Claire Bradley is a Dublin-based genetic genealogist specialising in ancestry from Ireland
In my DNA work, I often need to trace living members of families to ask them to take target tests. So when Cheri Hudson Passey’s new book Genealogy in Reverse: Finding the Living, A practical guide for all genealogists appeared in my letterbox, I was interested. Genealogical Publishing sent me this book for free and…
When you work in a rapidly developing field like genetic genealogy, books go out of date. This book was originally published in 2019 and I read & reviewed it then. A new edition has been published this year and it is substantially meatier than its progenitor. The same group of authors worked on the revised…
One of the areas that Rootstech could improve on is more books. I love buying books about my work and I’m always trying to build my reference library further. This year saw the release of a new book written by Michael S. Ramage & Catherine Becker Wiest Desmarais (amongst others) and published by the National…
As a young genealogist, Megan Smolenyak was one of the first “famous” genealogists I ever heard of. She was involved with the discovery of former US President Barack Obama’s Irish ancestry (now commemorated in that most Irish of ways by a motorway service station!) and the discovery of the real identity of Annie Moore, the…
As a European, the concept of a lineage society was only vaguely familiar to me, so I was surprised when Genealogical sent me a free copy of The Complete Guide to Lineage Societies by Kimberly Ormsby Nagy for review purposes. I remember an episode of the Golden Girls where Blanche has to hide a Jewish…
The moment I saw that Robert Estes had written a new book on Family Tree DNA, I knew I wanted to read it. So I was particularly delighted that Genealogical gave me a review copy for free. Roberta Estes is a well-known DNA blogger. I’ve actually met her briefly a couple of times but I’ve…
I often review serious history and genealogy books on my blog but this is a little bit different. Did you know there’s a whole fiction genre that involves genealogy? This post features 3 different writers & I’ve read most of their books. The pattern with most of these books is a two-stranded narrative. One part…
Inside Grangegorman is a history of Grangegorman Mental Hospital in Dublin, which was also known as the Richmond Lunatic Asylum and St Brendan’s over the time it existed. It’s written by a mental health care professional, Professor Brendan Kelly. While telling the history of the institution, he weaves through case studies of patients, anonymising their…
The second part of my report from Rootstech 2024 highlights an interesting panel session, which you can watch online, featuring some of the movers and shakers of the genetic genealogy world. They discussed the origins of the field and how it has progressed in the first quarter century. It’s a lovely summary of “so far”.…
If you’ve lived in Ireland in the past 25 years, you can hardly be unaware of various historical scandals that rocked the country. These included, but were not limited to, industrial school abuse, Magdalene laundries, Mother and Baby homes and illegal adoptions. A couple of years ago, I helped a man called Denis O Sullivan,…