The class on May 21^st was a gem. Our speaker, Debra Dudek, gave us more than our money’s worth of ideas to find Irish records in “unusual places.” The big take-away for me was to step away from the routine of the big databases and go to sites where you can find emigration, alternative military info, naturalization records, fraternal organizations and even prison info. She gave us a lot of valuable locations to look in and then a quick case study of what going to some of these lesser used sites might result in as we dig, analyze and tell the story of our ancestors.

I don’t know about you, but I am not great about going to these other locations. Sometimes I just don’t know the sites to go to (she solved some of that) and sometimes it is just easier to connect to the sites that are part of my routine. Whether you use ancestry.com, Family Search or another large database, they become habits. I don’t think she was trying to tell us to eliminate those but rather to not use them exclusively and to maybe use the “unusual” places a greater percentage of the time. That is at least what I took away from the class.

What does that mean for me? I think my next steps are to use some of her ideas to continue to dig here at home. I have quite a bit, I believe, to still find before I can go on to some of the sites she suggested such as RootsIreland.ie. I did get 2 of the books she recommended, Irish Immigration to America by Szabados and Finding Your Irish Ancestors in New York City by Buggy. I can tell you the second one needs a magnifying glass. The type is very small but I will manage.

I was able to confirm several generations on one of my maternal 4x GG side and get it to England and France by using the WikiTree site. I Googled the name and the WikiTree site came up and had a lot of info that someone had put on and confirmed. Remember, you must identify sources on this site to confirm. When I confirmed with sources, to meet up with that ancestor, it linked my info with the existing info and confirmed what I had thought was the path before. Now I will look at other sites to see if I can find those original documents in church records and military records and land records.

The next class on Social History can also help by explaining moves and if whole communities moved together to various location in America or as our speaker stated, perhaps they went from England to Canada or Germany or France to England to Canada before they ended up in Virginia or Ohio or Pennsylvania or where ever they made their first American home.

I am off to read about Irish Immigration to America now, have a latte, bake a cake for my grandson’s 2^nd birthday, and pet the dog, her “gotcha day” is the 1st. Busy week.

See you at the next class.

Heidi Geise, education@hqrl.com