The former of these, with minor variations (e.g. MacClenahan) is about twice as numerous as MacLenaghan, which also has similar variants. Both are anglicized forms of Mac Leannacháin. It belongs almost exclusively to Ulster, particularly Counties Antrim and Derry. It appears, as one might expect, in the Elizabethan Fiants in the O'Neill country and once, rather strangely, among the Co. Cork “pardons”

of 1601. Two testators of 1783, Mac Clenahan and Mac Clenachan, lived in or close beside north Tyrone. In 1878 de Burgh's Landowners shows that at that date both MacClenahans and MacLenahans held considerable estates in other Ulster counties.

MacLennan may occasionally be a contracted form of MacLenahan, though normally this is either the well known Scottish surname or a rare variant of MacAlinion (More Irish Families pp. 20, 21), MacLenahan is quite distinct from O'Lenahan (Irish Families, p. 209).

*In the fourteenth century, the surname de Swerdes (derived from the village) was recorded in several places in Ireland; and in the Ulster inquisitions of the first half of the seventeenth century we find Swords, Swoordes and Sourdes in Co. Down.

Mac Leannacháin In Tyrone in the sixteenth century, now almost exclusively Co. Derry and Antrim. SIF 34