It’s All About the Dash

By the time you read this, I likely will have landed in Dublin. While I have had many ideas about what should be ahead of us on this trip—I have, after all, worked on the corresponding research for this event for nearly a year—they have all been thoughts about the doing of the days, the content of the occasions, the requisite itinerary. Settling in to let the event just wash over me as passive passenger, I now start to see everything from the perspective of process rather than as the search for content that has riveted my attention with its incessant demands.

This is only the second time I’ve been to Europe: the first time on the eve of welcoming our daughter into the world, the second on the cusp of launching her back out into that world. And so it becomes that such travel indelibly imprints on my mind as coupled with life’s pivotal phases. Perhaps, among such shifts in attention, I stumble upon the philosophical as I review what’s been accomplished already in the face of what is yet to achieve.

The curse of content-gathering is that we focus on the doing of our project: all the deadlines that cry for completion, all the demands, all the details. To find our ancestors in Ireland, we need to construct that eternal chain of events, the litany of his-father-who-was-son-of, and marry it with obligatory names, dates, and life events. Duly documented. We take up the chain only to forge another link. When will we be satisfied? Just one more. Just one more.

At some point, back through the ages, the paper will crumble. There will be no more documentation. Not, at least, for those lowly tenant farmers who owed everybody something but could claim nothing of their own. Yet those are the very people whose ages-old life details we seek. We will at some point encounter disappointment.

As I shift to the process of traveling there—there being that dream destination once called home by those generations far removed from our lifetime—there is nothing more that can be done about gathering such details. Other than one glorious week at the national repositories of Irish history and documents, what we will glean at this point in our journey will be the sense of being where these ancestors once walked. It will no longer be a time in which I, the researcher, am in control, but a time in which we must sit back and take it all in: the sights, the sounds, the signs of history. We no longer go to the books to extract its proof; the details will ooze from the ambience of the places where we’ve chosen to visit. “It” must come to us—whatever that unanticipated “it” might be.

This is a type of process for which we cannot make plans. It only comes packaged with serendipity. There may be a Tully or a Falvey or a Flanagan at the village market who knows just what we are seeking but could never find in a book. Or not. How can you plan to rendezvous with the answer to a mystery? You can only keep your eyes open, your ears perked, and be astute about connecting the dots. Any lead can become a viable clue.

You cannot command process. You can prepare for it solely by gathering the content to fill out all the requisite forms. But the answers we really seek only unfold. You cannot command an unknown to “fetch.”

As we enter into this unexplored research territory, it becomes all the more obvious that we need the permission to slack off those demands of content and free ourselves to go with the flow of the process. We may have once planned to travel to obtain long-sought-after content, but it’s the process of the journey alone which can immerse us in a fuller understanding of the lives these ancestors lived. John Tully, 1842 – 1907: it’s the dash, not the dates we pursue now.

Above: "The Red Houses," a 1912 oil on canvas by County Limerick native, Norman Garstin; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

On Our Way to Ireland

While madly dashing about—despite best-laid plans—with last minute preparations for our imminent departure for the homeland of my husband’s forebears, I couldn’t help but dwell on one thought: the difference between our trip across the Atlantic and that of our ancestors.

Granted, times have changed. Much. Today, we will board a jetliner, while they boarded the evolutionary precursor to the ocean liner. Today, our belongings will fit into two suitcases—and the obligatory carry-on bags, without which I couldn’t possibly travel—and, though temporarily, we’ll leave the vast majority of our personal belongings behind. Our ancestors likely could fit all their life’s belongings into the same baggage over which I gripe about such things as fifty pound weight limits.

Our non-stop journey will cost us a good night’s sleep but after ten hours' travel time, will deposit us at our destination in only slightly bedraggled condition. Theirs? Apparently the weeks it took to navigate the Atlantic Ocean were only the beginning of their travel woes.

I ran across an informative essay on the many aspects of emigration from Ireland, thanks to a file in one of those Facebook genealogy groups I told you about. A member had provided the link to this website in a document—“Useful Genealogy Websites"—posted on the Tipperary Genealogy Facebook group. If you have a few minutes to absorb the content, it is well worth the read.

The value of the composition is in its accounting of the many steps prerequisite to the actual emigration journey. Though sympathetic to the plight of those having to leave their homeland and face the hazards of trans-Atlantic crossing, I had never realized how exhausted these people had to have been at the start of their journey. Yes, there was the impact of the deplorable famine weakening many—plus the ravages by the diseases which often accompany such deprivation. But in addition to that, it was apparently a marathon these emigrants endured, just in the processes required of them merely to leave their homeland.

From travel beginning in their rural townlands to the Irish port from which they would connect to England, to the obstacles they faced in trying to secure passage on the ocean-going vessel itself, let alone the hardships of third or fourth class passage (hint: the class where cattle are given preference over human passengers) across the Atlantic, the challenges seemed insurmountable. Our Irish ancestors who made it across—I ruefully note the “poorer emigrants” heading not to New York but to destinations in Canada—were indeed Olympians at their endurance trials, world class travelers of a very different sort.

As for me and my traveling companion, all we will have to complain about will be the lack of one night’s sleep. A small price to pay in comparison.

By the time you join me here tomorrow, I’ll likely be grabbing my bags at the luggage carousel in Dublin. If all goes well despite the unpredictable rendezvous with wifi services coupled with time zone disparities, the following days will bring you brief posts—including photos of a rather amateurish sort—of our travel and research progress.

Above: "An emigrant ship, Dublin bay, sunset," 1853 oil on canvas by Dublin resident Edwin Hayes; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Mapping Out a Hundred Fifty Five Year Old Meeting

The very few details still available today—from the 1859 marriage of John Kelly and Johanna Falvey through the 1860s births of their children in County Kerry—give a mixed message as to the specific location of this family’s home. Yet, in little over a week, we will be in the vicinity of Killarney, hoping to uncover the very paths once walked by our ancestors. How to determine that location, when each document seems to report a different place?

The problem is this:

• One record gives the marriage location of John and Johanna as Kilcummin.
• That record lists John’s residence as Knockancore.
• A baptismal record for 1864 comes from a parish called Killeentierna.
• That 1864 document shows the Kelly address as Currow.
• Another baptismal record, in 1867, shows the same parish, but address in Barnfield.
• The Griffith’s Valuation shows John Kelly in civil parish Molahiffe, in the townland of Lisheenacannina.

Question: Where are all these places? More to the point, is it feasible for the same family to have been in each of these locations from the time of their courtship through the course of their early married life?

Obviously, the answer to these questions would be easily had if I could produce a map of the area including all these details—including those of any towns that might no longer be in existence.

However, that obvious solution did not occur to me. It took a tip, kindly offered by a denizen of the Facebook genealogy groups I’ve already mentioned, to knock some research sense into me. A member of the County Kerry group suggested, basically, that I take a map and check out the distances between each of the places named on these various family records.

