“History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all."
"I am bound to them. Although I cannot look into their eyes or hear their voices, I honor their history. I cherish their lives. I will tell their stories and remember them." ~Author Unknown
While the primary focus of the contents tends to be the greater Carna area, due to advancing technology with DNA connections, it really has expanded to the total West Galway area. Every effort has been made to source the information available using civil and census records primarily. In some cases, this is still a work in progress and regular updates happen to the data, so check back often!
My personal 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 is solid data and evidence attached to her research.
One database convention that you will see is that I generally use 5 underscores (_____) as a placeholder when a surname is not known.
Timothy Robinson was an English writer, artist and cartographer. His most famous works include books about Ireland's Aran Islands and Connemara in the West of Ireland. He was also well known for producing exceptionally detailed maps of the Aran Islands, The Burren, and Connemara.
'Stone of Aran: Pilgrimmage' is, as Robert Macfarlane says in his introduction, 'one of the msot sustained, intensive and imaginative studies of a place that has ever been carried out.'
Tim Robinson portrays the inner and outer life of a landscape and its inhabitants. It is an encyclopedia of myth and reality, herbal, love-letter, missal, jest-book, anthology of cultural responses.
In the aftermath of the Great Famine of 1845-52, the Martin Estate in the West of Ireland, 200,000-acres of bog and mountain, was put up for sale. Its mortgagees, the London Law Life Insurance Society, evicted many of the tenants.
'Islands and Images', the first essay in this collection, describes the Aran Islands themselves; 'Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara', the title-essay, elevates the map-maker's craft into art.
The author of Stones of Aran captures the mountains, shorelines, bogs, and landscapes of his home in Connemara, in an evocative portrait of the people, places, history, and natural wonders of a small region of Ireland.
This book is the result of his extraordinary engagement with the mountains, bogs and shorelines of the region, and with its folklore and its often terrible history: a work as beautiful and surprising as the place it attempts to describe.
Favorite Genealogy Quotes
