Searching for Sisters: A Guide to Researching Catholic Nuns in the United States – All genealogists with any Catholic heritage will want to swallow this book as soon as possible. In “Searching for Sisters,” Sunny McClellan Morton unlocks the key to the long-neglected treasure trove of records pertaining to sisters and nuns. You’ll learn how to find and request them, what to expect, and how to use what you’ve discovered to both tell their stories and push your family’s research forward. A handful of case studies walk you through the process and reveal the kind of gems that can be uncovered. Add it to your library today!

80 million people globally claim Irish ancestry – why the release of 1926 Irish census records is so momentous – Countdown!

Photo Credit: Public Domain

The post Genealogy Roundup, April 22 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

How Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman saved the mission’s moon mascot: ‘It’s hard not to love this little guy. I can’t let Rise out of my sight’ – This has nothing to do with #genealogy, but I can’t resist sharing it.

Glencastle Irish Dancers performing Annie Moore – Could not love this more! Look what Annie Moore of Ellis Island inspired! And how talented are these young dancers?!

Virtual Reading Room at the Library of Virginia – Very cool!

Idris Elba thought he knew who he was… – Idris Elba reacts to his DNA test results.

The post Genealogy Roundup, April 15 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Which of the following describes the heritage of Peter Gene Hernandez, better known as Bruno Mars?

• Ukrainian
• American
• Filipino
• Hispanic
• Jewish
• Hawaiian
• Puerto Rican
• European
• Hungarian
• Asian
• Spanish

The correct answer is all of the above. And though I haven’t been able to prove it through the paper trail, he may well have some Taíno and African roots through his Puerto Rican ancestry.

As a genealogist who’s been delving into the past for most of my life and playing with DNA for almost two decades, I’ve climbed the branches of several thousand family trees, and the more branches I explore, the more apparent the growing “melangification” of America becomes.

Folks like myself who are 100-percenters or half-and-halves with roots in only one or two places are rapidly becoming quaint, and families like Bruno’s are slightly ahead of the curve. If you were to come back 100 years from now, I suspect most families would look like the cast of Hamilton. But for now, let’s linger on Bruno’s for a bit. Here are a few things you probably didn’t know about his roots:

• He’s typically described as being Hawaiian-born to a father of Puerto Rican heritage and a mother from the Philippines. This is all true. His parents are Boricua and Filipina. But his ancestral pool also happens to be one-quarter Jewish hailing from Hungary and Ukraine.
• In the U.S., Hawaii, New York, California, Nevada, Puerto Rico and Texas all hold a piece of his family’s past.
• Bruno’s Ukrainian immigrant ancestor, a one-time Hebrew teacher, entered America not through Ellis Island, but through the port of Galveston, Texas as part of the Galveston Movement. His future bride, however, was of Ellis Island stock.
• This same ancestor was once banned from ever becoming a citizen, but after modifying his name (please see the Ellis Island chapter of Hey, America, Your Roots Are Showing if you still believe that old myth about names being changed by immigration officials) and waiting about 20 years, he was finally naturalized.

• As seen in this photo, continental blending in Bruno’s family began a long time ago. This shows a pair of his great-great-grandparents — the father born in Spain and the mother in the Philippines — with two of their daughters around the 1890s. About a decade after her husband passed away, Bruno’s great-great-grandmother remarried to a Chinese gentleman 19 years her junior, introducing yet another country into the family mix.

Spanish birth record of a great-great-grandfather of Bruno Mars

• When it comes to Spain, it’s Segovia — I’m talking to you, Nava de la Asunción and Fuentepelayo! — that gets the bragging rights.

Whenever Bruno Mars races around the globe on tour, there are likely unsuspecting cousins in his audiences in Madrid, New York, Manila, Kiev, San Juan, and Budapest. I look forward to the day when we all realize there’s nothing especially remarkable about that.

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Suncoast Genealogy Society – Last minute reminder that I’ll be talking #genealogy – in person for the first time in a long time! – this Saturday (Nov 22nd) in Palm Harbor, FL! Hope you can join us!

Photo: Robert LeRoy Knudsen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The post Genealogy Roundup, November 19 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Betty White, now 96 years old, graced us all with her presence at the Emmys. Mischievous and beautiful as ever, she was honored for her remarkable eight-decade career in show business which includes classic series such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Golden Girls.

