Whoo boy, I'm glad a lot of my family are no longer with us, so they can't hear what I've found.

I'd much rather be finding things like what you found in your family line. How cool!

both sides of the family had relatives no one knew about. my da's mom was from a family of 11. never met or heard of a one, even tho they were in the area. prolific lot, too. must be 100 cousins.
and my mom died thinking the only relatives she had were her brother's kids and grands. but of the 11 in that family, 5 came here and 6 stayed in new york. she knew nothing about them.

i ran into an adoptee that is a genetic cousin, and suspect that that might be the root of the rift on my da's side. my grandpa was a grand night of the knight's of columbus. her age would put her right about at the point my folks married.

Isn't it fascinating?

While my dad was still alive, I discovered that he had an aunt and uncle he never knew about.

While my mom was alive, we found out that her great-grandfather, who supposedly had left the family and died, in fact, didn't die.

The family had told one big whopper of a lie. They said he disappeared, and they waited seven years to have him declared legally dead, and then his widow remarried.

Where he was for seven years, Heaven only knows. But he shows up in a family photo later in life, with one of his sons, whom he supposedly abandoned.

The real kicker is that the supposed Widow didn't wait seven years to remarry. I found her with another guy in a census record, with kids from the abandoned marriage as well as kids from the new marriage. This was approximately 18 months after great grandpa went missing. I have never been able to find a marriage record for the second marriage. I wonder why?

we are good friends now. peas in a pod.
she found her mom, and a couple kin on that side. we figure i'm on her dad's side, but so far no clues. i;ll be taking a trio over when this ends, and she is coming here, too.

I'm actually adopted, so I have two big trees to work on.

The family I grew up with, which is where I have all of my history, and then my DNA line tree.

And I met my birth parents when I was in my mid-twenties, so I know everyone.

My mom and dad, the people who raised me, because they are my mom and dad, that is the tree that fascinates me the most because that's the history I grew up knowing.

My dad's side is really easy to discover, because his family lines are well-documented. But on my mom's side, I can only get back to the great-greats and I'm stuck. They just disappear.

I'm going to have to start working on my DNA line, so I can find out more about where my birth family came from. Unfortunately, mom and dad and birth parents all passed away within the last 8 years. So I'm on my own.

I'm really jealous that you found family in another country that you get to meet!

I have 'met' a lot of cousins online, through my adopted family. Would love to meet them in person someday. They are all in the states.

kinnitty. gonna stay at kinnitty castle, which is a b&b and said to be haunted.
i can wait to see if the haints talk to me.

Have to tell you a funny story that you will really appreciate.

When my mom had to undergo some surgery, they put her on morphine afterwards. We didn't know she couldn't tolerate morphine, and she hallucinated like you cannot believe.

While she was having all these hallucinations, she swore she was seeing all of the dead ancestors I've been trying to find on genealogy websites.

I thought 'what could it hurt to ask?' Maybe she really is seeing them.

So every time she mentioned one of the dead ancestors, I would ask her to ask them some question that would help me figure out where I could find them. I wanted to know where they died and where they were buried, Etc.

I didn't have any luck. But it helped us pass the time until the morphine wore off!

I so hope you find the ghosts!

i never used to believe in that stuff, but, well.
when my uncle died, my da, already full of cancer and totally doped up and out of it, woke up calling his name. it was, like 2 am.
banshees. this same cousin told me that, yes, we would have one, as my family was a powerful family back in the day.

that's rly the most interesting thing to me. i thought i came from poor ppl. i was raised poor, and the grandparents on both sides who came here came as famine refugees, in steerage.
to hear that they were a powerful family back in the day, and that my great uncle was one of ireland's greatest rebels. it puts you in a different place.

Your family history is fascinating to me. I bet you can't wait to go to Ireland and see all these places for yourself. Some day, hopefully soon!

I've had some really weird things happen. I don't know if it's a ghost or an energy or ? But I have definitely experienced things I cannot explain. So did my mom.

and i have a kid who had the same. from head injuries.
a lot of them were classic ghost 'evidence'. that's what carl sagan said.
my favorite was the scent of gardenias, which my da tried to grow w limited success.

but quantum physics is proving that time is more malleable than newtonian physics would suggest.

but a bit of lore on the other side, not the banshee side, is that women in the o' families had visions.
mom was an o'regan and an o'dwyer. the o' got dropped back in ireland but it was o'.

now, i am a trained artist and designer, so, i have that kind of vision.
i also find real treasure in trash cans, like, on the regular. like, boxes of jewelry.
and my thrift shop skills are uncanny. my kids have it, too.

i could easily be convinced as a witch if i got sucked into the wrong timewarp.
so, who knows.

When I am going through something very stressful and I need emotional support, I smell my grandmother's cookies.

My grandmother made my favorite cookies in the whole world. She took the recipe with her when she died. So I haven't eaten them since 1972.

