The anomalies revealed by birth registrations are often strange. My own brother-in-law whose name is Tadhg on getting his birth certificate found that his registered christian name was Tige and that he was officially a female! The man of a Leavy family who was registered as Levi, if he made no effort to change back to Leavy, must have had difficulty in persuading people that he was not of Jewish ancestry.

The form Levy, often seen, does perhaps suggest a modification of Levi. Until I came to examine the question I assumed, as Woulfe does, that Levy and Leavy are abbreviated forms of Dunlevy, and perhaps occasionally they are when met with in the Dunlevy country (see Irish Families pp. 118,119). O'Levy occurs in the Monaghan hearth money rolls of 1666. In actual fact, however, Leavy is seldom to be found in Ulster and, if not solely confined to Co. Longford and Westmeath is much more numerous there than anywhere else. They are a quite distinct sept, akin to the O'Farrells, their name in Irish being Mac Con Shléibhe which in its earliest anglicized forms appeared as MacEnlieve, MacEnleve ,etc. and always in or near Co. Longford. In the O'Clery genealogies, too, we find Genelach Meg Con Sléibhe appropriately presented. In the 1659 “census” it appears as a principal Irish name in the barony of Longford (Co.

Longford) in the guise of MacIlleavy.

The O'Levies or O'Leavys who, as surgeons, were among the professional classes to whom lands were assigned in the sixteenth century in the MacCarthy country were presumably a branch of the Longford sept. W. F. T. Butler suggests that this is the origin of the Levis family, well-known in Co. Cork, since the seventeenth century.

It is perhaps worth adding that there is an English name Leavy, Levy derived from the Old English leofwig meaning beloved warrior, but few if any of our Irish Leavys are of English or Jewish origin.