But it was one of her more recent shows — Hot in Cleveland — that puts me most in mind of her own life. In it,White played a wisecracking, Midwest caretaker of a house a trio of Los Angelistas landed in upon impulsively fleeing their California lives. An Illinois native, White moved to Los Angeles while still a child, so this series was a version of her life in reverse.

Though born in Chicago in 1922, Betty Marion White was already residing in a neighborhood ensconced between Melrose Avenue and Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles by the time of the 1930 census. Her father, Horace L. White, a WWI vet and electrical supplies salesman, seems to have been doing fairly well in spite of the nascent Great Depression, as the family owned their home and — perhaps more importantly for Betty’s future career — a radio.

That only-child Betty was close to her parents, Horace and Tess, can be seen in this 1954 California Voter Registration in which the then 32-year-old Democrat shared the same address as her Republican parents. This same year she had a self-titled show on NBC and was voted honorary mayor of Hollywood.

(Ancestry)

Both Horace and Tess were raised in Chicago with a single sibling and Canadian-born mothers (thank you, Canada, for sharing yet another comedic talent with your Southern neighbor). Both also had immigrant fathers, meaning that all four of White’s grandparents were born outside of America, but the specifics are surprising.

It turns out that the ethnic brew that created Betty White is one-quarter Danish, one-quarter Greek, one-quarter Canadian, one-eighth Welsh and one-eighth English. Her Canadian portion sports branches that meander back not only through Canada, but also New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts to the early days of the United States, and eventually back to England, so in fairness, her English percentage should be rounded up a bit.

Perhaps what’s most striking is the Danish-Greek combination. Her Danish grandfather, Christopher White, came to America as a young man and bounced around Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois working as a salesman dealing in everything from hats to rubber. It’s possible that his wife Ettie was the quasi-namesake for Betty.

White’s other grandfather, Greek-born Nicholas Cachikis, also came here as a young man and worked as a salesman, but of one item — ice cream. For decades, he sold ice cream off a wagon, but it was apparently a hand-to-mouth existence as he was sadly buried in a potter’s field when he passed away.

So Betty White will always be Hot in Cleveland and a host of other places, but it’s Chicago, Denmark, Greece, Canada, England and Wales that should be hot to claim her.

Originally published on Medium on September 18, 2018

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The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It? – Twiblings, eh? Good luck, future genealogists.

10 Cemeteries to See Before (or After) You Die – Cool cemeteries to ponder over the holiday weekend and put on your to-visit list.

Taylor Swift’s Formidable Female Forebears – Seems a good time to share my research about Taylor Swift’s fascinating ancestors!

The post Genealogy Roundup, September 3 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

An Ancestral Tour of Stephen Colbert’s Family – I see that this article I wrote about Stephen Colbert’s roots is making the rounds again, so I guess I’ll share it as well.

Lies, Damn Lies, and…Primary Sources? – Interesting article from an underutilized resource. Also includes a link to an intriguing collection of prison newspapers!

Clan’s American cousins help save historic Borders church – Love it when trans-Atlantic cousins help each other!

The post Genealogy Roundup, July 23 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

(AI-generated family tree using a combination of ChatGPT and Whisk)

In just the past week, we’ve been regaled with the supposedly startling revelations that:

• Halle Berry and Sarah Palin are cousins
• Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are related
• Justin Bieber, Avril Lavigne, Ryan Gosling and Celine Dion are all cousins

My reaction to all this can probably best be summed up by this chapter title from my latest book: Barack Obama and Sarah Palin Are Related – *Yawn*

As I explain in that chapter after listing a similar set of famous cousins:

“What are the odds? Oh, about 100%. Well, maybe not 100%. I should probably refrain from addressing one form of hyperbole with another, so I’ll temper my last statement and reduce the odds to 95%. And in the interest of full disclosure, I have to confess that I’m also guilty of participation. The Barack Obama-Brad Pitt (ninth cousins) connection was my doing, so I haven’t exactly been an innocent bystander in the “I can’t believe they’re related” game. But I’m over it, and I hope everyone else is too.”*

When I was little, my grandfather used to confound me with his mind-reading skills when we would play a little math game:

1. Think of a number
2. Double it
3. Add 10 (or some other number)
4. Divide by 2
5. Subtract the number you first thought of

Time and time again, no matter what number I focused on, he was able to tell me exactly what it was. And until I was old enough to understand the simple formula behind this (the answer will always be half of the figure you add in step 3), I was dazzled.

