Yeats
also Yates
The Drumcliffe-Sligo Anglo-Irish, and the poet who imagined a country into being.
- Origin
- Connacht, Ireland
- Famous bearer
- William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), poet, Nobel laureate 1923
- Register
- Irish family
CoreHistoric reach
The seat of Yeats
Seat vacantChief
No one leads the Yeats community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.
Current mission
No shared goal set yet. Once Yeats has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
The Yeats clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.
Help rebuild the Yeats clan →What does the Yeats name mean?
From the Middle English yate (gate), as a locative byname for someone who lived near a town gate or kept a gate. The surname is of English origin and was brought to Ireland in the seventeenth century through the Yorkshire-Yeats Cromwellian planter line; by the late eighteenth century the Yeatses were a Anglo-Irish Protestant gentry family of Sligo (Drumcliffe parish) and the Dublin merchant class. The two great bearers of the surname, the painter John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) and his sons the poet W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and the painter Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957), are descended from a Drumcliffe-Pollexfen-Yeats line on the maternal side and a Sandymount-Dublin merchant line on the paternal.
The history of Yeats
The Yeats family of Sligo descend, on the male side, from the Reverend William Butler Yeats (the poet's grandfather), rector of Tullylish in County Down, of a Cromwellian-planter Yeats line from Yorkshire; on the female side they descend from the Pollexfen-Middleton merchant family of Sligo, who had a small steamship line on the western coast and were a substantial Anglo-Irish Protestant family of the late nineteenth century.
John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) was the portrait painter of the late-Victorian Dublin school. His four children, all of whom became significant figures of the Irish Revival, were: William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), the poet, Nobel laureate 1923; Susan Lily Yeats and Elizabeth Lolly Yeats, founders of the Cuala Press in 1908; and Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), the painter who, by the critical assessment of Samuel Beckett, was the most significant Irish visual artist of the twentieth century.
W. B. Yeats was the founding editor of the Dublin University Review, co-founder with Lady Augusta Gregory of the Irish Literary Theatre (1899) and the Abbey Theatre (1904), member of the Irish Free State Senate (1922–1928), and Nobel laureate in Literature in 1923. He is, by the consensus of every twentieth-century critic, the foundational poet of modern English-language Irish literature.
Champions of the Yeats name
The bearers whose lives are inseparable from this surname. Each has its own page — biography, achievements, geography, connection to the family.
Explore With Your Ancestors · Beta
Pick any year from 500 to 1945 and any place on earth — the Yeats country, or a shore no Yeats ever reached. The chronicler sets the scene; the deeds are yours.
Step Into History
Walk the streets and seats the Yeats name knew — a photoreal walk through time, on foot.
Notable bearers of the Yeats name
- William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), poet, Nobel laureate 1923
- Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), painter
- John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), portrait painter
- Susan and Elizabeth Yeats, founders of the Cuala Press