Contagious Genealogy: A Pandemic

In November 2020, I began intensively researching one of my maternal Irish lines, the O’Keeffes. I wanted to learn more about the direct impact the potato famine of 1847 had on my family. During my studies, I made some incredible discoveries practically all in one night, one after another, that you can read through here -- Potato Famine: The Great Hunger That Forced My Irish Ancestors to Flee to America . A few months later in May 2021, I followed up with this writeup on a grandson of my immigrant family -- William Thomas Murphy . This breakthrough helped me expand the search on the O’Keeffes here in the United States. But now, it’s about time I head to ground zero for this family, or at least ground zero-adjacent. I have a research trip planned in the fall of 2023 to Ireland that will be entirely focused on the O’Keeffe branch of my ancestral tree. I’ll be diving deep into record groups held by all the major repositories in Dublin. Kira D. Foltz, Dublin, Ireland, September 2019. This ...

  MAY 02, 2021 As far as I know, there is only one ancestor in my direct line that has had a major run-in with the law, and it was quite a shameful event, so I’d rather focus on my 2nd great granduncle’s brush with the prison system. Week 18: Crime and Punishment The eldest son of my 3rd great grandmother, Margaret (O’Keeffe) Boyce was first only known to me as William T. Boyce. Other than being aware that he was born circa 1864 by the 1870 and 1880 US censuses that he appeared on, I didn’t really have any other info on him. It wasn’t until this past year that I took note of the fact that William was born several years prior to any of his siblings, and more importantly, even though he held the Boyce surname on the censuses, his birthdate appeared to have fallen previous to his parents’ marriage date in 1868. I knew his mother, Margaret, had been married once before to a papermaker in Wheeling, West Virginia. Originally, I believed her 1st marriage to have ended quickly and before a...

  NOVEMBER 15, 2020 When blight struck the Ireland countryside’s crop between 1845 and 1852, families that were deeply affected and starving, scrambled to survive and find ways to protect their loved ones. Many felt compelled to leave their homeland behind and emigrate to the States and elsewhere. One such family included my KEEFFE ancestors, hailing from Lismonihis, County Cork. John Gregory Crace, oldest known photo of an Irish potato famine survivor, 1853, County Waterford, Ireland; The Sexton Collection, The Irish Potato Famine exhibition; Kathy Armstrong, “Who is the Irish man in this rare 164-year-old photo?,” Independent.ie ( https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/who-is-the-irish-man-in-this-rare-164-year-old-photo-35691822.html : accessed 15 Nov 2020). Unfortunately I have not yet uncovered any photos of my Irish emigrant ancestors, nor do I expect to, as photography was quite expensive and still rather new during that period of history. However, I have stumbled acro...