I had a great start in my family history research, thanks to my mother, who wrote up what she remembered about my four grandparents and had been told about their parents when I was in high school in the 60s-her Farrelly mother from County Cavan, Kerrigan father from Clare, dad's Lohan mother from Galway and Lally father from Mayo. All emigrated in the 1890s, married and raised their families in Chicago. The summer I was in graduate school, some friends and I hitchhiked around Europe, including one week in Ireland, where I met some of my Cavan relatives and they showed me the house my grandmother had grown up in. I was hooked!

By that time my dad had died, but I got a job and took Mom back with me two years later, in 1971, and we visited Cavan again, as well as the birthplaces of my grandfathers. Highlights of that trip were the schoolteacher in Cavan who showed us school records (including a note that my grandmother talked too much in class), the old man in Clare who was a young boy when Grandpa left but remembered what a fine hurler he was, and the old lady in Mayo whose father-in-law had spoken of what a good provider my greatgrandfather, a blacksmith, was.

The one gap was my father's mother from Galway, about whom I knew only her parents' names and her birthdate.  However, that was enough to track her down on my next trip, with my husband, in 1992. I'd mentioned her to a lady at the Cavan Heritage Center and she told me the part of Galway she'd likely come from, based on her parents' names. Back in Dublin I searched the civil birth records and found her birth and her townland.
About 2000 I finally got home Internet access. Between Rootsweb mailing lists and message boards, GRO records, LDS filmed church records, various Web sites, and the help of many wonderful people, I was able to start pushing my history back to my greatgreatgrandparents, born in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

I made two great discoveries shortly before my husband and I went back to Ireland in 2006. One was the identity of my Cavan grandmother's grandparents. Through the help of someone on a mailing list, I learned her mother's father had been a miller, and the current occupants of the millhouse invited us for lunch.  Another was the identity of a second cousin in Galway, grandson of my grandmother's brother. An American relative had spotted one of my old postings and put us in touch with each other, which led to another wonderful visit.

In early 2009 descendants of two sisters of my grandmothers spotted other old postings of mine. Both live not far from me, and in each case they came for lunch and we traded information, pictures, and stories.

While I'm the genealogist in the family, my husband has also benefited. On our 1992 trip we went to the village in Cork that his father's father had emigrated from and were advised to talk to the postman, as he knew all the old families. It turned out the postman was a relative, knew of Paul's father and grandfather, put us in touch with more Cork relatives, took us to the family farm, and directed us to the old graveyard. In 2006 we also visited the Glasnevin grave of a famous ancestor of Paul's, John O'Mahony, a famous Fenian.

One piece of advice to help with brick walls--be sure to trace the siblings of your direct ancestors, as sometimes one of their records will take you back a bit further. Others are obvious from my story--post, post, post, and there's no substitute for visiting Ireland!

(by Diane Culhane)