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Ode to a great-great grandmother

For lots of our ancestors, we don’t know what they look like, or what they liked to read or eat. We can look them up in records and gain some information. One of my great-great grandmothers was called Anne Rourke (though her surname is variably spelled in different records). She was born during the Great…

New heights

While I’m working away on other people’s genealogy, I always try to do a bit on my own. As of today, I have 3053 people in my family tree. These are people who can be proven to be related to me, either by records (the vast majority) or DNA with records to back it up.…

Ancestry Hints – how to use them

If you’re a user of Ancestry, and you have a tree attached to your account or DNA results, then you’re familiar with this little leaf which appears to give you hints. These suggestions come in 2 forms. This blog discusses how to know when to accept or ignore them. It can be very exciting when…

Leap day thoughts

I often find it happens in genealogy that I’m researching someone and discover that it is their birthday or death anniversary on the very day I’m looking them up. Earlier this week, I was adding a distant cousin to my tree, newly discovered, but then found that it was the second anniversary of her death.…

Sponsoring DNA tests

Having read this post on the success of sponsoring DNA tests to break down genealogical brick walls, it is time to sponsor some of my own. Readers of my blog will be aware of my Ure One-Name Study, which seeks to trace all Irish Ures and see how they link to my own. I’ve taken…

Family size

Inspired by my friend Dara’s similar post, I thought I’d take a look at family size in some generations of my family. I’ve gone for 3 generations, as before that, I can’t be certain I know all the siblings in each family. I also took a look at the infant mortality. In my parents’ generation,…

The Rotunda Strikes Again!

This is my great-grandfather, Peter Reilly. He died when my grandmother was just a young girl and we didn’t know much about him. She always said he came from Cork but on the 1911 Census, his birth place said Dublin. Reilly is a very common surname* and I hadn’t any luck finding a birth cert…

Lopsided Matches?

If, like me, you’ve embraced genetic genealogy as a valid way to advance your family tree, then you may have found that one side of your tree has yielded a lot more matches than the other. This is certainly true for my maternal lines versus my paternal lines. In this post, I take a look…