Working on the assumption that, back in that era, a person would either travel by foot or with a horse and cart, this researcher figured a person could cover somewhere between ten to twenty miles in a day, one way, to travel to market. The possibility that said person could meet—and eventually fall in love with—a person traveling a like distance from the opposite direction means the two parties, though now in a relationship, might have originated from places which were up to forty miles apart.

Given that scenario, diagramming the possibilities on a map by encircling each town using a twenty mile radius would reveal any overlaps indicating likely pairings of origin. If the place names I’ve already encountered—Kilcummin, Knockancore, Killeentierna, Currow, Barnfield, Lisheenacannina—fall within those realms of possibility, then I likely have the same person moving from place to place.

Or, I might just be dealing with two different John Kelly families, both having a wife’s maiden name as Falvey.

Whichever result turns out to be the more likely scenario, I’m still keen on a visit to Lisheenacannina. If nothing else, it’s just fun to say it.  

 Above: Painting of a Ringed Plover by Irish artist and naturalist, Mary Battersby; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

The Changing Face of Genealogy Networks

Face it: genealogy researchers like to share what they’ve found almost as much as they liked the finding of it. And that means they’ve always needed a way to connect.

Remember queries, those hopeful letters sent to society newsletters and genealogical publications, probably by the thousands? I remember sitting in our local library, with stacks of pertinent society publications—plus Everton’s Genealogical Helper—poring over the listings in the back of each issue, hoping to find a match.

It’s been a long time since I tried that routine.

How about the listserv? Have you ever played that game? I remember one electronic mailing list I subscribed to, hosted at the University of Pennsylvania. I think I was on others through the University of Virginia. Whoever the administrators were, they became the middlemen enabling each of us to pass along genealogical information to hordes of desperate researchers.

Once online forums made their debut, they became the logical next step in assuaging that ever-increasing hunger for more genealogical information. I played my part in the early days of both Rootsweb and GenForum, both now greatly fallen from use—and GenForum about to become a read-only archive. They, too, served their purpose in their own time as the means with which genealogy researchers connected to compare notes.

With the advent of social media, it only made sense that we would once again congregate and do what we’ve always done: share and compare notes. The #genealogy hashtag is alive and well at Twitter. I’m sure Google+ has its own set of genealogical communities. There is even an APG chapter which virtually meets at Second Life.

And then there is Facebook.

While I’ve been on Facebook for a number of years, I hesitated to dive in to the genealogy scene there. I dunno…maybe because I always saw Facebook as a place to share more privately with people I really knew, face to face. I’ve always had that need to have a secluded space to call my own, even in the midst of all the public hubbub. So I resisted the urge to even go exploring.

Now, Facebook has experienced widespread use by genealogical organizations. Many societies boast their own Facebook page. And many Facebook “groups” have been set up—whether sponsored by a society or through other means—to facilitate communication between long-distance researchers who want to know more about a specific area.

That’s where Facebook started calling me back for a second look. I’ve been desperately seeking some local input on where to find resources on site in each of the Irish counties we’ll be visiting in the next few weeks. While I’ll spend a solid week poring over books, microfilms and records in Dublin, I have two additional weeks for leisurely journeys to the counties from which some of my husband’s ancestors emigrated. I want to get some suggestions from locals on where to go and what to see—not of a tourist nature, but regarding the local history and local resources.

For those kinds of questions, Facebook became my sole answer. I started entering the name of each county in the search bar at Facebook, and found at least one group for each destination. Granted, each was a “closed” group, but it involved the simple matter of requesting permission to join. One group even turned out to have, as its administrator, an American-based genealogist I’ve already met online: Terri O’Connell, co-founder of The In-Depth Genealogist.

In the few days I’ve been a member of each of these Facebook groups, I’ve gleaned several great suggestions and been directed to some worthwhile resources. One gentleman in a Tipperary group opened my eyes to the fact that our Denis Tully family came from a townland—Tountinna—which was (contrary to my assumption) high up in the mountains. Another member shared his work on maps, graphically demonstrating the surname distribution of his Carroll surnames; while this is not a surname I’m pursuing for this trip, it was enlightening to read about his work.

No matter which way we’ve done it—electronic email lists, online forums, or social media—it’s always been great to have a way to pose a question and see its answer come back at us almost instantaneously. On the eve of our trip to Ireland, I know it’s been a gratifying experience for me. Right now, I certainly can use the last-minute advice!

Above: "Rock of Cashel" in County Tipperary, mid-1850s drawing by geological surveyor and Dublin-born artist of Huguenot descent, George Victor Du Noyer; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.  

If You Need an Attorney to Do It, It Can’t Be Fun Anymore

Gah. This latest development couldn’t have come at a worse moment. I really didn’t have time for fine print. And yet, that is exactly what I found myself muddling over last night.

It all happened in an innocuous way. It was on the cool-down period after one solitary meltdown over realizing I leave for Ireland in three days, and I am way not prepared to go. I thought, I’ll just cool my heels for a while and wander around some of my favorite blogs. After all, I’ve been so busy lately, I haven’t had time to stop by and read what’s been going on with my blogging friends.

I made it all the way to the Es—and no, I do not generally read my subscriptions in alphabetical order; it just happened that way—when I realized this might not have been a good idea.

It was E for Ellie’s Ancestors that broke the news to me: that online genealogy resource I’ve already written a rant about has decided to change their policy on charges, from pay-as-you-go to subscription.

Oh? This could be an improvement.

Or not.

It wasn’t lost on me that I had already laid money down on the books. What was to become of that?

As it turned out, the company had a handy dandy device with which to convert one’s current balance to the new balance. But not so fast—this was the same nickel-and-dime-you company over which I had already been frustrated. I decided to take my time and—groan—read through their updated terms of service. After all, “buyer beware” and all that. This is the type of late night reading that cannot possibly be termed as fun. And, of course, a little surge of ye olde blood pressure ensued upon stumbling upon that rock of offense that reminded me

Online or other republication of content is prohibited except as unique data elements that are part of a unique family history or genealogy.

What is that supposed to mean? That I am bound and gagged and prevented from mentioning anything I find about my family? What is the use of looking, if you can’t share what you find? It’s a reward of the chase to be able to gloat over fresh discoveries, isn’t it?

And how can one have a “unique family history”? Even an only child could not boast of such a thing. After all, it takes two to tango.

This is where I started realizing that only through the professional guidance of my unique personal attorney could I safely navigate this mined field of words. And if it takes an attorney to make it safely to the other side of my genealogical research quest, it isn’t a fun journey anymore.

Yes, I know everyone needs to look out for number one. What better way to do so than to hire a passel of attorneys to insure your every right is thoroughly protected? But if I have to hire an attorney so that my attorney can talk to your attorney, I stop wanting to play this game.

