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Maille mac Conall

9th century Irish person

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 9, 2025
Entity authorityQ6735804
Source-derived summary

Maille mac Conall, member of the Umhaill, ancestor and eponym of the O'Malley family of County Mayo.

Maille was a grandson of Cosgrach mac Flannbhrath, king of Ui Maill (died 812). He had an unnamed brother, from whom the O'Gormghaile family descend. His father's brother, Colman, is given as ancestor of an O'Colman family, while Fergus, a son of Flannabhra mac Cumusgrach (died 773), is given as an ancestor of the family of Fergus and the Muinter Rooney.

Maille himself does not appear in the Irish annals. He appears in a number of genealogical collections, such as Dubhaltach MacFhirbhisigh's Leabhar na nGenealach. Hubert T. Knox made use of this source when drawing up family trees of the Ui Mail, and gives the O'Malley genealogy in his book, The History of Mayo.

Pedigree

Maille's floruit is uncertain. His descendants began using his name as a surname in the late 11th/early 12th century. The earliest members of the family to use O'Maille/O'Malley as a surname would have been his great-grandson, Dubhdara.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Maille mac Conall” as 9th century Irish person. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 169-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Maille, Conall and century can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 9th century Irish person. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6735804. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Maille mac Conall” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.