I AM A GENEEK

Last week I mentioned  my current project of entering information
on my Ellingwood line onto my Ancestry.com family tree. I use my
late cousin Florence O'Connor's book"The Ancestors and 
Descendants of Asa Freeman Ellingwood and Florilla(Dunham)
Ellingwood" as my guide and then find the sources and add the
citation to my tree. It's become almost an obsession now to get all
the names of the deceased Ellingwoods posted. The trouble is,
there's so darn MANY of them.

To give you an idea, my great grandmother Clara Ellingwood was
one of Asa and Florilla's eleven children, who went on to have a
total of fifty five children by my count so far. And then those
children went out and in turn produced more Ellingwoods. So
I've been doing a lot of adding of names.( My admiration for
Florence O'Connor has increased when I think of how she did all
this research without the use of computers.)

In fact, the women who married my male West ancestors all came
from large families. Arvilla Ames was one of thirteen children.
Louisa Richardson was one of nine. It seems a good many of my
ancestors took the Biblical instruction to "be fruitful and multiply"
quite seriously, and I couldn't be happier about it. There's enough
people and material in my genealogy to keep me busy for years
in both blogging and researching.

Which leads to my title. There are geeks and now "gleeks". And  
so since I am a geneablogger, I guess I'm also  a "geneek"!

MY KEYS TO IRELAND

As frequent readers of this blog know, I've been very fortunate in
researching my father's side of the family. Even though I have a
brickwall in my 3x great-grandfather John Cutter West, I've found
a great deal of information on the families of the women who've
married into the West line. It's in my mother's Irish-American line
that I have found very little about the family. Family tradition
says her mother's family came from Roscommon but beyond that
I know very little.


I know the key here has to be my Mom's grandfathers, Edward J.
White and John McFarland. I have copies of the Federal Census
pages they appear on from 1900 through 1930 which lists their
occupations and both had worked for the City of Boston at different
times. Edward's Irish nationality is in question for me at the moment
since his father's place of birth is listed as Boston on one census but
Ireland on the others. My hope is that there are city employment
records for that period and that if Edward and John are on them, there
might be information on their place of birth and their parents names. I
need to find out where such records might be archived.


A second possible source of information might be the records of the
entity that constructed the Boston elevated railway in the late 1900's.
Family tradition says John McFarland was one of the laborers. Does
the present day Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority have
any records on those first employees?


I hope to get into Boston to the main branch public library to search
for both John and Edward's obituaries. And now that the Archdiocese
of Boston's Archives have reopened, I need to go about calling for an
appointment to search for any church records on John and Edward's
family that they might have.

So there are my keys. Hopefully I'll be able to find them and open the
door to my Irish families.

Written for the 11th Edition of the Carnival of Irish Heritage and Culture.

THE THIRD CARNIVAL OF IRISH GENEALOGY IS OUT!

The Third Carnival of Irish Genealogy is out and I spent some
time reading it at Lisa’s Small-Leaved Shamrock as I had my
toast and coffee It’s the first time I’ve contributed to it
and I hope I’ll have more for it in the future especially if I
make some progress in tracing my Irish roots.

It’s also been a good morning of reading great posts from my
fellow genealogy bloggers on the “dinner with four ancestors”
topic for Jasia’s next CoG and on floats for the forthcoming
Genealogists’ Parade. You all not only are fun to read but you
also display a lot of creativity! I’m especially impressed by all
the mentions of flutaphones. It seems we all got in touch with
our inner flutaphonist.


Or is that flautaphonist?


Two corrections on the 49 Genealogy Uses for a Flutaphone list:

Schelly’s float has broccoli sprouts, not cauliflower heads,
sitting in flutaphone holders. Sorry, Schelly!

And I forgot that #29 was using a flutaphone as the parade
baton. So that is now #34:

#33 Genealogy CD holder. Crazy glue a flutaphone firmly to
the top of your computer desk (vertically so the mouth piece
is at the top). The open center of your genealogy CDs should
fit over the mouthpiece with some room to spare). -Janice

#34 - Baton- What could be more appropriate to use when
you're leading the Genealogist’s Parade?

I’ve gotten great entries into the Parade, but if you haven’t
sent yours in yet, you still have until midnight Feb 3rd to
submit one!