Casement

also Caismeint

The Ulster Anglo-Norman line, and the humanitarian who became a republican.

Territory of Casement

CoreHistoric reach

The seat of Casement

Seat vacant

Chief

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Current mission

No mission proclaimed. The chief, once seated, sets the clan’s public focus, a campaign, a contest, a piece of restoration, a year of remembrance.

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What does the Casement name mean?

Locative, from Old French *casement* (a small house, a hut), via Norman bureaucratic usage. The Casement family of Ulster trace to a Anglo-Norman line settled in Antrim by the late mediaeval period, principally around the small townland of Casement in the Glens of Antrim. The surname is moderately uncommon in modern Ireland and largely concentrated in north-east Ulster.

The history of Casement

The Casements of Antrim were a Protestant landed family of the Glens, with the chiefly seat at Magherintemple near Ballycastle held by the family from the eighteenth century. The most famous bearer is Sir Roger Casement (1864–1916), born at Sandycove in Dublin to an Antrim-Casement father (Captain Roger Casement of the Light Dragoons) and a Dublin-Catholic mother, raised at Magherintemple after his parents' early deaths.

Casement was a British consular officer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, posted to West Africa (where his 1903 report on Belgian Congo atrocities precipitated the international campaign against King Leopold II's personal rule of the Congo Free State) and to Putumayo in the upper Amazon (where his 1910 report on Peruvian Amazon Company atrocities won him a knighthood). He retired in 1913 and turned to Irish nationalism, joining the Irish Volunteers and conducting unsuccessful negotiations with Imperial Germany in 1914–16 for German arms and an Irish Brigade among prisoners of war.

He was arrested at McKenna's Fort near Banna Strand in north Kerry on Good Friday, the twenty-first of April 1916, three days before the Easter Rising, having been landed from a German U-boat with arms that were never offloaded. He was tried for high treason in London in June, convicted on the twenty-ninth of June, stripped of his knighthood, and hanged at Pentonville Prison on the third of August 1916. His remains were returned to Ireland by Harold Wilson's British government in 1965 and re-interred with state honours in Glasnevin Cemetery on the first of March 1965.

Notable bearers of the Casement name

Sir Roger Casement (1864–1916), human-rights investigator, Irish republican, executed at Pentonville

Stories of Casement

Casement on Banna Strand
1916
On the early morning of Good Friday, the twenty-first of April 1916, on the long flat sand of Banna Strand on the western coast of County Kerry, three days before the planned Easter Rising in Dublin, Sir Roger Casement, fifty-one years old, former British consular officer, knight of the realm for his humanitarian work on the Belgian Congo and the Putumayo, presently a Captain in the Imperial German service, was put ashore from the dinghy of the German U-boat *U-19* with two companions (Robert Monteith and Daniel Bailey) at three in the morning. The U-boat had been escorting the German freighter *Aud*, which carried twenty thousand rifles, one million rounds of ammunition, and ten machine guns for the Irish Volunteers, on the long passage from Lübeck. The *Aud* had failed to make the secret rendezvous on Easter Sunday morning at Fenit pier; the captain had scuttled her off Daunt's Rock, near Cork harbour, when intercepted by the Royal Navy. Casement, ill with malaria, exhausted, and (by his own letter to his sister Nina from prison) increasingly disillusioned with the German alliance, was found by an Irish farmer named Mary Gorman at McKenna's Fort, half a mile inland, at one in the afternoon. He was held at Tralee gaol overnight, transferred to Dublin Castle on the morning of the twenty-third of April, and taken to London by steamer the same day. The Rising began the next morning without him and without the *Aud*'s arms. He was tried in London in June, hanged at Pentonville Prison on the third of August 1916.
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Frequently asked

What does the surname Casement mean?

Where does the Casement family come from?

The Casement family was historically based in Ulster in Ireland, in particular Antrim.

Who are some famous Casements?

Notable bearers of the Casement name include Sir Roger Casement (1864–1916), human-rights investigator, Irish republican, executed at Pentonville.

Is Caismeint the same family as Casement?

Yes. Caismeint is historical spelling variants of the Casement name. They share the same lineage and clan affiliation.

Neighbouring clans

MacDonnellThe Hebridean lordship in Ireland, the Glens of Antrim and the Route.