Tracing North
Towards my Acadian and Québécois roots | Vers mes racines acadiennes et québécoises
Category: Genealogy
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My paternal grandmother, Lillian Ester Burkhardt (known to us as Nana), was born on April 10, 1909, in Winthrop, Massachusetts. She was born the day before Easter and was named after the Easter lily. The youngest daughter of nine children, Lillian was the longest-lived among them. Nana credited her good health to daily walks and…
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My maternal great-grandfather, John Baptist Mutty, was born on March 31, 1861 in South Brewer, Maine. This photograph comes from a lineage booklet compiled by Dana Pierce, my first cousin once removed. Known as John B., my great-grandfather was the eldest of twelve children in a French Canadian family rooted in both Québec and Maine.…
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My paternal great-grandmother, Mary Josephine D’Arcy, was born in Oughterard, Ireland on March 5, 1871. I do not have a photograph of Mary herself, so I am sharing a photograph of her two eldest daughters, Mary (“May”) and Grace. They look so loving and joyful. Nana said that her mother was born in Ireland to…
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My paternal great-grandfather, Michael Francis Gilfeather, was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts on February 26, 1886. His father Michael emigrated from County Fermanagh, Ireland in 1859. Michael Sr. worked as a stonemason in Boston. There he met and married Irish immigrant Catherine McGeever. She is listed as his second wife. I do not know the identity…
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My paternal great-grandmother, Bertha Margaret Rau, was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on February 11, 1885. I do not have a photograph of Bertha herself, so I am sharing a photograph of her children. When Bertha was born, East 2nd Street was part of a dense immigrant neighborhood known as Kleindeutschland—“Little Germany.”…
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My maternal great-grandmother, Margaret Mary Barry, was born in Kinsale, Ireland on January 4, 1877. According to the Registrar General of Marriages, Births, and Deaths in Ireland: Fourteenth Annual Report 1877, there were 100 baby girls born in Kinsale between January and March 1877. Two women died in childbirth during the same time period. The…
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I received my AncestryDNA results last week and I am learning how to interpret what they actually mean. Ancestry.com identifies “Regions” where my DNA most closely matches their genetic reference panels. None of my Regions came as a surprise, but understanding how they arrive at those numbers has been instructive. As Ancestry.com explains: “A reference…
Tracing North 