Being curious about the origins of the McFly family I did my own little bit of research. McFly, is of course, a fictional name. I've never seen that name in real life, and only God knows how the two Bobs came up with that. Being 1/16th Irish myself, and 5/16th Manx (from the Isle of Man, a smallish island between Ireland and England, where the Islanders don't really think of themselves as British, more as Manx) I have a strong Gaelic background. In the movie Back to the Future, we learn that Marty McFly is of Irish ancestry. In part 3 we learn that his great-great-grandparents came from Ireland and settled in Hill Valley, California in or before 1885. This article is to prove whether the McFly's surname has an Irish or Scottish origin.
Background Information
The countries Scotland, Ireland, Wales (where Tom Jones is from, in case people from over the pond haven't heard of it) and the Isle of Man (not a country!) have strong Celtic (pronounced keltik) traditions. They each have their own version of Gaelic, an old language which was once the common tongue in the U.K.
Then the Romans invaded from Italy, bringing Latin with them. They influenced they version of Gaelic spoken in England. Then the Saxons invaded from "Germany" (it wasn't a proper country back then) and brought their influence on the language with them, then the Angles (hence Angle-land or England), and the Norsemen invaded Scotland and Northern England from Denmark. Then the French came in 1066 and influenced "English" yet again.
With the subsequent invasions from the North East and the East, Gaelic speakers were pushed westwards and northwards. Some went to Ireland, some didn't quite make it and inhabited the Isle of Man, and some stayed put and became the country known now as Wales. A form of Gaelic was brought to Scotland by Irish invaders about the 5th century, where it replaced an older Brythonic language. (However, there are the Scots-Irish who are descendants of Presbyterian settlers from the lowlands of Scotland who colonized the province of Ulster in Northern Ireland in the early 17th century, but this is much later on)
Some of the Brits went to France around thw 5th or 6th Century and formed the region in France now known as Brittany.
So the Welsh and people living in Cornwall (county in the south west of England, which also has a Gaelic language) are more likely to real "English" people. 95% of the people living in England have German, Norse (or Scandinavian), French or Angle ancestry from centuries ago.
So when people say that Mc (e.g. McGuinness) is Irish and Mac (e.g. MacHugh) is Scottish, that is not quite true. Mac and Mc both come from the same Gaelic route, "Mac", which means "son". (Of course, over time, languages change so word would be slightly abbreviated, so Scottish Gaelic would be different from Irish Gaelic, like English is slightly different from American English.) Both Mac and Mc are found in the two Gaelic national traditions. In fact, the MacNamaras built up Clare ( a County in Ireland) even before Brian Boru and later inaugurated him as High King.
O is really a word all by itself, signifying "grandson." The apostrophe that now usually appears after it is simply the result of a misunderstanding by English-speaking clerks in Elizabethan times (d'oh!), who took it to be a form of the word "of." That other distinctively Irish prefix, Fitz, derives from the French word fils, meaning son. Fitz means "son of", i.e. FitzGerald or FitzPatrick.
So basically, the fictional name McFly has a Gaelic origin, which means it could be either Irish or Scottish, and given that Gaelic was brought to Scotland the Irish and that the Scotts colonized part of Ireland, the McFlys could by of Irish or Scottish origin. Of course when we see them in 1885, they are Irish, but their ancestors could have come from Scotland originally.
Sources used:
Ireland for the Irish: Digging Up Your Roots
http://cda.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesTitle/productCd-0764554557.html
Ireland For Dummies , 2nd Edition
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/irish/genealogynames.html
Microsoft Encarta 98 Encyclopaedia (I use the English spelling)
Any other info other people, especially Irish people, can dig up would be gratefully received. Just e-mail me with it and I'll give you a credit for it at the end of this page. Thanks,
Time-warp Girl