I had once read that none other than John Grenham had labeled the site “clunky” or “byzantine” or another such term. Though I failed to locate that comment via a Google search, I was nonetheless rewarded for my efforts with two other Grenham commentaries on the site’s past charging policies which I found here and here. Click through and see what you think. Apparently, I am not alone in my longstanding frustration.

There is, however, another way. When I think about this current distress, my mind flies immediately to another company’s terms of service, the spirit of which I vastly prefer. A while back, I took up an offer to subscribe to findmypast Ireland. While the company’s genealogical documentation didn’t meet my needs at the time, I wish it had—not just because of the disappointment of those still-elusive records, but on account of how the company conducted its business.

Take their terms of service. I was almost positive I saw phrases in their terms directing the customer to “kindly” do certain things. Their genial demeanor shone through their straightforward and fair wording on their terms of service. How can one not help but like a company that makes statements like

These Terms & Conditions are made under Irish law and any arguments about them (heaven forbid) will only be heard in Irish courts.

At the outset, findmypast Ireland stated in their terms,

We hate jargon as much as you do, so our Terms & Conditions are written in plain English.

And they kept their promise. Kindly.

Why can’t everyone conduct business like this? Especially in Ireland. After all, the Emerald Isle has a reputation to uphold. We customers of Irish descent always heard it was that way back in the Old Country. And we’re not ready to be disappointed.

Above: County Limerick native Norman Garstin, "Autumn," 1882 oil on canvas; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain. 

Who, Me? Organized?

It appears the intrepid traveling genealogical researcher must be at the peak of perfection, when it comes to organization. After all, considering the resources poured into such a trip, there ought to be some return on investment.

That line of reasoning might lead one to think, “She is going on a genealogical research trip; ergo she is organized.”

Wrong-o.

Not this genealogical researcher.

So when Wendy asked, in a comment a couple days back, for my secret sauce for staying organized, I couldn’t say anything.

Wendy mentioned,

I am curious how you are organizing your notes for this trip. Notebook? Flashdrive? Excel spread sheet? How will you make sure you're not a half-hour down the road from Tipperary and suddenly remember, Oh—I wanted to look for....

Granted, she has a valid point. After all, who wants to remember what she forgot, just after the gates close and you have to head home?

I’m not the one to answer that question. I’m the one who used to be able to keep everything in my head, so list-making and spreadsheet wizardry are skills I’ve never taken the opportunity to develop. Besides, I never started this blog under the assumption that it is to be written by an expert. You know that. I’m the perpetual guinea pig. And I’m about to demonstrate that, yes, you should make a list. And yes, you should have other ingenious ways to preserve your sanity and never fail to remember everything.

I will say I’ve learned one lesson: to always have a back-up plan. Case in point: I once attended an out-of-town workshop in which I planned to share some data which was accessible on my tablet. While I carry a hotspot for back-up wifi access, I had thought the workshop location would provide Internet access. It didn’t. And though I needed to re-load the hotspot service, the time I had that morning should have been sufficient. It wasn’t: the site was down for half the day—the very hours I had left to try and re-up my service. If I had known, ahead of time, that I’d be faced with those two roadblocks, I would have just printed the material on my desktop before I left home. Sometimes, we just have to make room for “Plan C.”

For our Ireland trip, you can be sure I’ll be bringing printed copies of the pertinent data I want to have at my fingertips. You never know when the old-fashioned way will be the only way you can access what you need.

Sometimes, in the midst of research, it’s possible to find an unexpected fact that leads to the kind of questions that make you wish you had brought along a lot more of your family records. That’s when I like to have my entire database on hand. Face it, though: mine is one of those collections that contains records for upwards of thirteen thousand individuals. I won’t be printing all that out and carrying it around. Being able to tap into my Ancestry account will make the difference there.

Thanks to Far Side’s prodding, I do have lists of what I’m seeking in each county location. But even those I'll treat as a fluid read-out. Some of these journeys, I will be going in blind. I’m not sure what’s available, and what I can find. The lists are more amorphous than some people might prefer to see. That’s where flexibility comes in.

Of course, I’ve rehearsed the lines of these eight Irish individuals countless times, in my mind and out loud in explanations to family, friends and anyone else crazy enough to give me the time to listen. By this point, the quest seems rather straightforward to me. And yet, just as convoluted. Sometimes, I feel confident that I’ll find everything. And then, sometimes, I freak out that I will find nothing.

Perhaps, rather than pose as the expert and answer Wendy’s query myself, it would be better to crowdsource the answer. After all, you are just as likely—take that back; even more likely—to have some good suggestions for how to keep organized in the midst of The Big Research Trip. What do you feel is helpful? What has saved your skin, when you thought the whole trip was a bust? What tricks do you use to keep yourself on the right track?

It’s your turn to write a blog post here. Add your comments, or link back with a post on your own blog. I’m curious to see what has been helpful to you on your research trips, be they grand adventures or more modest excursions.

Above: County Clare native William Mulready's illustration to chapter one of Oliver Goldsmith's Victorian novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, "Choosing the Wedding Gown." Courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Of Technology and Tantrums

Let’s just say I sometimes do my genealogical research online at a rather late hour. And let’s just suppose, as a figure of speech, that such late hours are times when it might be more likely for cyber-spirits, ghosts and such to exert their influence on the unwary tech services of the databases I prefer to haunt.

Now, pre-midnight hours aren’t exactly what I’d consider late hours, but we have to consider one additional fact: the online services I’m utilizing are not located here where I reside, but eight time zones away, where I am seeking research bonanzas.

My mental math is getting pretty sharp lately. After all, I’ve had nearly two months of practice at adding eight hours to what is essentially a base-twelve counting system.

The woes I am about to recount to you began when I started getting irritated over a particular Irish website. Every time I tried to access that particular server, the system was down. Down, as in:

The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.

Now, that would have been fine if it were a visit to a mere curiosity I had stumbled upon while cruising around on Pinterest, but it wasn’t. It was a research mission to a website offering a searchable version of Griffith’s Valuation, and I needed to access it in preparation for our research trip to Ireland.

After several nights of failed attempts to recreate a search I had once—note, that’s once—completed, it finally dawned on me that I usually did my trials when it was approaching four in the morning. Over there.

I’ll let you do the math to figure out what time it was on my side of the equation.

How could the site be “too busy” at four in the morning? Could it be that the tech people over there actually took their system offline at that time of night? And I just happened to get on the wrong side of that wavelength?

So the other night I was at my computer, doing what I usually do in the evenings: search the Net to locate what else I’m missing before we head to Ireland. I wanted to look up something on Griffith’s Valuation. Again.

Yep, it was offline. Again. And since I just couldn’t stand it, I went Googling to find an alternative. Which I did: Ancestry.com.

For those of you who follow along here at A Family Tapestry, you know when I find something I would have needed to footnote, if this were a research journal, I try to hyperlink the key terms back to the online resource, so you can follow my tracks. Since not everyone pays for—or can afford to pay for—subscription services, I try to find a free version of that same resource to use for my links. That’s why the Irish site for Griffith’s was superb—when it was up.

