We Are The Chosen

“In each family, there is one who seems called to find the ancestors. To put flesh on their bones and make them live again. To tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve. Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who have gone before. We are the storytellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us: Tell our story. So, we do. In finding them, we somehow find ourselves.”

This project began as a labor of love for my paternal grandmother, Mary Bridget Geary, born in Carna in 1908. As I extended her tree, and started exploring further with DNA testing, a large web of interconnected families started to emerge. In many cases, the DNA linkages are not yet confirmed, but in others, like my Mweenish Island Geary research, family lines started becoming clearer. The purpose of this website is to share research to date so that others may benefit from it.

All information shown is intended to meet privacy requirements. In fact, to the best of my ability, I have tried to stay focused on the 1901 and 1911 censuses, and work backward from there. I maintain an offline tree with greater details, and each record/person is carefully flagged for inclusion here which could introduce issues due to the manual nature of the flagging process. Some of my assumptions may also be incorrect and I welcome feedback. You may see this particularly in the Bunnahown Ridge research or the Mweenish Geary research. I have made educated guesses based on both data and DNA clues.

Please let me know if you find anyone who is living and whose details have been inadvertently included or anyone who is dead and whose details are known to you but have been excluded. If you spot any more general errors or omissions in the data or if you would like me to e-mail you relevant extracts from the database as a GEDCOM file to open with your own genealogy program, please feel free to contact me.

In the initial release of this website, logins and passwords are not required. This may change in the future. The site is constantly under reconstruction as I add source information and additional related parties.

My primary areas of research are Geary, Lyden, Ridge, Keaney, Folan, and Mongan. I strongly suspect I have Conneely connections as well. I would love to chat if they are your lines too. You may wish to find my grandmother Mary Bridget Geary to orient yourself to the site since there are solid data and evidence attached to her research.