If your name is Gribbin, Gribben or Gribbon (or even some other variation, like Cribben or Ó Gribín) you will find out here about its origins.

My name is John Gribbin and I live in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I have been researching the Gribbin family name for about twenty years and have put my findings into a book, recently published (15th Nov. 2023). This blog is my way of getting word about the book out into the world, so people can buy it, but I also want to use the blog as a means of building on what the book provides. I’m hoping that other Gribbins out there will help enlarge the picture by sharing your Gribbin stories.

So, let’s begin! The Gribbin name seems to have originated in the north of Ireland some time before the seventeenth century. The first documented appearance of the name is in a pardon list for the O’Doherty clan and followers in 1602. The O’Dohertys had been on the rebel side in the Nine Years War, but had switched allegiance and were fighting for the English; as a result they and their followers were granted a pardon. On that list we find Owin and Henry O Gribin. The O’Dohertys were the rulers of the Inishowen Peninsula, so Owin and Henry most likely lived anywhere on the peninsula or thereabouts. Thereafter, during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Gribbins turn up mainly in the northern part of Ireland we know as Ulster, and mainly in the counties of Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Down (Donegal, which includes Inishowen, can be included, but Gribbins have not proliferated there).

Inishowen Peninsula in North-East Donegal and adjoining County Derry in Northern Ireland.

Those of you living outside Ireland, if you have any idea of where your ancestors hailed from, will have traced them to Ulster, I imagine. I would be very surprised (but fascinated!) if anyone out there has evidence that their Gribbin ancestors originated elsewhere. There is a strong possibility that the name originated in Scotland, but so close is the link between North Ulster and Western Scotland that this is hardly surprising – they were practically the same people for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

My book traces the whereabouts of the Gribbins of Ireland, beginning with the 1901 census and going back in time to 1602 and beyond. It looks in some detail at the Gribbins in each of the four main counties I mentioned – Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Down – trying to establish what sort of people they were, what they did and what their lives were like. There is a chapter on Gribbin emigrants, one on DNA and one on Gribbin place names. I begin in 1901 because I wanted to tell my grandfather’s story and because the 1901 census gives the fullest and most accurate record of where the Gribbins of Ireland were located, as well as their age, sex, religion, occupation, family position and even the type of house they lived in. From there, I move back in time, using whatever documentation is available – earlier censuses, land valuation records, church records, birth and death records, wills, gravestones, newspapers etc. Necessarily, such a broad-brush survey cannot be a record of every single Gribbin who turns up in the records. On the other hand, where the documentation is compelling, I do zoom in on individuals who have left a record of their actions. So, for example, I paint as full a picture as I can of Eoin Ó Gribín, a scribe from south Down whose Gaelic manuscripts are in the Belfast Central Library and the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. Likewise, I try to do justice to Sémus Ó Gribín, another scribe based in Armagh, Big James Gribbon of Coleraine, and Henry Ó Gribin of Rasharkin, County Antrim, to name a few.