A good start to the New Year

As predicted at the end of last year, it wasn’t too long before I returned to doing research into my family’s history, and the New Year brought a flurry of activity, much of it done in a short time. I cannot do the full story justice in this post, but I’ll at least hit the highlights.

Perhaps the most exciting moment was being contacted here through the blog by a distant cousin living in Dublin, Ireland, who has been very generous with his time and has helped to fill in some details of the family tree. I have to say that it feels like one of the great goals of family research has been accomplished, namely, making contact with living relatives still living in the country of your family’s origin.

The next exciting thing has been the unearthing of an entire group of ancestors living in Newton, Massachusetts that I had no idea existed. I had one of those classic research moments when you realize that names of persons in records you have already viewed once were in fact members of your family tree, only you didn’t know it the first time around.  I hope to be able to tell this story a little more fully in a future post.

And lastly, I have been pushing to try to determine where exactly in County Laois the Conroy family is from, and I think I have narrowed down the possibilities, thanks to the help of Griffith’s Valuation, which was a landowner survey conducted in Ireland between 1847 and 1864. It is hard to know for sure if I have found my actual ancestors listed in the index without consulting the “house” books held in the National Archives, or perhaps commissioning the actual Valuation Office to research it. However, I think I am on the right track, and hopefully I will be able to figure this out for sure sometime soon.

More coming soon…!

A quick look into what I've been up to... it's complicated!

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