Intended AudienceTrade
SynopsisOur Joyce & O'Brien Ancestors documents the processes of identifying and locating Irish ancestors and building valid family trees. Using DNA match results, help from Irish genealogical and Facebook group members, church and civil records, family stories, and a Genealogical Proof Argument, the author confirmed her paternal grandmother's identity, family, and location. Mary (Joyce) Kelly (1872/73-1918), and Mary's parents, were born in Loughaconeera, a small fishing and farming townland on the south coast of County Galway near the Rosmuc Penninsula. The Joyce & O'Brien Family History also includes an extensive social history, with records, data, maps, photographs, and stories describing our ancestors' lives and the environment in which they lived. This publication can serve as a template to build and validate your own family trees and to research, write, and disseminate your own family histories. Joyce V. Kelly, Ph.D., researched and wrote Family Histories for her four grandparents after she retired from the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she conducted health services research for nearly thirty years. She is a second generation American on her father's side with both paternal grandparents emigrating from Ireland to California during the late 1880s. The author's maternal grandfather was born in the United States, but his grandparents emigrated from County Donegal, Ireland. Ancestors of her maternal grandmother were from England and Germany. Joyce and her husband live in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington DC. They have visited Ireland twice to research her Irish ancestors, meet distant cousins, and visit ancestral farms and cottages in Counties Galway and Roscommon.