MacCormac family

MacCormac
Current region	Northern Ireland, England
Place of origin	County Armagh, Northern Ireland
Members	Sir William MacCormac, Sir Patrick Dean, Sir Richard MacCormac
Connected families	Almond, Burden, Burrowes, Dean, Easmon,
Distinctions	Medicine, architecture, civil service, commerce

The MacCormac family is a distinguished medical dynasty of Northern Irish ancestry that originates in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. The MacCormac family produced four medical doctors and at least three members of the family received knighthoods during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The family is of Ulster ancestry and perhaps also has some distant English ancestry through Colonel Joseph Hall of Hall Place, Lurgan.

The MacCormac family descends from the union of John MacCormac, (d. 1811), a prosperous linen merchant and Mary Ann Hall, (1766-1846), a wealthy heiress and daughter of Colonel Joseph Hall, a notable distiller in County Armagh. John MacCormac was the son of Cornelius MacCormac, a high-ranking naval officer who died after falling aboard a vessel.

The precise origins of the MacCormac family of County Armagh are unclear and it does not appear as though the family was of Scottish descent. The family may have descended from the family of Archbishop Cornelius MacCormac of Armagh, who was a clergyman in late seventeenth century Ireland. The origins of the Hall family are probably in England or Scotland, although the name may be an anglicised version of a traditionally Irish surname.

The medical strand in the MacCormac family began with Henry MacCormac, (1800-1886), the son of John MacCormac and Mary Ann MacCormac. Henry MacCormac qualified as a medical doctor in Dublin, Paris, and earned a Medical Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 1824. It is primarily from Henry MacCormac's lineage that the notable MacCormac dynasty descend, although his elder brother, Hon. John MacCormac was the progenitor of the Easmon medical family, a West African medical dynasty. Dr Henry MacCormac married Mary Newsam, the daughter of William Newsam, a linen merchant, descended from an old English family that settled in Ireland in 1640.

Henry MacCormac and Mary Newsam MacCormac were the parents of Sir William MacCormac, 1st Baronet, the most decorated surgeon of the late nineteenth century, who served as Serjeant-Surgeon to King Edward VII. The grandson and namesake of Dr Henry MacCormac, was a widely recognised dermatologist and the father of the equally distinguished architect, Sir Richard MacCormac.

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