I am pleased to introduce viewers to our new website about our family’s 70+ year multi-generational obsession with the Arabian horse. It complements our FaceBook page which currently has over 50,000 followers. The site features profiles on each horse, pertinent information on their ancestors and progeny, as well as a blog.
My grandfather Joseph Lyman “Doc” Doyle described his horses simply by their strain: Saqlawi Jadran of Ibn Sudan. In considering how to develop this new website, we felt it was best to return to this concept and organize horses according to their strain and Bedouin tribal origin, the governing traits of the Arabian horse.
Readers can study the details of each taproot desert Arabian ancestor, their strain (rasan), sub-strain (marbat) and the last known Bedouin tribal interaction. This information is integrated into the profiles for the original core foundation ancestors of our herd: Gulida, Ghadaf and Nusi. Edouard Al-Dahdah patiently explained to me the dynamics of the Bedouin tribes as well as provided information on many of the taproot ancestors. Edouard also kindly gave me the Arabic images used on the pages describing the strains and some of the original desert horses.
Horses on this website are categorized into groups based on their year of birth. We also classified horses as “core” to our notion of breeding. Basically, this means the horses we trust enough to be included in the gene pool of sires for our main herd. This concept will be detailed further in another post.
Our horses presently represent the highest percentage of Abbas Pasha blood found anywhere in the world. Core horses on our farm in 2020 have 63% Abbas Pasha blood. This concentration of Abbas Pasha blood, and an interest in preserving it, was one of Doc Doyle’s main motivations for purchasing Gulida in 1949. The category “Abbas Pasha” details the taproot ancestors he purchased from the Bedouin tribes and exported to Egypt. Doc’s motivation for breeding these horses will be the subject of another entry.
This website also seeks to tell the story of the people outside the Doyle family that were so inspired by the horses that they continued to breed them. Our horses today would not be the same without them. Their story is told within the profiles of the horses they owned or bred.
We also welcome horses significantly related to our horses but bred by others on this site. The horses presently included are mainly those that I had images for. I hope to expand this effort in the future.
There are many horses that should be on this site, but unfortunately did not produce offspring or no image is presently available to represent them. As new content on particular horses becomes available, profiles will be updated or created for them.
In researching the history of our horses from roughly 1960 to 1980 my father’s cousin Barbara Baird and her former husband Jim Brown were invaluable sources of information. They also provided a number of excellent photos. I hope they find the time to contribute to the site before their memory begins to fade.
A special thanks also goes to my cousins Mark Sloan and Kris Kitterman who helped me understand the situation on the farm in the years prior to our grandmother Ellen Doyle’s death in 1973. This information was incorporated into the relevant pages on the site.
During the 1980s, Eileen McNulty collected photographs of many of the horses and their ancestors that are now on this site. She sent a photo album containing these images to our family in the early 1990s. Without Eileen’s interest in the horses and invaluable efforts creating this album, many of the horses on this site would not have a photo.
I would like to thank my parents Terence and Rosemary Byrnes Doyle, who inspired my interest in our horses as a way of having fun as a family and reminding ourselves of the past and thinking about the future. We breed Arabian horses so that future generations of our family can enjoy them.
Lastly, I want to thank my two children Ellen Frances Doyle and Liam Terence Doyle. They don’t know it yet, but their arrival in this world motivated me to do many things, including to create this website. I don’t know if Ellen, Liam, or their cousins Malaika, Pascal and Loende will want to continue the family tradition of breeding Arabian horses one day, but I would like them to have the option should they develop the interest and capability to do so in the future.
I hope you enjoy learning about the horses.