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Note: The old family name can be found among English records as well as Irish, though generally considered to be of Irish origin. The name is derived from the Gaelic "Duin". An ancient family, they claim to be descended from Heremon, son of King Milesius, who with his army of Gauls conquered and colonized Ireland before the Christian era. The ancestral home of the family was located in County Lesix. The "Dunn`s" became numerous in Ireland, England and Scotland. The clan is mentioned in the mid-sixteenth century in official documents as being hostile and dangerous to English interests. The sept was originally prominent is Lesix (Queen`s County) and became the principal sept of Leinster, their chiefs being the Lords of Iregan. The Dunn surname stems from the Gaelic O`Duinn meaning "brown" and indicative of a person with a ruddy completion or perhaps with dark hair. O`Doyne was also a common spelling of the name in the mid 17th century but is now obsolete. In Scotland the name was usually found as Dun where it was a name of territorial origin from the Parrish of Dun in Forfarshire. In England, the name more often appeared as Dunne, although William Dun is recorded as early as 1180 in Gloucester and John Le Dunne in 1198 in Hereforeshire. Several Dunnes appear on the tax rolls in England in 1273 and Thomas La Dune served under King Edward I. The Dunns appear in the history of American colonies during the 1600`s. One of the first of the family to reach our shores was Thomas Dunn who sailed from Bristol in 1620 arriving in Virginia as a servant on the vessel Temperance at the age of fourteen. John Dunn came to Virginia in 1634. Captain Richard Dunn was a freeman in Newport, Rhode Island in 1655. A Thomas Dunn resided in Weymouth, Massachusetts in 1655.
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