I've got a few blogs floating around so I decided that I'd turn this one into my genealogy blog. That way I can stop boring people on my lj with all this stuff and it'll be easier for me to locate it since it'll all be in one place.
So a quick overview. My dad started tracing his and my mom's families years ago. I've always been fascinated by history and there's something extra cool about it when your ancestors have been through things. (For instance, I wish I had asked my grandmother about the 1918 flu pandemic while she was alive. She would have only been 7 or 8 at the time, but she might have remembered things.) The problem with my families, though, is that I don't speak the languages many of them come from, and while I do have at least one ancestor who served in the Civil War, many weren't even in America at that time. It makes reading records difficult. Not that I'm going to give up.
But one night about 6 months ago, I had a strange dream. There were some circumstances going on as to why it meant so much, but the basics are this: Aiobheall, who is a legendary Irish figure and known first as a fairy queen of Munster then the banshee of the O'Brien family, appeared in my dream and said she would be my guide. Guide to what? I'm not sure. Life? The Universe? Everything? I'm not arguing. She's a figure who has fascinated me most of my life. As has the O'Brien family for some reason--maybe the legendary descent from Brian Boru. I'm not Irish by birth. I have, however, always considered myself to have an Irish soul--I've been fascinated by Ireland my entire life. Once I realized I had no Irish ancestry, I thought my parents were lying to me. Really. I think I was 8. So I started digging into the husband's ancestry. Which, he insists, is now mine as well. And there, not even that far back, I found some O'Briens. He had no idea. So obviously the marriage was meant to be. And I've been going crazy (in a good way) researching that side of my family. So much easier--everything so far is in English (his ancestry is mostly from England, Scotland, and Ireland)--and since many of his lines were in the US and Canada before the colonies became a separate country, there are records galore. So I'll mostly be blathering about genealogy on the husband's side, but not exclusively.
