Claire Bradley is a Dublin-based genetic genealogist specialising in ancestry from Ireland
As a genealogist, the satisfaction of a job well done is usually rewarded by a nice thank email or letter. People will then go on to share the findings with their wider family. It’s not often though that the genealogist gets invited to the family gathering, but that’s what happened to me today. I met…
Tracing your Ancestors using DNA: a guide for Family Historians is published by Pen & Sword and edited by Graham S. Holton, with contributions from John Cleary, Michelle Leonard, Iain McDonald & Alasdair F. MacDonald. Having previously read Blaine Bettinger’s book on the same subject as a beginner a few years ago, I was ready…
We all would love to log on to one of the big commercial sites and find that someone else had already been working on our family tree. The work would be done and we could just enjoy what was found. BUT…the discerning family historian should be certain that the information on this other tree is…
Inspired by my friend Dara’s similar post, I thought I’d take a look at family size in some generations of my family. I’ve gone for 3 generations, as before that, I can’t be certain I know all the siblings in each family. I also took a look at the infant mortality. In my parents’ generation,…
This is my great-grandfather, Peter Reilly. He died when my grandmother was just a young girl and we didn’t know much about him. She always said he came from Cork but on the 1911 Census, his birth place said Dublin. Reilly is a very common surname* and I hadn’t any luck finding a birth cert…
If, like me, you’ve embraced genetic genealogy as a valid way to advance your family tree, then you may have found that one side of your tree has yielded a lot more matches than the other. This is certainly true for my maternal lines versus my paternal lines. In this post, I take a look…
I’d been aware for some time that the parents of my ancestor James Lawless (1857-1920) were called Thomas and Bridget but didn’t know much about them or her birth surname. When James married in 1876, the church just recorded his parents as Thomas and Bridget Lawless. By playing around with records* a few years ago,…
Politics and genealogy don’t often collide but the advent of Brexit, now apparently only 3 weeks away, has led a lot of British people to explore their ancestry as a means to retain EU citizenship. If you’re one of the alleged 1 in 4 British people with Irish ancestry, you may be able to obtain…
There’s been a lot of negative press recently about DNA testing and at least some of it is ill-informed. Personally, I don’t feel it’s any more “dangerous” than posting on Facebook or any other social media. The value for me far outweighs the risk. Just look at this family mystery I solved with the help…
William George Kent is, to the best of my knowledge, the only member of my extended family to die in World War I, though many others, closer to me, fought and lived. He was my first cousin three times removed, or to put it another way, he was my maternal great-grandfather, Frederick Walters’ first cousin.…