But hey. Bird in hand. I’m shameless when it comes to loyalties. I headed to Ancestry’s version of Griffith’s Valuation to check things out there. And what did I find?

Not the same stuff I found at the other Griffith’s site.

For instance, when I looked up Denis Tully—you know, the one I found in the County Tipperary civil parish of Templeachally—he was nowhere to be found on Ancestry’s version. The only Denis Tully to pop up there was a gent renting land in Dublin.

Wrong side of the island.

I felt like my eyes were playing tricks on me. Surely, I saw Denis in County Tipperary. Didn’t I? I went back to look, but—you guessed it—it was after four in the morning in Ireland and there was no Griffith’s website to be had.

I went on working and, as sometimes happens when I get to doing genealogical research, it started approaching the wee small hours of the morning around here. And it occurred to me, hey, it isn’t four o’clock in the morning in Ireland anymore.

So I checked on it again, and the site was back up. And Denis Tully was right there in Templeachally, just like he always was.

Now, the clincher was this: I got to thinking, if Ancestry seems to have different records for the same (?) Griffith’s Valuation, and if I couldn’t find some of our ancestors on the Irish website’s version, might I find them on the Ancestry version?

I gave it a try. And the answer to my question became a resounding “Yes!”

So what gives, here? I mean, Sir Richard Griffith did his accounting well over a century ago. It’s not like the electrons got up and re-arranged themselves on the original document. I realize there were some records which were published in the years following the original issue, so I went back to the notes for each site, trying to find any explanation like that. No such luck.

Part of me wants to be glad for what’s been found, using each version, but part of me loses confidence in the data provided by a website when it disagrees with data from another website claiming the exact same source. Something is obviously missing here. Some sort of likely explanation.

Or maybe late night hours in Ireland are closer to the Twilight Zone than we’d originally assumed.

Above: "From Pentonville Road Looking West, Evening," by Irish painter John O'Connor; orphaned as a young man, he started as a scene-painter first at theaters in Belfast, then London; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

The Nooks and Crannies of Genealogy

Google may be a wonderful gift to mankind, but it has its limitations. It favors the more recent and the more recently-visited. Those out-of-the-way corners of esoteric knowledge are sometimes bypassed by such search engines in favor of the more popularly frequented digital destinations.

When it comes to genealogy in the aggregate, we’ve got a popular thing going. Not so, when we all divide to conquer our various special interests: countries of origin, political subdivisions, specific centuries, exact surnames. We divide, scramble, re-assemble and find our new groups of fellow-seekers like a grand right and left on the dance floor of human history.

In my case, before my husband and I leave on a research trip to Ireland in less than a week, I still hope to find more local information on the family lines I’m seeking. For instance, on our Tully and Flannery lines in County Tipperary, I’m holding out for places to search specifically in the northern part of the county, around the village of Ballina or the townland of Tountinna.

At the first, of course, I relied on Google. And the major online genealogical players, like Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. I’ve since made a switch to searches in Ireland—google.ie is now my friend—and learned about online repositories the Irish would tend to seek out in their parallel quests. But there is still more.

I think all of us who have been around this genealogical research scene for any amount of time remember the earlier days of online presence, when dedicated groups of volunteers would set up websites and crowdsource their material. The network of GenWeb pages is an example of such efforts. The user pages at FamilyTreeMaker and Rootsweb were much the same.

How to navigate such labyrinths? If they were more recent additions to the Internet, Google would have snatched them up in a nanosecond. Now, they’re “so nineteen nineties” that no one pays them any mind. But they’re still there. And the information they contain is just as current today as it was twenty years ago. After all, there won’t be much change in 1800s information, whether you find it in the 1990s or the 2010s.

So I keep pushing back the margins on these fringe areas of the digital ghost towns of genealogy. Some of those cyber-resources turn out to have researchers still inhabiting them, as it turns out. Take this bunny trail I recently unearthed. The path began in a place modern-enough to our cutting-edge sensibilities: a Facebook group for genealogical researchers interested in County Tipperary.

A small note on the page invited members to take a look at their website. It was called IGP: Ireland Genealogy Projects. Looking not much different than some GenWeb pages I’ve seen, the IGP landing page hyperlinks to a page for each of the Irish counties—including one for my current research interest, County Tipperary.

Of course, unlike those commercial giants of genealogical research, these collections are limited by what information is on hand to the participating volunteers—and by the number of volunteers willing to share what they’ve found. Just like GenWeb, some local pages are wonders of organization with a wealth of material to behold. Some are just annoyances eating up valuable research time for those who turn away, empty-handed.

I can’t say I was particularly successful in my own pursuits on this website. No specific Flannery or Tully hits, courtesy of their search bar. But I did find something that reminded me of another resource I’ll pursue, once I get to Ireland: local newspapers from the early 1800s.

In IGP’s case, someone on the County Tipperary page had taken the time to transcribe entries from some very old newspapers. One page did turn out to have a report mentioning the Tully surname, although I can’t say it was anyone related to our line.

The curious snippet from this time machine read,

Stephen Tully, aged eleven, fair-haired inclined to curl, smooth-faced with cut on forehead. Wearing dark brown frock coat, cloth ap, and cord trousers, strayed from his father’s house. Thos Tully, Mountslat, Killenaule, on Friday 13^th. He left Marlfield on Sunday last and crossed the Work-house Bridge, it is supposed, with the intention of making his way to Kerry for the purpose of going to school. Police please look out for him.

It was an advertisement appearing in the Tipperary Free Press dated Wednesday, October 18, 1837, that told the tale of someone’s Tully ancestor in the midst of family troubles. Since the announcement included the name Thomas Tully, it caught my eye, as our John Tully’s brother Patrick had, on his Ballina baptismal record, the name of a Thomas Tully listed as his sponsor.

Curious, I checked out that particular Thomas Tully on Griffith’s Valuation, and sure enough, there was a Thomas listed in the townlands of “Monslatt.” Was he close enough to our Tullys in the townland of Tountinna? Hard to say. Now, by car, it would take an hour’s drive to travel the distance. Perhaps that would remove this Tully from the realm of family possibilities.

Still, the newspaper clipping reminds me: there are Irish newspapers from that era which I cannot access from online subscription services here, but I may be able to peruse in person, once I arrive in the counties I wish to research in Ireland. That would not only go for County Tipperary, but remember I have some research to do on the mystery of the great-great-granduncle, William Flanagan of County Limerick, who supposedly was sentenced to transportation in that same mid-century time frame. Now, that would be a news report I’d like to find!

This serves also to remind me that, in this last minute push to organize the final touches on my pre-travel research, I still have to attend to family details from a couple other counties.

