Call it the Luck \u2018o the Irish, Coincidence, or Fate, but in March I felt its influence. I had attended the monthly genealogy meeting in Calgary, and was interested in the appropriately themed Irish research lecture, as I have an Irish great-grandfather. I filed away the tips I learned, planning to come back to them in a few years when I had time to research that side of the family.<\/p>\n
Instead, my current task was to refocus on some half-finished files I had set aside a few months earlier, when more pressing concerns had preempted their completion. As I have discussed here before, I search for descendants of people who worked at the now defunct Glenbow Quarry, located in Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park<\/a>. The hope is that these descendants will have stories and photos to share with the Glenbow Town and Quarry Project<\/a>. I picked up the file from the top of the stack and dove in.<\/p>\n In a couple of days, I had nearly completed the descendant tree. The hardest part, due to various privacy regulations, is locating the living descendants. I had exhausted my usual methods, so decided to see if I could find a hint in an online tree that may have been submitted about this family. Most online family trees are riddled with errors introduced by irresponsible cutting and pasting; another major problem is the almost complete absence of source citations. Still, it couldn\u2019t hurt to see if there might be something I could use.<\/p>\n I did find a tree that included my Glenbow stonecutter, and a contact link to a modern descendant. Bingo! I looked for associated photos and found a family portrait of my stonecutter. Wow \u2014 it was almost too good to be true. As a final check, I skimmed through the vast number of images, in the tiny thumbnail forms. But wait, one of them seemed familiar. I opened the larger version and there on my screen was a photograph of my Irish great-grandfather\u2019s family!<\/p>\n Why was Great-Grandpa Harry in someone else\u2019s family tree? I could not find an obvious connection between the families, so I must have missed something, or maybe he had been included by mistake. There was only one way to find out.<\/p>\n I contacted the Glenbow descendant (Tom) and after explaining my Glenbow Project request and securing his cooperation, I ventured to confess my personal discovery and to ask for more information. He happily shared what he knew and, with the aid of a little chart, I finally\u00a0 understood my link to this Glenbow family. It turns out that Tom\u2019s Glenbow relation is on his father\u2019s side, while my connection is on his mother\u2019s: Tom\u2019s 3X great-grandfather\u2019s brother\u2019s granddaughter married the half-brother of my great-grandfather Harry.<\/p>\n It may not be a direct family link to a Glenbow resident, but it is a treasured one. Years ago, we discovered that one of the team archaeologists was the great-niece of the Provincial Architect who lived and worked at Glenbow for a time, and now this. It was more than enough to incite the jealousy of my colleagues on the project. It seems my husband was justified in his complaint that I should stop researching and just finish writing The Book, or I would find out everyone was related to each other!<\/p>\n The only down-side of this discovery was the ensuing two-week diversion from my Glenbow tasks while I investigated my Irish ancestors\u2026<\/p>\n This article was originally printed in the<\/em>\u00a0BERGEN NEWS<\/strong>\u00a0and is being reprinted with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Call it the Luck \u2018o the Irish, Coincidence, or Fate, but in March I felt its influence. I had attended the monthly genealogy meeting in Calgary, and was interested in the appropriately themed Irish research lecture, as I have an Irish great-grandfather. I filed away the tips I learned, planning to come back to them…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peyerl.ca\/quill\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peyerl.ca\/quill\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peyerl.ca\/quill\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peyerl.ca\/quill\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peyerl.ca\/quill\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.peyerl.ca\/quill\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":426,"href":"https:\/\/www.peyerl.ca\/quill\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions\/426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peyerl.ca\/quill\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peyerl.ca\/quill\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peyerl.ca\/quill\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}