I attended a couple of their annual Jamboree seminars that they broadcast live last year, and they were excellent, so I'm very excited about the upcoming series. I've been plodding away at the history of my family for many decades, now. A huge breakthrough was made last March when I finally found the townland of my Irish ancestors on my mother's side. I'd only been looking for it for forty years.
It wasn't until recently when records like US Passport Applications were put online by ancestry.com that it was possible to find the information I'd been looking for. My great-grandmother and her sister (and all my other ancestors, for that matter) had arrived in the US long before the Ellis Island immigration center existed, so I'd never bothered searching the Ellis Island records. Then, one day just on a lark because I couldn't think of anywhere else to look, I searched for their married names on the Ellis Island site and was dumbstruck to find them both on a ship returning to the US from Ireland in 1920. That lead to a search of US passport applications, and one of their applications listed the name of the town! They'd made a return trip to Ireland to visit their mother before her death, something unknown by me or my mother until finding the information on their US passport applications.
Now to find my father's Irish ancestors' townland. One of the webinars is titled "Irish-American Catholic Genealogy", which is right in line with my Irish ancestors. I can't wait! Are any of you researching your family? Had any big finds lately? Once I find my father's side, I want to do an ancestry needlework piece of some sort, using image transfer to fabric, and embroidery for names and dates. The idea hasn't fully jelled yet, but I'm hopeful it will over this coming year of sewing and genealogy.
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