Back in action

This has been a very busy time for me. School has started and I am now teaching at new school. So there has been little time for me to indulge in genealogy while I have been preparing myself for the new school year.

I did receive an exciting e-mail from Jack Cummiskey who has located the original ship manifest for Arthur Cummiskey and his family. This certainly gave insight to my research and has supported information that I had previously found. It verified to us that members of the Cummiskey family came over at different periods of time rather than as an entire group.

As more and more records and databases are uploaded online, there is a lot more information available for us to take a look at. I am currently taking full advantage of my membership with the New England Historic Genealogical Society and the plethora of records they offer to research the Taffe and Cummiskey families who settled in Massachusetts. Families in the 1800's were much more mobile than we give them credit for and the branches of our family trees sometimes reach further than we realize.

Breaking down those walls...

I know it has seemed like forever since I have posted, but I have finally had a major breakthrough that I was just so excited about that I had to blog. I stumbled across a death record identifying the mother of Ellen McDermott Carroll and confirming a connection between the McDermott family and the Cummiskeys. It was so very exciting.

The second breakthrough came not even ten minutes later when I found an old article mentioning Francis McDermot (sic) of Albany township was crushed to death by a falling tree. It was known he died, but not where, when, or how. This tiny snippet answered all of the above questions.

Today was a good day.