They suggest corrections, updates, and additions faster than I can add them.įor many years, I remained an advocate of desktop genealogy software over web-based family trees. Now much of my database is on my password-protected TNG website, which currently has 969 registered users. By June 1995, I had discovered GED2HTML and published the first online version of my family tree. I actually had a webserver running on my office computer back in November 1993, before even Microsoft had a website. The World Wide Web appeared a few years after I started my PAF database. The database now includes 19,359 blood relatives, out of 202,874 people who are connected to me in the WikiTree sense, and a total of 208,352 individuals. I have always included notes containing biographical details and sources to most individuals. The original scope was my own blood relatives and their spouses, to which in turn I added parents of spouses, then anyone connected to two people already in the database, and eventually unconnected mystery DNA matches and their relatives.

Over the intervening 35 years, that database has grown into my own mini-WikiTree. I got my first personal computer in 1987 and began another full transcription, this time into a database using Personal Ancestral File (PAF), which subsequently evolved into Ancestral Quest. I remember spending the Christmas holidays of 1976/77, when I was 13, rewriting everything by hand in my own format, including making a start on my mother's side. My father later developed an interest in updating his father's family tree, and I started to help him from a young age. Her memory and the oral history that she had absorbed, both from her own family and from her husband's family, reached back further than many of the archival sources available to present-day Irish genealogists. She lived to 88, so was still around to help her son with his retirement project. His mother married at 17 and had him and his identical twin brother and their older sister by the time she was 19. My paternal grandfather, who died four years before I was born, took up genealogy as a retirement project in 1949. After decades of looking at those photographs, I was surprised to discover one day (a) that the two nuns were second cousins to each other and (b) that there was, therefore, a time in the very distant past when I was not yet a genealogist. I always knew that, like my grandmother, they were both from County Clare. There are photographs of me aged 7 on my first communion day in Dublin in 1970 with two of the nuns from my school.

When and how did you get interested in genealogy? He is currently a Team Leader in our Ireland Project. Paddy became a Wiki Genealogist in April of 2021. It's time to meet another one of our wonderful WikiTreers.

Ireland by Melanie Waldron