 Above: "Madonna Lilies," undated oil on panel by County Limerick native, Norman Garstin; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Not Just Like Me

Sometimes—even when we are researching our genealogy—we have to take a step back and examine our assumptions to see whether they are standing in the way of our research progress.

While I have been obsessively focused on our upcoming research journey to Ireland, that is not, in fact, the only issue consuming my attention in my every waking hour. I have been rather busy, it turns out, with other activities.

Amend that comment about obsession: other, ahem, genealogy activities.

In the course of this past week, I coordinated the program for our local genealogical society, spoke as a representative of our society’s board at a gala public event, and taught a beginners’ genealogy class at a local mini-conference.

It’s what happened at that first event—the genealogical society meeting—that sparked the thoughts I want to discuss today. You see, as vice president of that organization, I have the responsibility of arranging speakers for each meeting and planning the educational choices for the programs. Last week, as our meeting was about to begin, I went to close the doors to the meeting room when a young man stepped in the doorway and asked me the kind of question we normally love to hear:

“Is this where you can tell me how to get started on my family tree?”

At any other time, the answer would be an almost overzealous “Yes.” Inviting the unsuspecting novice in, I would fight hard to maintain my composure so as not to appear too similar to the spider addressing the fly. But this time, I almost found myself taking a good look at the man, then turning around to take in a sweeping view of the audience assembled there, awaiting the beginning of the program. The thoughts flying through my mind at that point almost sucked the words right out of my mouth.

You see, that night, our featured speaker was a local author and researcher addressing the subject of a historic cemetery in our county, and the personal histories she had gleaned from the mere inscriptions found on the now-crumbling gravestones. The time frame began in the 1850s and stretched through the rest of the century. That century.

The eager young man speaking to me, however, couldn’t have been farther from the average demographics of that assembled group—nor could he have been ready yet to benefit from century-old cemetery research findings.

Nor was the format for the evening’s program the type that would assist him. This would not be a how-to full of beginners’ tips. The meeting was about to become a time-traveling yarn about the founding of a now-vanished pioneer California town and the people who shaped its history. While many of our long-standing members who focus on preservation of cemetery records would thrive on such a topic, the meeting would have done nothing for our novice visitor.

As the fly in him began shrinking away from the doorway, the spider in me was grasping for any way to entice him to follow that spark of passion for uncovering his roots. I didn’t want to snuff out that spark by inviting him in, but neither did I want to snuff it out by sending him away.

There was, however, more to this story. It was not only a tale of a sole young person in a sea of retirees. There was also another difference. For those of you aware of my enthusiastic advocacy for methods and organizations—like The NextGen Genealogy Network—seeking to encourage younger generations to explore their roots, you know the issue of age would not be what was beguiling my introspective side.

Let’s just put it this way: while I can safely say ninety nine percent of my ancestral roots would hail from European origins, that was not the case with my young interloper. Whether he claimed ancestry from African, Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander or other background is fairly immaterial to my point, although in his case, his would be the first category. My point is, rather, this: when we take a long, hard look at the members peopling our genealogical societies, they often appear to be people who are “just like me.”

And “me,” for the most part, seems to be descendants of European immigrants.

Granted, just engaging a speaker who can address these other family origins is a start—but it isn’t enough to meet the continuing research needs of those others who aren’t, after all, “just like me.” We need ways to draw people in who have these research interests, to provide them with resources and support to continue their trek toward finding their own family history’s answers.

Actually, there are such resources, but we seldom find them in the aggregate, so they seem harder to grasp in that instant in which we struggle for our reply. That’s why, when I set up our society’s Twitter account, I began a list-building project to share the Twitter handles of groups which focus on a wide variety of genealogical research interests. That’s why, if you scour the genea-bloggers community, you find there are bloggers speaking to such subjects. Some of you are yourselves bloggers who specialize in such areas.

Because I teach research workshops for beginners, I know of some of these resources, but it occurred to me it is time to make a list and share it online, as well as with our local group. Of course, there is that small matter of a trans-Atlantic research journey standing between me and such a resolution, but once that is accomplished, it is time to share the wealth regarding genealogical resources for all ethnic backgrounds of potential members for our local genealogical societies.

There is nothing quite so disconcerting as deciding to do something new—like joining a genealogical society to help find one’s roots—and stepping through the meeting room door for the first time, only to size up the crowd and realize there is not one soul in there who is “just like me.” America may be a nation of joiners, but we are also a people sensitized to the need for belonging with others with whom we share something in common. If we, as a local organization, fail to provide the resources to help those pioneer first attendees feel their association with us is worth it, will they ever feel the need to come back for a second visit?

Not on the Beaten Path

There comes a point in the intrepid traveler’s life—well, at least in my case—in which that insidious doubt of personal capability overwhelms the confidence that one can find his or her way in the world. In my case, that’s when I succumbed to the siren song of those well-marketed tourists’ guides.

You know those books: the annual issues of brand-name “See Such-and-Such Country” publications.

It started out in a harmless way. A friend passed along a copy of one book. She found it at a used book store and thought of me. A beautiful, glossy handbook, it was full of inspiring photographs and artwork from famous locations in Ireland.

That inspired my husband the other day—since he was on Amazon, anyhow—to take a look at what else might be available. After all, we have to have some idea of what we are going to do, once we land in Dublin.

The books arrived last week—a crazy week, as usual, so I didn’t get a chance to even peek until this weekend. Yes, this weekend in which I’ve been laser-focused on constructing an itinerary for what we will be doing, once we drive to Ballina.

Last night, I thought I’d crack open those shiny pages and see what could be found about my current destination of obsession. I found…absolutely zip. Nada.

Well, that isn’t entirely true. I found two page entries in the index of one book—did I mention it happened to be the only book which actually had an index? (Can you tell, the more ticked I get, the more I tend to use italics?!)

Don’t let those two pages get your hopes up. Remember Ballina boasts a double identity: one in County Mayo—the bigger one more likely to be mentioned—and the smaller one. Guess which one got the bigger mention in the tour book?

The other one—the one I want to know about—got a mention of one line’s length on the page.

Thanks.

Well, let me reconsider that. After all, I’m not really traveling to Ireland to do the tourist routine. I’m looking for a very different pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Maybe I’m even looking for a different rainbow. And for different rainbows, you have to look in different places.

My digital visit to the County Clare website, yesterday, inspired me to see what I could find in County Tipperary. Remember the GenMaps page I found? If, on that program, you clicked the choice for townlands, you could see the overlay of the borders on the map of the county. You could also click the choice for surnames from Griffith’s Valuation, which would then be superimposed on the same map.

I want that for County Tipperary.

Search as I might, though, I could find no results for such a treasure. County Clare, it appears, has a cutting edge institution, as libraries go. Oh, if only they were on the other side of the Shannon.

