Airman Accounted For From World War II (Akers, L.) – Welcome home, Private Lowell Craig Akers. Honored to have researched your family

A Guide to the 1926 Census of Ireland – handy article for those anticipating the release of the 1926 Irish census

Photo by Mark Rasmuson on Unsplash

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Soldier Accounted For From Korean War – Welcome home, Sgt Elwyn Dean Nordyke. Honored to have researched your family. #KoreanWar #Hero (2003)

Top Photo Credit: Arseni Mourzenko under Creative Commons license

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Transatlantic: An Irish American History Podcast – I’ll be joining Damian Shiels & Fin Dwyer to chat about Annie Moore of Ellis Island and other Irish American topics on their Transatlantic podcast! Will share the link after the fact.

Hegseth Announces 100th Service Member Identified From Remains Turned Over by North Korea – I was astonished to read about this milestone as it turns out that 81 of these 100 soldiers were heroes I researched.

Image: AI-generated family tree using a combination of ChatGPT and Whisk

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Act Now to Preserve Access to New York State Vital Records – Just signed and sent comments about how these proposed changes will impact the work I do with the military.

The post Genealogy Roundup, February 12 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Not long ago, I was persuaded to republish a 2002 article I wrote about genetic genealogy, and much to my surprise, readers loved it. After that experience, I decided to take an occasional dive into my archives and re-share selected old favorites. Some are timeless in nature, but even those that are dated, have some useful insights. I hope you’ll enjoy my “Genealogy Classics.”

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Ireland on a vacation sprinkled with a dash of genealogical ambition. I had been there twice before, but promised myself I would not return until I had at least one ancestral village to visit. Being half-Irish in origin, with a total of six immigrant ancestors from the auld sod, I didn’t think this was an unreasonable standard. After all, I just had to find the home parish of any of these six forebears. But it took me more than a few years to succeed.

Lucky Break

As those of you who have dabbled in Irish research know, it can be rather challenging. My break came a few years ago when I was invited to speak at the NGS conference in Portland, Oregon. I had grown up with one of those Oregon Trail tales in my family and it pertained to the sister of one of my immigrant great-great-grandmothers, Ellen Nelligan Murphy. I decided to head to Oregon five days early to see what I could learn about this branch of my family. A wonderful genealogical adventure that took me to churches, court houses, county and state archives, cemeteries, and even a morgue (truly testing the limits of my then-fiancé’s patience) culminated in my meeting a couple of distant cousins who were the proverbial “last in their line.”

Now in their 80s and 90s, respectively, they were two generations closer to the old country than I was, and one of them provided the magical nugget I needed. He had no idea how to write them, but phonetically gave me the names of the towns (supposedly fairly close to each other) from which his grandparents hailed. Combing maps of Ireland, I found a likely pair of candidates: Listowel in Co. Kerry and nearby Abbeyfeale in Co. Limerick.

Since most of the records from this region were not available in the U.S., I hired a researcher in Ireland to have a look at Catholic church records from these two towns, but both came up blank. Fortunately, since they were a mere seven miles apart, there were only two Catholic parishes between them, and I had already researched one of them using FHL records. A search of the last remaining parish – Dromlegagh, Duagh – finally revealed my Nelligan clan on its home turf. (2024 remark: Many of these records are now available online.)

The Voyage

Now having an Irish “hometown” to visit, I arranged the trip, bearing in mind the promise I made to my now-husband that the entire journey would not be restricted to graveyards. I claimed the first few days for puttering around in my ancestors’ neighborhood and one day for visiting the Cobh Heritage Centre (to see their counterpoint to Ellis Island – The Queenstown Story exhibit about the three million emigrants who departed from this port), and allocated the rest to traditional sightseeing, such as queuing up to kiss the Blarney Stone and terrorizing locals by driving on the wrong side of the road on the Ring of Kerry.

While unfortunate for Ireland, the fact that this was their worst year for tourism in a decade meant that we could be as flexible as we liked in our itinerary with no worries of there being “no room at the inn.” Early in the trip, I read an entertaining book called McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland by Pete McCarthy. According to him, the eighth rule of travel is “Never pass a bar that has your name on it.” Had I been pursuing my Murphy roots, this might have been a problem since my hindquarters would have been almost permanently affixed to one stool or other, but with the Nelligan name being considerably less common, it seemed a useful travel tactic. (2024 remark: It’s hard to believe now that Ireland ever had a tourism lull.)

