Category Archives: Irish-research

'Our new Eden'

An illustration in The Cruise of the steam yacht North Star... (1854). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Over the holidays, my boyfriend’s father and I delved into his family’s genealogy. John has a rich treasure trove of family documents that have been scanned,..

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Collective memory

“As the flood itself has receded in Boston’s collective memory, so, too, have the players in this tragedy” - Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide

The Boston Globe, 15 January 1919

As genealogists, we build relationships with the dead. We see them in our minds as we peel back..

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An 'extinct' family

The O’Dwyre monument, photographed in 1998, has not been included on findagrave.

In response to my query, an eminent genealogy colleague once advised me that there is little point in publishing information on families with no living descendants. My example here, I..

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Two souls

Gerard Dery

As we mark Veterans Day, I think of my ancestors who fought for our country. During my family search, I found that most of my ancestors didn’t arrive to the United States until 1870; we don’t have any early American soldiers in our family tree who fought..

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Service records for Civil War combatants

Click on the image to expand it.

When researching ancestors who fought in the Civil War, don’t forget to examine their Combined Military Service Records for important genealogical data. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Combined Military..

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Misconceptions of an American

People always ask: What ethnicity are you? This is a difficult question for genealogists, as we can get quite detailed with our answers: “Well, on my mother’s maternal line we have Irish from County Leitrim and Monaghan, on my mother’s paternal line we have Italians..

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A Mulcahy mystery

Michael Mulcahy on his wedding day.

On 7 May 2018, my maternal grandmother Eleanor Margaret (Buckle) Sadlow passed away at the age of 89. She was born 22 August 1928 in Arlington, Massachusetts, the daughter of William and Frances (Mulcahy) Buckle; in 1947, she..

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Hiding in plain sight

Courtesy of belfastforum.co.uk.

I have been working on various genealogical projects since boyhood, with – as I hope – increasing research ability. Happily, there are times when a lucky Google search cuts through years of dead ends: as yesterday, when I went looking..

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Irish name variations

Recently Mary Ellen Grogan at NEHGS shared a great resource with me. It is called the Special report on surnames in Ireland [together with] varieties and synonymes of surnames and Christian names in Ireland by Robert E. Matheson. It is available in the NEHGS library...

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Back to the auld sod

My grandfather's genealogical notes.

I was lucky enough to take a trip to Ireland with my brother over our spring break, March 10–18. The two of us were not in charge of the itinerary, and our daily travel to churches, monasteries, and other tourist spots left..

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