Of course, there is a County Tipperary library system. But, coming from a heritage of a bifurcated land mass—historically divided into the “North Riding” and “South Riding” jurisdictions—their town centers are spread throughout a sizeable county. And, of course, their branch libraries appear to be nowhere near Ballina—which is why I am fervently hoping the Ballina folks consider their local library to be the one across the river in Killaloe, oh please, oh please. That way, perhaps that County Clare library would have holdings including the local history and genealogy of this northern outpost of their neighboring county.

Thanks to Google, my searching yielded other local resources—though some of them turn out to be via the usual suspects and/or include some sorrowfully outdated links.

I found this Google Books link to provide a helpful list of local resources.

The County Tipperary library’s website seems to have some promising links. I am guessing the closest branch to Ballina would be the one in Nenagh. Apparently, the term I am looking for—the way the Irish put it, at least—would be “Local Studies.” The library provides a list of links for this, although frustratingly, the list includes contact information for national resources (not very local of them, now, is it?) or pay-for-service sites like the heritage centers. Apparently, there has also been a book published which (I guess) serves as a finding aid for local materials covering a wide range of topics having to do with Tipperary; the library website gives a further description. Of course, I cannot tell from the site whether the limited-edition volume is still available for sale. It might be a useful item to pick up while we are over there. However, the one item I wish I could find—a GenMaps feature for County Tipperary like the one I found yesterday for County Clare—is nowhere to be found on the Tipperary library’s website.

Another local resource I was able to find was the County Tipperary Historical Society. It seems their prime purpose is—or was—to publish an annual journal. I can’t tell if they are still in operation. Their website seems somewhat outdated.

I had to journey way back in time to find another website with links to local resources for County Tipperary. Predictably, it was the ubiquitous GenWeb site, this one specific to County Tipperary. Though the website seems outdated, and contains some broken links, it is packed with a wealth of resources. It provides a page for the specific civil parish in which I had found a Griffith’s Valuation listing for my (hopefully) Denis Tully: Templeachally. Drilling down a bit further, I also was able to find a page on our Tully family’s Tountinna Townland. And, scrolling down past the title of this additional GenWeb page, I found a long list of links referring to other researchers and websites having to do with County Tipperary genealogy.

But still no GenMaps. Which means I’ll need to polish my PhotoShop skills enough to work on graphically overlaying a very old map from the time of Griffith’s Valuation over a modern-day road map, to see if, once we are in Ireland, we can drive by that very location where Denis Tully once eked out a living in rural County Tipperary. If I can discern nothing else, thanks to Google Street View, I can tell things haven’t changed much there, out in that neck of the woods in northern County Tipperary.

Talk about being off the beaten path.

Above: Irish artist Henry Albert Hartland, "On the Moors," 1876 pencil and watercolor inspired by Achill Island in County Mayo; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Finding It in the Stacks

There is a saying that has gone around genealogy circles: when it comes to research, what you find on the Internet is just the tip of the iceberg. That very concept was incorporated into a graphic design on a poster sold by the California Genealogical Society. In fact, I only recently realized that the poster was designed by the daughter of one of this blog’s readers—Lisa Gorrell.

I take that concept to heart—especially now, on the eve of our research trip to Ireland. At least, I hope that maxim will hold true! For libraries will be one of my most depended-upon stops in the various towns and counties of Ireland.

My mind was turned to libraries last night, having just returned from the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the building that houses the main branch of our local library. Our local genealogical society was there to help celebrate those fifty years. And why not? That library has played host to our Society’s meetings, workshops and donated reference collection from the time it opened the doors of that new building fifty years ago.

When I think of the nearly four thousand books our Society has donated to the library over those fifty years, it reminds me that our city is not unusual in that regard. Across the land, there are mid-sized cities (and perhaps even smaller) with genealogical societies which have done the same.

In the aggregate, that adds up to a significant stack of books. Books that someone can reference to find a way around a research brick wall, perhaps. And if we are doing that here in the United States, surely someone is doing the same in other countries as well.

Hopefully, one of those other countries is Ireland. I think of all the local history books, family genealogies, transcriptions of records and documents housed in our own repository. And I earnestly wish for the same to be true of the libraries at my destination. Not just the national library in Dublin. But the small libraries in places like Ballina in County Tipperary, where I have some questions still needing answers.

Wouldn’t it be just the dream outcome to walk into a local library and pull a book down off the shelf that mentions the name of someone in my Tully or Flannery families there?

Since our libraries here have their holdings listed in online catalogs, I thought I’d test the waters on this one. I Googled Ballina, Tipperary and library. Perhaps because Ballina markets itself jointly with its “twin” city across the River Shannon, Killaloe, the best I can hope for is to visit the library at the water’s edge on the other side of the river—and believe me, the Killaloe library does indeed boast waterfront property. It is on the original site of the lock keeper’s house.

While the library is fairly small—it houses holdings of nearly eight thousand volumes—it is, after all, the closest collection to my target town of Ballina. The website is helpful, providing contact information—you know I’ll have questions—and links of interest to a researcher like me. Better yet, the wider county library system has played coordinator to a crowdsourced list of details to make a genealogist happy. Check out this sortable list of local graveyard inscriptions, for instance. Or this page on the Cathedral’s burials. Or, better yet, this “GenMaps” readout—be patient, this one loads s-l-o-w-l-y—which can be manipulated according to selected features listed on the left sidebar.

And, of course, like any forward-thinking library, the Killaloe library includes their own blog, which I was delighted to find.

Naturally, I couldn’t help but let my eyes wander over the entries in the listings of burials at the Cathedral just across the river from Ballina. Remember, the actual source of the baptismal verifications received by our Tully family in the 1870s originated from the Cathedral in County Clare, not the actual church the family attended in Ballina. And it wasn’t lost on me that there were a couple Flannerys in the cemetery listing, as well as Tullys. Who knows?

I can’t just satisfy myself with this resource from the next county over—though it is much closer in proximity to Ballina than the town’s own county seat in Tipperary. I’ll be looking to see what can be found online for the County Tipperary library system as well. But once we arrive in Ballina, I wouldn’t discount a trip across that eighteenth century bridge. After all, the bridge was already spanning the river, back when our family lived there.

Above: "On Suffolk Sands," 1887 oil on canvas by Dublin impressionist landscape painter Walter Frederick Osborne; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Then Versus Now

Two weeks from today, we will be in the town of Ballina—Ballina in County Tipperary, that is. With a population just under 2,500 people, it’s understandable why the other Ballina keeps popping up on search results. In comparison, Tipperary’s Ballina is a mere village.

Searching for a place to stay in a location that small would seem to be a challenge. After all, if you were coming to visit my neck of the woods, you would be considering a town somewhere between the size of Linden and Weaverville. Neither of those locations would be places where I’d expect to find both an abundance of Bed and Breakfast accommodations and hotels from which to choose. Thus you see the dilemma I was expecting to face.