A similar concept applies here. Until you understand the fundamentals of genealogical math, you will likely remain impressed with these famous cousin connections, but once you do – not so much. In a nutshell, many people who lived more than three or four hundred years ago now have millions of descendants (yes, millions), and inevitably, a few of them will be famous. And while it used to at least be worthy of note that people would take the time to ferret out these hidden links among living progeny, the growing number of massive genealogical databases makes this less and less remarkable. Those on the prowl for potential headline-grabbing cousinships also know exactly where to look:

“Colonial times in North America constitute a famous cousin sweet spot. They’re long enough ago that genealogical math has had a chance to work its magic, but recent enough that there’s often a paper trail to follow. That’s why – if you pay attention the next time you hear a famous cousin revelation – the touted connections almost always involve a shared colonial American or French-Canadian ancestor. And the living celebrities will rarely be more closely related than seventh cousins. In fact, they’re most often eighth, ninth or tenth cousins. About the only exceptions to this pattern are those who are related even more distantly, generally through a royal ancestor who lived back before America and Canada existed.”*

This is why Barack Obama (who has deep colonial roots on his mother’s side) is cousins with Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, Brad Pitt, George Bush, Harry Truman, Warren Buffett, Rush Limbaugh, and countless others, and why Hillary Clinton (who has French-Canadian heritage) is cousins with Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Celine Dion and Shania Twain, to name a few. As to the recent revelations, Halle Berry didn’t share any specifics, but the Obama-Romney link stems from an English king and the six-degrees-of-Justin-Bieber game hinges on French-Canadian ancestry.

Lest I burst anyone’s bubble, I should point out there are occasional celebrity kinships that grab my attention. For instance, I was genuinely surprised to learn that Gwyneth Paltrow and Gabrielle Giffords are second cousins. This unexpectedly close connection passed my cousin litmus test, which I’ll share here for everyone’s use:

The next time you hear that celebrity A and celebrity B are cousins, ask yourself two questions:

• Are they more closely related than seventh cousins?
• Was the common ancestor not a colonial American, French-Canadian or royal?

If the answer to both of these questions is yes, then you’re dealing with a social media-worthy announcement you might want to share with others. But if the answer is no, in the words of intensively-cousined Shania Twain, “that don’t impress me much.”*

* Excerpted from Chapter 2 of Hey, America, Your Roots Are Showing

Originally published on Huffington Post on Oct 17, 2012.

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With Tim Walz in the Spotlight, a Nation Fixates on Finding Irish Roots – So my research on Tim Walz’s Irish roots wound up in the Wall Street Journal.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

The post Genealogy Roundup, October 23 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

How a Solitary Tombstone in Wisconsin Solved the Mystery of His Irish Origins

Tomhaggard Village

As a professional genealogist of half-Irish heritage, I’ve long embraced the opportunity to underscore the ties between Ireland and the United States, and one of the most obvious ways to do this is to trace the roots of high profile Americans to their place of origin in Ireland. This is trickier than it sounds since “crossing the pond” to Ireland can be challenging, especially when ancestors arrived Famine era or earlier. But I can be stubborn, so over the years have ferreted out Moneygall for then-first-time candidate Barack Obama, Ballina and Carlingford for then-Vice President Joe Biden, Rathangan for Bruce Springsteen, Limerick for Barry Manilow, Eyrecourt for Katy Perry, and so forth.

So it’s no surprise that I would do this again for Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz. In this instance, I identified the Catholic parish of Kilmore in County Wexford, but came up short on naming the specific townland. No worries. Whenever I’ve done this in the past, genealogists in Ireland have piggybacked off my research to learn more about the individual’s past, so I figured it was just a matter of time.

The flurry of media coverage that said this was already happening only reinforced my expectation, but five weeks have gone by with no further word, so I decided to jump back in. This time around, I managed to zero in on a village called Tomhaggard, and I’m going to spend the balance of this article explaining how.

