Research

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The research I was able to do for this project was somewhat limited from my home in Colorado. I originally created an account on Ancestry.com and went down the logical path of: “What’s my name? What’s my father’s name? What was his mother’s name? What was her mother’s name?” and adding each individual family member to my “family tree” on the website. In theory, it made sense. In practice, however, it was a total disaster.

It was frustrating to find that each time I added a family member to the tree, I would have to fill in a lot of blanks, most of which I didn’t have answers to. For example, in order to identify a real historical person, you have to have more information than just names. At a minimum, you generally need the following information to start with:

  • full name (first, middle, maiden, last)
  • birth date
  • birth location (city, state, country)
  • death date
  • death location (city, state, country)

This doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but in my case, I had almost none of these things for all my Irish family members. Now, Ancestry.com has a workaround for this: “suggestions.” After you add in as much info as you can find, it will search its database of other family trees created in the past by other members, and make suggestions based on what’s been added in the past. Herein lies the fatal flaw of a building a family tree in Ancestry.com: a lot of the suggestions are simply wrong. Not wrong because people are maliciously trying to add bad data to the system, but because they are working with limited information, so they add in what they think they know, and Ancestry.com tries to suggest that I add that to my family tree.

I did this initially, but then found out that almost all the data I had was bad. I had inaccurate birth locations, birth dates that were off by several years, and even people from other unrelated families in my tree because they had the same name.

So what is someone to do if they want to actually map out an accurate family tree? There’s good news and bad news for this. The good news is that if you dig deeper to find actual verifiable data for your family members, you can create an accurate family tree. The bad news is that this takes time… an unbelievable amount of time.

In my own case, I got frustrated and nearly gave up. After a few weeks, I found a resource called “Irish Network Colorado” which had a list of members, and on that list, I found a professional genealogist with experience researching Irish ancestry. I contacted him, and decided to hire him to help me in my search. The first thing he did was essentially ask me to delete the family tree and start over. I did. From there, we slowly started to rebuild it, with a lot more data from a multitude of sources this time.

In order to get the information needed to verify each family member, we looked for the following types of information:

  • marriage records (from both civil and church sources)
  • church birth records
  • baptism records
  • obituaries
  • newspaper archives
  • military draft records
  • pictures graves/headstones
  • social security index records
  • immigration records via shipping manifests

Only with these new sources could we then start to get a better picture of who is actually in my family and who isn’t. With this info in hand, we were able to confirm details, answer questions, and help determine which pieces of the puzzle were still missing.

Even after all of that, I decided I needed to take a trip to Pennsylvania to do some primary research by finding historical locations or artifacts that would help me verify some suspicions. For example, I had a few photos of headstones that other people had taken and posted to the Find a Grave website, but there were also mentions of family members buried at certain cemeteries without any pictures, so I had no proof.

Resources/Bibliography

For this project, I used a variety of sources, including the following:

Videos:

Books:

Websites:

Professional Consultants:

Visual Timeline of My Family

In order to help visualize the lives of my various family members, I created a Gantt chart of my direct forbears below. This shows their year of birth, year of death, lifespan, and how they match up with each other. The only exception is the first one on the list: Owen Grady. I’m fairly confident of his birth year (1810) and his birth location (Ireland, perhaps County Sligo), but I have no date of death for him, so he doesn’t appear on the chart except as a line.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to pinpoint the exact date that any of them came to America, so I can’t really tie it to particular dates such as the Irish Potato Famine or the War of Independence. Perhaps with more time, I can modify this chart later once I have that data.