This is what occupied most of my dad's free time for the last several years of his life. The family genealogy project. I had promised myself that I would finish this for him.
He had amassed all kinds of information, most of it from his mother's side of the family. On his father's side, his great-grandfather Daniel Harrington arrived from Ireland around 1840 when he was about 6 years old.
Research into any history prior to that was hampered by a fateful turn of events. In 1916, the Irish government ordered all churches in the country to submit all birth, marriage and death records to the Public Record Office of Ireland for safekeeping.
During the Irish Civil War in 1922, the Records Office was destroyed in a fire. A thousand years of family histories, land records, court documents...all lost. I think that's when they coined the phrase "Luck O' The Irish".
At any rate, dad has done a lot of research, obviously. I've seen bits of pieces of it before, but I now have all of it in here with me. I'm trying to read through an envelope a night, to get a sense of what's here. I hope I can start putting some of it together to share with relatives later this year.
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I saw a couple family bibles when I was helping my parents move this weekend, so I'm hoping those make their way to my place, or at least that my dad lends them to me to copy information down.
My great great grandfather was Welsh, and had a VERY common name, so I've been unable to track him at all. The rest of the family, I can get back to the 1850s, and then I start to stall out again.
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