When I actually began to delve into my housing search in earnest, I was pleasantly surprised—although, alas, no castles—to find a number of Bed and Breakfast options. Somehow, that seemed like an option that would bring us closer to the land. (Or whatever romantic notion you’d like to substitute as an excuse.)

Getting closer to the land seems to be the goal, here, when it comes to venturing this far north of our Dublin-to-Cork itinerary. After all, the rest of our journey isn’t far removed from those two anchors: just a little bit to the west to County Kerry, and a little to the north to just over the County Cork line in the eastern portion of County Limerick. Somehow, this County Tipperary excursion seems to be an outlier.

But Ballina is the firmest fact I’ve found for the home base of any of our Irish ancestors. I have two Tully baptismal verifications pointing back to Ballina. And an entry in Griffith’s Valuation.

As I look for anything that can be found on the actual townland of our Tully family’s former residence—as well as the site of the original Catholic parish—it becomes quite easy to absorb all extraneous information. Inspired by Iggy’s prompt to discover the actual population of Ballina, I couldn’t help notice all the other details that came up in searches on the town. I’ve taken to reading the community page of the local newspaper, the Tipperary Star, after having stumbled upon it during a search juxtaposing the words “Tully” and “Ballina.” Thanks to seeking out population numbers, I discovered quite a collection of disparate facts about the place, like the fact that there is a greater proportion of professional and managerial workers than the national average, or the detail about the large number of Polish nationals living in Ballina

Apparently, there were enough of such interesting trivia to rank Ballina, a few years back, as the third best place to live in Ireland. (The other Ballina, by way of contrast, made it into the same list as the nineteenth worst place to live.) Their own promotions certainly rank the town as “amongst Ireland’s most picturesque attractions.”

Coming away from such glowing copy, I feel as if our destination would be perfect for the chic weekend getaway. And yet, this is the same turf upon which our ancestors once felt so hopelessly despondent about their future as to risk it all for a perilous and uncertain journey in despicable conditions. I get the feeling that our Tully and Flannery ancestors would not fit in well with the preponderance of well-educated professional and managerial Ballina commuters braving their daily thirty minute drive to their well-respected positions in the nearby urban centers of modern Ireland.

After all, our ancestors last walked on that turf almost one hundred seventy years ago. A lot can change in a span of time that size. Yet, for us to journey back to that same location means for us to carry them in our hearts as we go. Having traced their family’s story back, step by step through each decade, to arrive at that point at the beginning of the Great Hunger aligns me more with mindset of their departure than the viewpoint held by the town's current residents. How strange it will seem to be leisurely chatting over a meal at a tony café by the very streets these destitute ancestors may once have passed on their way out of town for the last time.

Above: "On the Quays," 1888 charcoal on canvas by Irish artist, Frank O'Meara; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Waited ’Til the Last Moment

When taking a trip of a lifetime, everyone knows the planning starts in advance. Way in advance. For those of you following along here at A Family Tapestry, you know I’ve been at it diligently for quite some time. While I can say it’s been a push for the last several months, I’ve actually been aggregating records and notes and things-to-remember for years.

Now that I’ve come to the end of my research rope—at least the part that can handily be done from home—I thought it would be safe (to say nothing of prudent) to pull out all those old files and review those many notes.

One of the mental notes in that stash of to-do lists was to revisit the website of the Irish Family History Foundation. That has become the online presence of the parish church records, gravestone inscriptions, and even census records accumulated from each of the county genealogy centers throughout Ireland. Many of those records have been transcribed, and it is the transcriptions that are available for viewing—for a price—from the Foundation’s website.

I had known about this site for years. I can’t even remember how it was I first stumbled upon the site, but I can say it is vastly different now than it was then. At that point, anyone could freely make a search of the documents in their database and at least get a brief summary of the results found. Now, to access the material, the Foundation requires registration, which is at no cost, and once you find a potentially viable hit to your search parameters, payment up front before viewing even one record.

I remember, years ago, discussing with a fellow Tully researcher what we had found on the Foundation’s website. There were, as it turned out, several baptismal records on file in County Tipperary for children of one Denis Tully and wife Margaret Flannery. Working jointly, we had thought those records looked like potential keepers. I saved the emails exchanged with that other Tully researcher, intending to return and look into the records further. Some day.

Several months ago, once I began planning this Ireland research trip in earnest, I decided it would be just the time to review those records, and went back to retrace my research steps. I found that things had changed—mostly the requirement for registration and the pay-as-you-go fees—but I also found another disconcerting item: the terms of service.

Now, I am not an attorney, nor do I play one on TV, but it seemed to me the legal jargon in those terms of service was insinuating that the sharing of any portion of the website’s material in even as well-intentioned a manner as the fair-use concept familiar to academics of many disciplines was a grave violation of their rights. Not wanting to step on anyone’s digital toes, I decided not to register. Of course, that also meant I would not be saying—at least to my circle of genealogy friends—“Hey, check out this site; I heartily recommend it.”

Fast forward to this week. Suffice it to say I have reconsidered my self-defensive stance. I did go back and register to use the Foundation’s website. But not having the time to re-examine those myriad service restrictions, I won’t be free to tell you anything about what I found on their website.

Isn’t that just a killer?

If you feel as bound and gagged as I do, it’s understandable. Anyone writing for any academic journal would have had the liberty to at least quote a small portion of another researcher’s text, duly footnoted, and use it as a stepping stone upon which to bolster one’s own hypothesis. But apparently not here. Yes, they are certainly entitled to see their holdings as tokens of their national treasure. They are even well within their rights to charge for the privilege of gaining temporary access to those holdings. But to demand, in a researcher’s world, a vow of saying nothing violates the concept of fair use.

Because I already have other verification of the documentation I was seeking, I think I can safely say that, as for our Tully family in County Tipperary, I already knew all the pertinent details I was checking for confirmation. This was one of those cover-your-bases cases. You never know when something new will pop up and bust wide open those impossible brick wall roadblocks.

I guess, even in this wonderful age of free access to so much information—or, at least, reasonable charges for the organization and provision of accessibility and searchability—there are still some who are more vested in their own rights than in the service of a wider audience for the greater good.

 Above: "A Rest in Rotten Row," 1892 watercolor by Dublin-born Rose Maynard Barton; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Logistics

Yes, I know that is a term usually deployed by military personnel. It’s just that I’ve been seriously contemplating hotel reservations, train tickets and flight schedules for four different people. Oh, and class schedule for a fifth person. And maybe a guest.

You see, this research trip to Ireland has blossomed into a mini-family reunion of sorts. My husband and I are going to visit our daughter, who is currently attending school at University College Cork. His sisters are going to join us for one week of tromping around the west coast of the island. One sister’s husband may fly in for a weekend. And one new-found college friend may come along for the ride.

I used to be amused when, at the grocery store—now, doesn’t that strike you as a quaint term?—I would flip the package of whichever gourmet treat I was considering purchasing, and see, on the back label, that it was delivered to my local store expressly by the XYZ Logistics Company. How appetizing. Somehow, the art of delivery has moved from the realm of foodstuff to factory assembly.