I’ll warn you now that this will probably provide more detail than many would be interested in, so if that’s you, feel free to stop reading here since you already have your answer. But if you’re a fellow geek or perhaps a skeptic, get comfortable as I park you on my shoulder to follow the process.

Surround and Conquer

Whenever you’re stuck genealogically, it’s always a good idea to find others associated with the people you’re researching, as it’s possible that they left the paper trail you wish your direct targets had. I casually refer to this as “surround and conquer,” although “cluster research” and FAN club (FAN = Friends, Associates, and Neighbors) are more popular terms.

In my earlier research, I had focused on immigrant James Sullivan and his parents, Daniel and Ellen (Doyle) Sullivan. All of them came to America in the latter half of the 1850s. James was one of five children born to the Sullivans, so I opted to start by seeking out the godparents of these children. Godparents are often relatives and a good first guess is siblings of the parents of the child being christened.

I could have gone about this several ways, but was fortunate to be able to take a shortcut thanks to a woman named Rachel Darlington who established and maintains a website called “Kilmore Genealogy.” The Internet used to host countless location-specific sites like this, but they’re becoming increasingly rare. Still, it’s always worth a look, and I’m so glad I did because Rachel has single-handedly transcribed civil, parish, and other records for the vicinity of Kilmore. Better yet, she did so more comprehensively than other resources as she troubled to include the names of wedding witnesses and baptism sponsors. This allowed me to search a single page, rather than perform a series of individual searches elsewhere.

I swiftly developed a list of godparents, and it jumped out that there were no Sullivans, but four Doyles – Judy, John, Catherine, and Denis. A look into other godparents hinted that they might have married into the Doyle family. This told me that James and Ellen Sullivan lived where her family – the Doyles – had come from, not his. There was a smattering of entries for Sullivans, but they were sparse on the ground – especially for such a common name – so I suspect that James was an incomer, at least from another pocket of Wexford.

Pushing Back

I also noticed from Rachel’s site that there were some earlier transcriptions of marriages and baptisms from 1798 to 1812. This was lucky since Catholic parish records are patchy and even more so this early, and I wondered whether I might be able to get back another generation. I knew from my previous research that Ellen (Doyle) Sullivan had supposedly been born in 1813 (according to her obituary), but the collection of documents I had for her suggested a range of 1810 to 1813.

With this in mind, I took a dive to see whether this batch that ended in 1812 might just include her and found an entry that looked promising. If this was her, then her parents were William Doyle and Catharine Moran. My next step was to search FindMyPast for any other children this couple might have had, and there they were – Judy, John, and Catherine – almost a perfect match for the names of those who would become godparents to Ellen’s children in later years. As to Denis, his birth was included and his parents were also a Doyle and Moran couple, so he was likely a first cousin. Yes, this was Ellen’s family.

17 February 1810 Marriage of William Doyle and Catharine Moran (Catholic Parish Registers at the National Library of Ireland)

Map Time

This is when I caught a break. The records I had searched over a month ago had no place names, but the priest who logged these earlier family events had kindly included the townland of the participants. I sought out each of the four baptisms as well as the marriage of the parents and pieced together the geography. The parents were living in Crossscales (yes, a triple ‘s’) when they married in 1810, had moved to Pludboher by the time of the birth of their first child, and then shifted once more to Grayrobin for the births of their next three children.

In an attempt to make sense of this, I turned to an incredibly helpful website by renowned Irish genealogist, John Grenham. One of the reasons determining an exact location in Ireland can be confusing is due to the variety of land divisions, and just for fun, they frequently share names and overlap, but have different boundaries.

I knew from my previous sleuthing that Tim Walz’s family was from the Catholic parish of Kilmore within the diocese of Ferns, but now in my effort to single out the correct townland, I had turned up three. John’s site offers the perfect tool for this kind of situation – one which overlays the maps of Catholic and civil (that is, government) parishes.

If you’re able, I’m going to request that you go to his Kilmore parish map and zoom into the bottom where you see Kilmore. Once you’re there, move the slider to the left to see the Catholic parish of Kilmore. If you look directly east from the lower “Kilmore” label, you’ll trip across Pludboher, and just above are Grayrobin and Crossscales. Now I had confirmation that this trio of townlands is indeed located within the Catholic parish of Kilmore.