I don't ever look for this to happen, or expect it to happen. It just comes out of the blue. All of a sudden, I smell her cookies, as though she was in the kitchen, baking them. That tells me she is nearby, telling me I am not alone.

I was told I was her favorite grandchild. And I absolutely adored her. In fact, when she died, the only thing I wanted of hers was her cookie jar. It's here in my house.

Same thing happens with my dad, who passed away eight years ago. If I'm going through some troubled times, all of a sudden I get a whiff of his shaving lotion. There isn't any smell of that left in this house. But all of a sudden it's there.

As I got older, and went through rough times in my life, my dad was the one I always leaned on. He became my best friend. So I guess he's hanging around at times to make sure I'm okay.

I have been warned when something bad was going to happen to a specific family member. All of a sudden I get an urge that I need to contact them immediately. And it won't go away until I act on it, or something bad happens. I ignored the first one, and my beloved aunt died before I called her.

Another time I got the same feeling about a different aunt. I told my mom to call her because that was her sister. And I told her she could not ignore what I was saying. Thankfully my mom called her, because three days later that Aunt had a stroke and died. They were able to speak to each other one last time because of that nagging feeling.

I've had some really weird stuff happen. I guess some people would be spooked by these things. I just figure I am somehow allowed to peek behind the curtain. And I appreciate it.

The story I told you about the great-grandfather who disappeared and then showed up seven years later?

I don't think the dead ancestors liked me telling that story.

I was at a friend's house and I told them the story. And then I came home and I had to use the bathroom. I am the only one who uses this specific bathroom. I went in there, and there was dirt all over the floor. The kind of dirt you get when you're digging in the yard.
It was even behind the door and behind the toilet.

So if someone had walked in there with dirt on their shoes, it wouldn't have ended up in those spots. And, it would have been on the carpet that led to the bathroom. Nope. I knew immediately someone was telling me to stop tossing the dirt around. Meaning quit gossiping about the family.

It sounds absolutely insane, but this stuff happened and there is no other explanation for it.

Too bad we don't live close to each other and we aren't living in the age of a pandemic. I think we could have some really interesting conversations!

at my niece's wedding, we all stayed in one hotel. prolly 50 of us. afterwards, we came back after the festivities, and the kids all jumped in the pool. no lifeguard, prolly 20 kids in a small pool.

only had 3 at the time, and the eldest wasnt there. the 2 were only 5 and 7.
the 7 yo was a super shy, timid kid, but he had gotten to know all these cousins and was in the pool. he couldnt swim, but he was paddling around, hanging on to a soccer ball.
i got the feeling. not about both of them, about him. i looked around and found him in the middle of the pool. the deep end.
he was fine when i looked and a couple seconds later, he lost his grip and went under.
jumped in fully clothed and had him before he could hit the bottom.

now, the pool was crowded. none of the other kids saw him go under, and even if they had, the adults were drunk, loud, and paying no attention. they would have had a hell of a time getting anyone's attention.
in fact, they were so absorbed that virtually no one saw me jump in, nor noticed us walking put to get dry clothes.

i cant say if he would have died, but there sure would have been a 911 call.

and here i was, hero mom, and no one even saw me.

his little brother also nearly drown and i had to pull him out, but i was watching that one. walking in the forest preserve and he tried to walk out onto thin ice. only 2. i could easily have been distracted there, tho. but i wasnt. if he had gone all the way under, well, the pond was covered in ice.

i'm sure we could have some great chats. i love telling stories. my fave gift of all the many my da gave me. he was the best i ever heard at telling stories and jokes.

i had 3 kinds. 2 came at night. the furniture in my room swung like it was on ropes, toward me and back. there was also a big ball of string that unrolled toward me and rolled back up again, away from me. those were scary, but i figured out if i just held on, they ended, and i would fall asleep. which is how seizures work.

but i had one during the day that i found very interesting. i called it 'getting small'. everything would suddenly seems to be about 1/10th the normal size. all in proportion, but all small. i would look at my hand, and see that, yup, i was small.
now, i had the twilight zone and outer limits on my teevee, so, why couldnt i have a portal to another dimension? it didnt scare me at all. i thought it was cool.

my youngest had the same thing, but she didnt outgrow it. her big brother was giving her a helicopter ride, and thwacked her head into a big ole iron radiator. cracked her skull. but we didnt know it. thought she just had a goose egg, and she had no other symptoms.

when she was 21, she was cracking up, we thought. had a dx of ptsd because she saw ppl following her out of the corner of her eye.
but she finally started having overt seizures. they put her in the hospital, wired her up and w/in a half hour they came in and said- did you ever have a bad head injury?
the incident had been totally forgotten til then.
the doc said there was a genetic tendency to develop epilepsy from a head injury. that was my first clue that having my head bashed in at 6 was behind my neuro symptoms.

all better now thanks to ja's herb, but...

i would read it then eat it, but i figure i should pass it along to the kid who has dwyer for a middle name.