If the supermarket can use the term, so can I. I am, after all, coordinating the travels of an itinerant foursome—sometimes five-some or maybe even more—who are, mostly, out to research the rural outreaches of western Ireland, all in the hopes of locating our ancestral roots.

The amount of time sucked out of daily life by online travel arrangements is exceeded only by the time it used to take to make such maneuvers via telephone. By mid-afternoon yesterday—after getting in our preparatory daily walk, as darling daughter insists, “You walk everywhere”—I had succeeded in securing one reservation. Yes, only one. At least it was for two days.

My great disappointment was in discovering that the one place where I had most hoped to stay—no surprise here, it was indeed a castle—has vanished from the face of the Internet. I cannot replicate the search which conjured up the dream destination. That, alone, ate up half a day last week. No more time to search for such oddities; if I don’t find something practical—and quickly—it will be the park bench for the bunch of us. I don’t think that will go over well with the in-laws.

On the transportation front, we are currently negotiating the use of a rental car, which the agency insists will fit five people. Right. Turns out, it is a Toyota Corolla. In my book, that was a fresh-out-of-college starter car. It will take a lot more walking before five of me can fit into one of those.

When it comes to road trips and rental cars, let us not discuss the fact that we shall be driving on that other side of the road.

And did I mention we will be doing that, driving a stick shift?

Moving on to luggage. It doesn’t help my case that we are traveling during a season in which the temperatures will be plummeting from their summer highs to a seasonally adjusted fifty to sixty degrees.

What? You say those are the same as the summertime temperatures?

Let’s just say the clothes I wear during our type of summer weigh a lot less than the ones I wear during our wintertime—which has just about the same temperatures we can expect to have, once we arrive in Ireland. And I can only pack fifty pounds of those winter togs. For three weeks. That, incidentally, will be after we include all the vital material omitted from the previous traveler’s exodus to Ireland.

There will be virtue, however, in packing light: we need to wrestle those bags out of the airport, into a bus, onto a train, and into a cab, before we can kick our feet up at our hard-won hotel room. Maybe instead of walking every day, we should have been lifting weights.

The light begins to dawn on me, somewhere in the midst of struggling with all these arrangements, that this might be why so many people prefer the turnkey offers of one-price-buys-all. Pay your money, get whisked to your destination, stay put for a week, return home. Easy.

But who am I kidding here? There’s no reason to gripe. After all, we’ll get to see our dear daughter, who has been away from home for ages two months. And we’ll get to join the hordes of “dewy-eyed Americans” (as comedian Pete McCarthy called them) seeking our roots in the farthest outposts of Ireland. Even if I can’t make all those schedules align just the way I want, I really couldn’t ask for more.

Above: "A Steady Drizzle," oil on canvas by County Limerick native, Norman Garstin; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

How to Meet a Fourth Cousin

With as much sniveling and whining as I do over not having any distant cousins flocking to my virtual door, you’d think I never have had such an opportunity. Truth be told, I have—well, of a sort. It’s just that, when pursuing long-lost relatives, I am invariably the one who is seeking the connections.

And yet, sometimes, it does happen. You may recall the trip to Chicago undertaken by my family over a year ago, in which my husband had the privilege of meeting up for lunch with not only his (known) cousins and a (known) second cousin but also with two third-cousins-once-removed. (Well, at least we presume they are; we have yet to find documentation fixing the relationship at that point, though we do have auxiliary confirmation.) We can thank none other than our reader “Iggy” for serving as digital matchmaker for that occasion, as he was the one who found himself providing my email address to the inquiring relative who had stumbled upon my blog post mentioning a known ancestor from her family.

Now, of course, I’m headed to Ireland in an attempt to push back the Tully family history yet one more generation. And the question nearly taunts me: will we be able to meet distant cousins over there?

After all, we’ve advanced in our track record from second to third cousin—once removed, even! Could it be possible to find any fourth cousins over there?

Since Denis Tully, immigrant from Ireland, is the connecting link for this family, I pause to ponder those numbers. Denis Tully was my husband’s second great-grandfather. Any descendants of his would lead to the level of third cousins for our generation. Of course, being that my husband was the baby of the (almost) baby of the family (et cetera), we end up meeting people who are, eventually, one generation removed from his—but still counting from the level of third cousin.

But what if we could push back the shroud of time yet another generation? That would yield, for a third great-grandfather, fourth cousins. Fourth cousins possibly living in Ireland right now.

My mind starts spinning at the numbers. I once met—online, of course; these things seldom happen in person—a ninth cousin in my own Taliaferro line. Fortunately, that is a line from Virginian colonial history that is well documented, so it was just a matter of counting on a descendancy chart. I had to come up with a way to keep the right numbers in the right columns.

Sketching these generations out on a spare napkin at a coffee shop may work for a casual meet-up with a second cousin, but add a few generations, and it can get messy. I thought it better to come up with a concise way to yield the proper (n)th cousin. Ready? The (n)th cousins have a common (n – 1) great-grandparent. So, fourth cousins would share a third great-grandparent. In our case, that would be Denis Tully’s parents, whoever they might be—or his wife Margaret Flannery Tully’s parents. And they would not be here in America. Not even back in Canada, where Denis arrived after his trans-Atlantic voyage. They would be in County Tipperary. In Ireland. Where I’ll be in two weeks.

The first task, of course, would be to locate that third great-grandparent. If I cannot find any documentation at the local level in Ballina, where the family originated in the early 1800s, I will have to hope for some great revelation when I get to Dublin. And from there, I could trace the lines of descent. After all, it wouldn’t do to just go door knocking along the River Shannon, asking, “Are you my fourth cousin?”

Once the names and dates are secured, it has never been more than a matter of spreading the word far and wide—wanted: descendant of So-and-So Tully, father of Denis Tully of Ballina, County Tipperary—to find some takers for the coveted position of fourth cousin. Post it in online genealogy forums, as I have for so many other family lines. Search for connections on the family finder devices on sites like Ancestry.com or head out to deeper, more generic waters and trawl the hits on Google. Take a DNA test, even—after all, we just connected with a distant cousin that way, though on the other side of the family. Stalk possible descendants on Facebook—even if it costs a lousy buck to send a private message. Wear a sandwich board—yes, believe it or not, I saw someone do that, here in my own city, last week—and walk down the main streets of Ballina.

However we do it—meet up over a cup of coffee, or over lunch, or even via phone or email—here’s hoping that, at least, we do it. It would be grand to meet a fourth cousin. Especially on the other side of the equation. “Across the pond,” as it is so often termed. However, wherever: Tully fourth cousin, we know you are out there.

 Above: Ireland-born Samuel McCloy's "A Fisherman's Children," an 1881 pencil and watercolor; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.