But what about the civil parish? Shift that same slider to the right and you’ll get the view below. This grouping of townlands is associated with the village of Tomhaggard.

Wexford Catholic and Civil parishes overlaid (Irish Ancestors by John Grenham with maps created using © Mapbox and © OpenStreetMap)

Context Matters

At this point, I took a bit of a detour to poke around a tremendous Irish resource, The Dúchas Project, also known as the National Folklore Collection UCD Digitization Project. One of my favorite aspects of this is The Schools’ Collection which former school teacher, Tim Walz, would probably appreciate.

Back in the 1930s, students were instructed to write essays about the places where they lived. To do so, many spoke with elders in their communities and recorded stories and traditions that had been passed down, song and poem lyrics, and historical and geographical details. I’ve found it a useful way to get a feel for a place in Ireland that’s new to me.

Much to my delight, it holds a collection of essays for a school in Tomhaggard, and as I read through them (prepare to be dazzled by the exquisite penmanship if you explore), I began to understand both how intermingled and modest in scale they were. Eamonn Carty of Crossscales (then spelled by some as Crossgales), for example, wrote of the 25 people from seven families who lived there. The Doyle name popped up from time to time, as did multiple mentions of Father Mayler, a priest who was murdered there in 1653 (Cromwellian time frame), and “mass paths” which according to student Phyllis Codd were initially “used by our ancestors to bring corpses to the graveyards” before evolving into current day short cuts.

Essay by Phyllis Codd, “The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0621, Page 413” by Dúchas © National Folklore Collection, UCD is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Someone had even sketched out a map which includes the location of the priest’s martyrdom, a spot where a contemporary blog informed me, mass still takes place early on Christmas morning.

Tomhaggard map by James Ryan, “The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0621, Page 413” by Dúchas © National Folklore Collection, UCD is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Final Lap

Between the maps and the students’ essays, I realized that Tomhaggard was the family’s place of origin, but there was still one catch. I had proof that they had been there up through 1820 when that cluster of Doyle children had been born, but the more recent records didn’t have any place names. Had they stayed there until emigrating in the 1850s?

Obituary of Ellen (Doyle) Sullivan, Cedar County News, 28 December 1899 (Newspapers)

This is when I decided to revisit the Stateside research I had done before, starting with Ellen’s obituary. When I reread it, I remembered that I hadn’t followed up on the son named John. He hadn’t shown up in baptism records, so I didn’t know much about him. John Sullivan is a common name, but this at least told me that he had died in Wisconsin sometime before 1899.

Other records for the family that made fleeting reference to Wisconsin mentioned Madison in Dane County, so that’s where I looked, and that’s when I found a tombstone. The name, location, and timing all fit, and while it takes a little squinting, you can just make out that the text at the bottom says he was a native of “Thomhaggard.” I now had the substantiation I needed from both sides of the Atlantic, and yes, the family had remained there until the time of departure.

Tombstone of John Sullivan (FindaGrave, memorial by Angela Owens Jando and photo by Jade)

Flashback

At this moment, I experienced déjà vu, mentally flying back to early 2007 when I had traced Barack Obama’s roots to Moneygall. Just as with Tim Walz’s Irish immigrant ancestors, multiple generations of the family had come to the United States and settled in one place, only to move on to another. Both families had lost one or two relatives in their first American home with the result being that their tombstones were effectively stranded since they were in places that drifted out of descendants’ memory. And both of these isolated tombstones held the critical clue of the place of origin in Ireland. With Barack Obama, the missing puzzle piece resided in southeastern Ohio, and with Tim Walz in Wisconsin. From this genealogist’s perspective, it feels like lightning striking twice.

So it’s Tomhaggard, a historic village about 2.5 miles as the crow flies from Kilmore (though further by road), that was home to Tim Walz’s Doyle family. As it happens, before he was selected by Kamala Harris as her running mate, he was scheduled to lead a Minnesota trade mission to Ireland in November. A few things have changed since then, but let’s hope he has the chance to walk in his ancestors’ footsteps – perhaps along an old mass path – before long.

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