This name appeared first in Ireland in the thirteenth century as de la Chambre, i.e. chamberlain, (the cognate surname Chamberlain also occurs in thirteenth century Irish records but rare today); It is unlikely that any families called Chambers today are descended from those early Anglo-Non-nan settlers. Some were immigrants in the seventeenth century, under the Plantation of Ulster and later the Cromwellian Settlement. Many families of the name were established here before that: The existence of the placename Chamberstown in Co. Meath in the previous century prooves that. Not the Chambers family prominent in Co. Meath in the eighteenth century, they had previously been large landowners in the New Ross area of Co. Wexford where the townland of Chambersl and perpetuates their name. The name often appears in the lists of government officials, from 1592 when Thomas Chambers was housekeeper at Kilmainham and in 1609 when George Chambers was Chief Chamberlain of the Exchequer, down to modern times. Less prominent in the political and military sphere: no Chambers appeared in the Jacobite outlawries, one was in Stanley's predominantly Irish regiment in 1593 a John Chambers, a Dublin printer and bookseller, was a member of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen just two centuries later. The name numerous today in the northern counties of Ulster and Dublin; a century ago there were many families of Chambers in west Cork; outside those areas the only county where it is found in considerable numbers in modern times is Mayo. There, Chambers does not seem to be a synonym of any Gaelic-Irish name neither is it long enough established to appear in Strafford's Inquisitionof Mayo (1635). The ancestor of the Chambers of Killoyne, Co. Mayo, who obtained a grant of arms in 1724, came from Hertfordshire, England.