Presented by Mary Kircher Roddy, CG on 16 May 2024.
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It’s hard to do genealogy well without studying your ancestors’ Friends & Family, Associates, and Neighbors - their FAN club. If your ancestors are Irish, you might have no luck at all without those FAN principles. But if you combine FAN club research with DNA, you might have just the winning ticket to get you back to your Irish ancestor’s origins. In this case study presentation, learn how focused research pointed the way from Ohio to townlands in County Mayo for an 1850s era Irish immigrant.
Mary Kircher Roddy, CG®, grew up in San Rafael, California. She earned a Bachelor's degree in Liberal Studies from The University of California, Riverside in 1982 and a Master's in Professional Accounting from the University of Texas in 1984. She earned a certificate in Genealogy and Family History at the University of Washington in 2005. She was credentialed by the Board for Certification of Genealogists® in 2019.* She is a trustee of the Board for Certification of Genealogists and is a former treasurer for the Association of Professional Genealogists. She is co-editor of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.
Mary became interested in genealogy in 2000 in anticipation of a sabbatical in Ireland where her husband was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Limerick. She was sure she would complete all her Irish genealogy while her husband taught at UL and her children attended Monaleen school. Two decades later, the genealogy is still a work in progress. But the trip to Ireland awakened something deep in her Celtic bloodlines, the Irish tradition of the Seanachi, the storytellers and historians of yore.