>I do not think this is the same family as your "ahearne" has an e on the end.

Ahearne, Ahern, Ahearn, O'Hearn, O'Hern and even O'Harran, are all the same name. It just depends on what some clerk wrote down at the time of whatever event was being recorded. As many immigrant Irish were illiterate, they had no idea how their name was being recorded.

See http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~aherns/ahhist.htm#ro... for derivation of the Ahern surname.