Hughes

The Welsh Hughes is densest in the north, Anglesey, Caernarfonshire and Denbighshire, where the Welsh form Huw was most current at the time of Tudor surname compression. Diaspora bearers carried it to Liverpool, the slate towns of Pennsylvania, and the Patagonian Welsh colony of 1865.

Howell Harris (1714–1773), born Hywel ap Rhys, was the founding figure of Welsh Methodism and the open-air revival meetings that reshaped religious life across south Wales for the next century. The Hughes name pulses through every chapter of that revival. Ted Hughes (1930–1998), Yorkshire-born Poet Laureate of England, was the descendant of an Anglesey-Welsh line, and married Sylvia Plath in 1956 in a tying-together of two literary lineages that became one of the great defining tragedies of 20th-century poetry.

The Irish Hughes, Mac Aodha, were one of the inner circle of the Cinéal nÉogain, the Donegal-Tyrone overkingdom that produced the Uí Néill high kings; they held lands around Pomeroy and the Slieve Gallion from the 12th century, and lost most of their ground in the Plantation of Ulster after 1610. John Hughes (1797–1864), the Tyrone-born first Archbishop of New York, founded St Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and led Catholic Irish New York through the Famine wave of immigration. Sean Hughes (1965–2017), the Dublin comedian, was the youngest winner of the Edinburgh Perrier Award in 1990; Aaron Hughes (b. 1979), the Cookstown-born defender, captained Northern Ireland to a record 113 international caps.