SANDRA O’CONNELL talks to Helen Kelly
I’VE BEEN A genealogist for the past 15 years and, like most people, it arose from an interest in my own family tree. I had heard family lore about the eviction of one of my ancestors back in the 1700s and I wanted to chase it up, which I did. I found the evidence that proved it took place. That started me off.
Today, most of my clients are from overseas, mainly the US. I provide genealogy services to guests at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin and usually they’ll have sent me as much information as they can before they get here. When they arrive I’ll go meet them at the hotel.
We’ll sit down over coffee and I’ll present them with my preliminary report and then we will go up to the business centre and let them start searching online. Alternatively I will walk with them down to the National Library or National Archive and get them started there.
In these cases I act as a consultant. What I’m doing is empowering people to do their own research. They take ownership of it and most people like doing it that way. For clients who aren’t coming over to Ireland I will do commissioned research for them.
I’m from the midlands and my particular interest is those communities that emigrated from Longford and Westmeath and settled in Argentina.
As a result, at the moment I'm preparing a number of lectures I'll be giving in the Midlands in October, starting with a basic, How to research your family tree.
In most cases, genealogists are able to take the person back to the early 1800s easily enough, depending on the parish records that were kept at the time. Prior to that it starts to get harder.
When I find where a person’s ancestors have come from, I will walk the ground with them. For me, community is almost as important as family and bringing people back to the communities they came from is a huge part of my work.
Very often those communities will not have changed very much over the generations, and my job is all about helping track people back into the landscape they came from.
Recently, I took a 23-year-old Argentine back to the community his family had emigrated from. On the way there he told me how similar the landscape is to the place where his family eventually settled.
I introduced him to some distant family members and left him for a while. On the drive home he was overwhelmed. What struck him was the very strong sense he had of, as he said, “being among familiar faces”.
The internet has increased people’s interest in genealogy enormously. If I’m out in company the topic always comes up because people are so interested in their family tree. Which is fine – within reason.
- Helen Kelly is genealogy butler at the Shelbourne Hotel, helenkelly.com