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Forensic Genealogy

One of the areas that Rootstech could improve on is more books. I love buying books about my work and I’m always trying to build my reference library further. This year saw the release of a new book written by Michael S. Ramage & Catherine Becker Wiest Desmarais (amongst others) and published by the National…

The Quest for Annie Moore

As a young genealogist, Megan Smolenyak was one of the first “famous” genealogists I ever heard of. She was involved with the discovery of former US President Barack Obama’s Irish ancestry (now commemorated in that most Irish of ways by a motorway service station!) and the discovery of the real identity of Annie Moore, the…

Lineage Societies

As a European, the concept of a lineage society was only vaguely familiar to me, so I was surprised when Genealogical sent me a free copy of The Complete Guide to Lineage Societies by Kimberly Ormsby Nagy for review purposes. I remember an episode of the Golden Girls where Blanche has to hide a Jewish…

Genealogical Mysteries

I often review serious history and genealogy books on my blog but this is a little bit different. Did you know there’s a whole fiction genre that involves genealogy? This post features 3 different writers & I’ve read most of their books. The pattern with most of these books is a two-stranded narrative. One part…

Inside Grangegorman

Inside Grangegorman is a history of Grangegorman Mental Hospital in Dublin, which was also known as the Richmond Lunatic Asylum and St Brendan’s over the time it existed. It’s written by a mental health care professional, Professor Brendan Kelly. While telling the history of the institution, he weaves through case studies of patients, anonymising their…

Illegal adoptions

If you’ve lived in Ireland in the past 25 years, you can hardly be unaware of various historical scandals that rocked the country. These included, but were not limited to, industrial school abuse, Magdalene laundries, Mother and Baby homes and illegal adoptions. A couple of years ago, I helped a man called Denis O Sullivan,…