An Irish Research Case Study

John Tully gets to be on stage this Thursday, a Saint Patrick's Day feature at our local genealogical society. If you've been reading along at A Family Tapestry since before our family's trip to Ireland in 2014, you may remember our chase to locate the origins of my husband's great grandfather, John Tully.

That trip to Ireland may have seemed like the ideal research tour, but it wasn't the dash through the countryside which yielded the rich detail about my husband's ancestry. It was the preceding several months' preparation before even heading out the door. And this Thursday, together with my daughter—besides being a society member, an anthropologist-in-training who has had her fair share of researching in Ireland as well as struggling with apparently non-existent Canadian passenger records of the era—we will unfold the case study of finding John Tully's roots in Ireland.

Though the thrill of getting to share this story with others is keen, it does come coupled with the drudgery of details about the process of presentation. That's where you find the long hours, those invisible efforts expended that nobody knows about, except when they weren't attended to in the first place. While the last of those are getting all my attention, work on new research and new posts slows to a crawl.

Oh, how I sometimes wish for the cat's proverbial nine lives to get all the work done on the many projects bubbling in my mind. John Hogue and Marshall Jackson, your story will have to wait for another day, as will the Florida pioneer memories of my grandmother's Aunt Fannie and the ever-unfurling DNA trail leading back to my mystery DNA cousin.

This week is designated to be John Tully's week. And I'm glad to be able to introduce him in another new venue. After all, isn't it about sharing those stories of our ancestors? And here we go, all over again.

Above: Photograph of John Tully, born 1842 in County Tipperary, Ireland and died 1907 in Chicago, Illinois; from private family collection.