My Own Rules

I stretched McCarthy’s rule a bit for my own purposes, though, and ultimately visited a pub, bakery and even an accounting firm with the name Nelligan on them, all in the small region in which my ancestors had lived. The pub was a bit of a disappointment, attached as it was to a hotel and designed to seem authentic as opposed to actually being so, but I was surprised to feel a sense of pride at just how good the bread from the Nelligan bakery was. The proprietor, Charlie Nelligan, was probably a cousin after all! The last netted me a startled look from a bookish-looking gentleman who graciously recovered and took us to lunch, in spite of the fact that this was not the first time foreign, Nelligan-seeking strangers had strayed into his office. Although the paper trail is too spotty to prove it, it appears that this fellow is probably a fourth cousin once removed – and barging in on him earned me the names of a few possible American and Australian cousins as well. (2024 remark: The bakery sadly closed about a decade later, so the memory is even more special now.)

It didn’t occur to me until we had seen more of the country, but I developed another rule that I will use the next time I visit based on the overwhelming number of B&Bs we saw (everyone with a spare bedroom seems to have one) and a change that’s transpired since my last Irish jaunt. Whereas most Irish towns used to be rather monotone with grey predominating, someone got the idea to paint virtually every building in the same vivid colors often associated with the Caribbean. Consequently, just about every village now looks like a picture postcard. Such is the explosion of color, in fact, that my new rule is this: To add spice and a bit of a theme to your journey, choose a color and only stay in B&Bs of this pigment – all hues acceptable. If you try it out anytime soon, please let me know how it goes.

Lessons Learned

In addition to learning that walking in on strangers is a genealogical productive exercise, I took home several other lessons that might prove useful to those of you planning a trip to Ireland:

• Stop at the church your family attended, even if the records have already been searched at the National Archives in Dublin. I was surprised to find that the Dublin records included a baptism that the locally based records didn’t, and that the reverse was also true. By the way, priests are so accustomed to roots-seekers that they probably won’t even react to your appearance at their door. And of course, it’s always common courtesy to make a donation for their kindness in receiving you. (2024 remark: What I said here about finding random records in one resource and not another remains true today!).

• The quality of the heritage centres scattered around the country varies widely. Some are not much more than a collection of shops designed to separate tourists from their money, but others – such as the impressive Flasket Islands Heritage Centre – will leave you educated and moved. (2024 remark: There’s been considerable improvement since this time.)

• Visit any cemeteries in and near your parish of origin. The one in Duagh rewarded me with a tombstone for an ancestor who had lived 1721-1788, and others from the three closest parishes provided me a collection of possible relatives I’ll now research and try to patch into the family tree.

So now I’ve tramped in the footsteps of one of my Irish immigrant ancestors, and all in all, it was a wonderful experience. My roots give me a perfect excuse to return at least five more times – and just to set myself a bit of a challenge, I think I’m going with pink the next time.

Originally published in November 2003.

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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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Irish roots of Kamala Harris’s running-mate Tim Walz – So Ireland has noticed that Tim Walz has Wexford roots!

Tim Walz’s Irish Great-Great-Grandparents Were Just Like Him

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

The post Genealogy Roundup, August 14 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

US academic believes he is the first person to gain Irish citizenship based on DNA test – Very cool!

Megan Smolenyak – Find a Grave Memorial – We’re alive, but I’m posting our tombstone before someone else does.

The post Genealogy Roundup, July 24 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

The Most Colorful Cemetery in Guatemala – I’ve been to Chichicastenango, Guatemala, but unfortunately not to this cemetery.

The man who turned his dead father into a chatbot – Bit of a double-edge sword, eh? Part of me loves this and part of me fears for future genealogists who will have to sort out what’s real and what isn’t. Regardless, it’s interesting to learn about “death tech” and I only wish something like Settld had existed back when my sister and I handled our mother’s estate.

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

On the Prowl for Bruce Springsteen’s Irish Roots – Since Bruce Springsteen is back performing in Ireland, now seems a good time to re-share this.

National Archives and Ancestry team up to digitize millions of records – I know there will be mixed feelings about this in the genealogical community, but still, great news that these records will be more accessible! And NARA’s site is getting an overhaul as well!

Bodkin: The first thing Barack Obama said when I met him was “You know I’m Irish right?” – Looking forward to Bodkin & raising my hand to take credit for discovering Barack Obama’s Irish heritage! Tickled that he said this and that he and Michelle undertook this series in Ireland!  

UK toddler has hearing restored in world first gene therapy trial – 16 minute surgery and she can hear! Amazing! #DNA

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