Belted Galloway are just a part of the Galloway breed. Galloway cattle come in Black Dun, Belted and an occasional white. The breed was developed in Scotland and there obviously is Shorthorn blood in the make-up of the breed.
Justin.. in regards to the lack of record keeping, you have to remember that these were unregistered cattle. The Quane's Deerpark herd had only used bulls from their own herd since the 1940s when they disagreed with where the Shorthorn breed was going with their belt buckle cattle of that era. They simply kept their own bulls and eventually quit registering them as well. They only sold breeding stock to a few local herds, who again kept unregistered stock.
The story goes that the Quane's were attending a local auction mart one day when a red bull calf entered the sale ring. They liked the looks of him, and bought him that day. They used him on a few cows and that is where Deerpark Improver came from. When the Irish government decided to design a program to document some of these grade Irish Shorthorns, and provide registration status to them, the sire of Improver had no name, so the Quane's suggested he be named Clare Man, as he had been purchased in the County Clare auction.
As a side note, this registry was just being started in Ireland, when Dick Judy ( Beef Genetics Research Inc) in Kansas imported the first Irish Shorthorns into the US. We brought in Highfield Irish Mist and two females the following year and they were unregistered cattle as well. We decided to do this simply because we saw things in these cattle that could help our cattle at the time. While some of the Irish cattle were way to extreme for any era, some others had some very unique traits. We decided to import these cattle, as we thought they would do three things to improve our Shorthorns at the time. These were: 1) they would improve the hip structure ... Some of the Irish cattle were extremely wide from hook to pin; 2) they would greatly improve testicles in the males... at the time, many Shorthorns had issues with twisted testicles and poor scrotum shape and 3) improve the frame and overall muscle structure of our cattle. I think the good Irish cattle that were imported did do this. Unfortunately, once the Irish craze started, most anything was imported here and some of them were not worth the trip over. Many others left a major mark on the breed.