After six years and countless hours of research, I finally found the county in Ireland from which my maternal grandfather’s family originated.
It’s hard to explain why this particular branch of the family was so intriguing to me. Maybe it was because I found pictures of them on Ancestry.com going back five generations. Or perhaps it was tied into my ongoing journey of self-discovery and personal growth. Maybe it was all the detective work that I found so fascinating. After all, I was after a story, and at the end of the day, isn’t that what life is? One giant, interconnected story that binds us all together in some way?
So, why was this information so hard to nail down? Why did it take six years to finally get the answer I was looking for? Irish ancestry is notoriously difficult for several reasons:
Birth, death, and Catholic marriage records do not exist prior to 1864 in Ireland.
Almost every census record up until the 1900s had been destroyed.
Both my immigrant ancestors (3X great-grandparents) passed away before death records were required in my state, so finding their parents' names/birthplaces on those documents was, unfortunately, impossible.
There's lots more, but this is getting lengthy. I just felt like every road I went down, I seemed to hit a brick wall. I had exhausted every avenue possible and was *thisclose* to giving up. I had been looking for far too long and wasn't getting any closer to the answer. I finally had to face the reality that the reason I wasn't finding the information wasn't because I hadn't looked in the right places—it was because the records simply didn't exist. I couldn't locate a paper trail, because there was no paper trail to be found.
And I guess this is where the luck of the Irish came in.
In January, I received a message from someone who seemed to have names in his family tree that I recognized from generations back. At first, he didn't think he could help me because he didn't recognize the names I sent from my tree. But luckily, he offered up the only information he had about his direct ancestors, and that was the moment I had been waiting for since 2018.
As it turned out, his grandfather was my 3X great-grandparents’ son. It was as close to firsthand knowledge as you could possibly get in 2024.
He told me that our branch of the family came to the US in the 1840s from County Fermanagh. Based on other research I had done, I thought it might be County Donegal. Turns out, it's the next county over.
I don't know if I'll ever get any further than that (town, parish, etc.) but I am absolutely thrilled to have finally found the answer to this question.
Now, all that's left to do is keep saving for a trip!
*With great respect for the island’s history, County Fermanagh is located in what is now Northern Ireland, UK.
**This post is not sponsored by Ancestry. But also…my DMs are open. :)
📷Alamy
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