Zero to Dream Job in 90 Days!
Day # 21 Inishbofin Cousins
My father loved Ireland and everything about it. Part of his family came over during the famine and put down roots in the Boston area. There were lots of oral stories, but as in many families who emigrated to the US in the 1800s, they didn’t keep many documents from their country of origin. Life was tough, and if they made it over here, they wanted to look forward and begin anew.
My father researched in Boston and in Ireland for birth certificates and names of towns from where they came from, but the US records only contained “Ireland” and the records in Ireland had mostly been destroyed. He also researched my mother’s side for her Irish roots and through family oral history there was a bit more on that side, including the name of a town, Ardnagreevagh. There were also rumors of some of them coming “in from the Island of Inishbofin”, off the coast of Connemara in County Galway.
After my father passed away, I had looked at the piles of research he had done and thought that one day I will finish this work he had started. The pandemic gave me the chance to do just that! I joined Ancestry.com and began putting the information I had in a family tree. You have to be a very good researcher to grow your tree as they give you all sorts of hints of who your great grandfather might be, but then you must figure out the puzzle of matching birth dates, brothers and sisters etc. I thought that it could be a rewarding job, helping people find their family trees. It is so exciting when the information matches up and you know you are headed in the right direction!
One day I found another folder of papers I hadn’t remembered seeing and I also found an old cassette tape recording of my grandmother and her sisters talking at Christmas time about the old days. It was priceless to listen to Celia, Irene and Mary talking and laughing all at once, still with an Irish lilt in their voices, all these years later. As I pieced the information together and found a birth certificate of my great great grandfather, I cross referenced it on Ancestry and he indeed was born and died on Inishbofin! There I found the birth certificates (little yellowed pieces of thin paper with names and dates handwritten), which showed that his son, my grandfather and his brothers and sisters, all were born on the tiny island and must have “come in” to sail away to America together. I also found my third great grandfather, who lived and died there as well. Then the information just stopped.
Tomorrow I meet with some cousins from that part of the family and I’m going to share some books I bought about the island with them. I’m bringing some of the scraps of paper I have information on, to see if together we can get the names and places of these people right. It is an honor to those ancestors who braved coming to an unseen place and leaving their homeland behind, knowing they probably would never go back. It’s also an honor to my father who so valiantly tracked down some of his heritage but never got to see it completed.
Tomorrow I will expand on my own time in Ireland and Packy Coyne, the road next to the sea and the stop watch!
69 Days to go!
