When Thomas Arthur Prendergast was born on 5 May 1939, in Brooklyn, Kings, New York, United States, his father, Noel Prendergast, was 31 and his mother, Emily Rennick, was 28. He lived in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States in 1940 and Blasdell, Hamburg, Erie, New York, United States in 2005. He died on 26 November 2005, in Mercy Hospital, Champaign, Illinois, United States, at the age of 66, and was buried in Hamburg, Germany.
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Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.
On December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi and a small band of scientists and engineers demonstrated that a simple construction of graphite bricks and uranium lumps could produce controlled heat. The space chosen for the first nuclear fission reactor was a squash court under the football stadium at the University of Chicago.
Explorer 1 was the first satellite of the United States to be launched and successfully orbit the Earth.
Some characteristic forenames: Irish Assumpta, Brendan, Colm, Declan.
Irish (of Welsh origin): habitational name from Prendergast (Pembrokeshire). The placename might contain Welsh prender(w) ‘oak tree’ + gast ‘bitch’, hence ‘oak tree frequented by dogs’, but this is far from certain.
History: Maurice Prendergast was one of the leaders of a small force of Norman knights and archers who landed at Bannow in Wexford in 1169, the advance guard of the invasion in 1170 by Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke (‘Strongbow’). Maurice was granted lands in Wexford, and was the progenitor of the Irish families that migrated to North America. According to family tradition the surname derives from a warrior called Prenliregast, who supposedly fought at Hastings (the name Preudirlegast is listed in a 16th-century version of the Battle Abbey Roll), and who took his name from a ‘lost’ village in Flanders called Brontegeest. Flemings did indeed settle in Pembrokeshire in the 12th century, but the Battle Abbey Roll is an unreliable document, created long after the Conquest, and no evidence has been found for this or any other surname in medieval Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, or Belgium being derived from a place called Brontegeest.
Dictionary of American Family Names © Patrick Hanks 2003, 2006.
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