So Tom Cruise has Westmeath heritage and not Roscommon links after all!

Despite suggestions that his heritage could be traced back to Kilteevan, between Knockcroghery and Roscommon, it transpires that Hollywood star Tom Cruise's has links to North Westmeath.

In Dublin today, the world’s most famous Scientologist was presented with a special “Certificate of Irish Ancestry” by Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore at Iveagh House.

According to researchers Fiona Fitzsimons and Helen Moss, of Eneclann, Cruise’s great-great-great grandfather was Patrick Russell Cruise, who was born in Dublin, and who inherited around 500 acres of land around Dardistown and Paristown, near Delvin.

Patrick Russell Cruise, jointly with his maternal grandmother, inherited the land from his maternal grandfather, Patrick Maguire, in a will made in 1801 - providing a firm genealogical link right back to the Delvin area.

However, in the US in 1843, Mr Russell Cruise, who had by then moved to America, received word that his his land agent had evicted the tenants from the lands, and so he came back to Ireland, and undid the work of the land agent.

By way of thanks, the tenants hosted a public dinner in his honour in Clonmellon in 1844.

Mr Russell Cruise did not return to the US, but sadly, died just five years later, in Dublin, and is buried in Donabate.  His family continued on in the US, with his youngest daughter, Mary Pauline, marrying the Dublin-born Dillon Henry Mapother of Louisville, Kentucky. 

This man has links to the Kilteevan area, but he died, leaving Mary Pauline with six children, and she remarried to a Thomas O’Mara, born in Kentucky to Irish parents.

Their son was Thomas O’Mara Jnr, who assumed the name Thomas Cruise Mapother, and who is a direct ancestor of Tom Cruise.

However, he only assumed the name Mapother and is therefore not directly related to the Mapother family from Kilteevan.