Gaelic names, how do you type them with the correct spacing?

Question

I'm doing genealogy and ran into some gaelic ancestors and the names are never typed in the same. I'd like to enter mine correctly. Is it Mc Carteny or McCarteny, mac Brien or Macbrien or McBrien or MacBrien? O Hara or O'Hara or Ohara?

Answer 1

My mother had a Mc name and they just put it like you have McCarteny and McBrien. O'Hara I have always seen with the apostrophe. Mc and Mac are not necessarily interchangeable. I think Mac is more likely to be Scottish and the Mc is more Irish. Some of the Scots were moved to Ireland by the ruling British and then some of the Macs became Mc over time. Some families dropped the Mc or Mac altogether over the years. Also, some of the census takers were not necessarily educated or much interested. They had the qualification of being able to write and it was a job and they often made mistakes by writing names as they understood them to be.