Claire Bradley is a Dublin-based genetic genealogist specialising in ancestry from Ireland
Ancestry has released a new ethnicity feature which separates your DNA by parent. I’ve just looked at mine and, well, it’s not what I expected. So what is surprising me is that I have known Scottish and Welsh ancestry on my mother’s side, and no known from either on my father’s side, which due to…
For International Women’s Day 2022, I’ve written up the life of Annie Mahony, one of my great-great grandmothers. Sadly, I don’t have a photograph of her, but she had at least 186 descendants. I’m hoping to share this amongst as many of them living as I can find & perhaps someone will have one that…
The Presidents’ Letters by Flor MacCarthy is a work of history, social history, a history of letter writing in Ireland and an all-round excellent read. It’s a book you dip into rather than read straight through. The premise is simple, she found that no one had ever collated a book of letters written to or…
Following two separate conversations this week, I present a bit of fun.
Despite climate change’s best efforts, the evenings are beginning to draw in.Many people will not be aware that Hallowe’en has its origins in Ireland. It’s changed quite a bit since I was a child in the 1980s but some facets still remain the same. Back then, we dressed up and went to our neighbours’ doors…
UNESCO designates 8th September every year as International Literacy Day. It promotes the importance of literacy as a human right. Who among us doesn’t love getting caught up in a great novel? In this modern world, very few activities still require your full attention, we’re always on our phones or something, but reading is still…
This week I’m discussing how to break down a DNA match who has not responded to your messages. I had great success with this technique on a DNA match on MyHeritage recently. If you haven’t already taken a test with them or uploaded your results from another database to My Heritage, then it is worth your while.…
As we approach a second St Patrick’s day still beset by a terrible pandemic, albeit with light on the horizon, I wanted to focus on a collection of records that are relevant for our large diaspora. 80 million people around the world claim Irish heritage and half of that number are in the USA. I’ve…
This year, to mark International Women’s Day, I’ve created this graphic celebrating my four great-grandmothers.
As part of work for my MA in the History of the Family, I had to contribute a piece of original research to a collaborative public history project called Ports: Past & Present. I wrote about the effect of the sinking of the RMS Leinster on the community of Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire). Note: the…