Administrivia: Back Online

As a Christmas gift, my wife bought me both an updated subscription to Ancestry.com as well as an AncestryDNA kit. This has prompted me to renew my interest in genealogy, and as a pleasant side-effect, do some long-needed maintenance to the site. I’ve updated WordPress to the latest and greatest, refreshed the layout and brought back the search bar and tags, two features that had somehow gone missing over multiple automatic security updates. The biggest update was renewing the certificate that allows the use of secure browsing. Google Chrome has been complaining and warning users off for a year or so since I’d never gotten around to renewing the previous certificate.

I’ve started digging back into my family history again. Ancestry has made it quite easy to to find new relatives, and I think I’ve found two new siblings of my immigrant ancestor, as well as a lot more information about his elusive brother, Simon Keating. I’ll post more on this research as I verify and double-check my conclusions.

One project I’m currently working on is walking through the Ballymore Eustace parish records, looking for any references to my Keatings and Hylands (and McNultys, Murphys, Moores, etc.). Ancestry.com indexes the child being baptized and the parents, but not the godparents, so going by the index alone can result in a lot of missed connections. I’m finding quite a few possible family members as witnesses to other baptisms. My hope is to trace these families over multiple generations.

As for the AncestryDNA kit, I’m a bit excited to see the results. Unfortunately, my first sample of spit was apparently subpar, so I’m awaiting the processing of a second sample. At the current 6-8 weeks processing times, it’ll be a bit before I see the results. My hope is to find others who share a common ancestor further back than my current records. It would be nice to work at some of my brick walls from the other side. My plan is to download my data from AncestryDNA and then upload it to the Keating Surname Project at FamilyTreeDNA. Again, I’ll write up a post on my experience as the results come in. As inexpensive as AncestryDNA kits are these days, the more people uploading their data, the better and more detailed family groups we’ll be able to discover.