Quigley


Select Quigley Surname Genealogy

Quigley is the anglicized form of the 12th century Gaelic O'Coigligh.  O'Coigligh meant "‘descendant of Coigleach," a nickname for an untidy person or possibly someone with long, flowing hair.

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Ireland.  One Quigley sept were a branch of the Ii Fiachra clan of county Mayo which dispersed sometime in the 16th century.  A possibly related sept was the Quigleys of Inishowen in Donegal.  The name in fact is mainly to be found in Donegal and Derry and to some extent in Monaghan and Fermanagh where the Quigleys were the erenaghs at Clontivrin in Clones.

Father James Quigley, a United Irishman executed by the English in 1798, was born in county Armagh from what was seen as "a respectable Northern farmer class."  His family had come from Derry.  It was said that his greatgrandfather had been the maker of the Catholic barricading boom at Culmore fort during the seige of Derry town in 1689.    

England and Scotland.  Quigleys crossed the Irish Sea in the 19th century in search of jobs.  John Quigley from Monaghan, for instance, came to the Govan area of Glasgow in the 1870's to work in the shipbuilding there.

America.  Many Quigleys came to Pennsylvania. 

In fact the Quigleys were among the first Scots and Irish settlers of the Cumberland valley in the 1730's (as traced in Bella Swope's 1905 book History of the McKinney-Brady-Quigley Families).  James Quigley had settled there in frontier land in what is today Hopewell township.  He built his wilderness home of logs close to the banks of Conodoguinet creek.  A bridge later built there caused the location of the Quigley homestead on Conodoguinet creek to be later called Quigley's Bridge which was where later generations of Quigleys grew up.


James Quigley, born in Pennsylvania in 1777, moved to Barren county, Kentucky after the Revolutionary War was over.  A Quigley family history began with Phillip Quigley who around 1790 immigrated to Philadelphia and Bucks county, an area where other Quigleys had already settled (a Quigley ran the ferry service which operated across the Delaware river).  Michael Quigley of German parentage was one of the founders of Beech Creek in central Pennsylvania after settling there in 1814. 

Andrew Quigley, escaping the famine in his native Tyrone, reached New York in 1849 and then headed west, enticed by the California gold rush.  However, he met Mormons on the way and ended up in Salt Lake valley.

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Father James Quigley, born in Armagh, was a Untied Irishman executed by the English in 1798.
James Quigley, Canadian born, served as the Catholic Archbishop of Chicago from 1903 to 1915.
Eddie Quigley was an English footballer who was transferred in 1949 from Sheffield Wednesday to Preston at the then English record transfer fee of £26,500.

Select Quigleys Today
  • 5,000 in the UK (most numerous in Lancashire)
  • 5,000 in America (most numerous in Pennsylvania) 
  • 10,000 elsewhere (most numerous in Ireland)

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