 Ladies and gentlemen, we have the next talk, and we're in for a treat. This is the main Gale Tartt project, presented by Deborah Sullivan-Gallison on behalf of the main Irish Heritage Centre. Deb works very, very closely with Margaret Feeney-Lacoum, with Maureen Coyne-Narris, with Pat McBride, with Terry Fitzgeralds. The list goes on and on. These guys are an incredible team who've come all the way from Portland, Maine to tell us about this fascinating project, which I think is the most mature autosomal DNA project in existence today. Now, Deb is a board member of the main Irish Heritage Centre, a genealogist from Portland, Maine, an Irish citizen via her mum, and an organiser and volunteer from many local organisations. Margaret Feeney-Lacoum, who is standing behind her with the clicker, is a genealogist who has been researching her own family roots and the Irish of Maine for over 15 years, and started the Centre's DNA project along with Maureen Coyne-Narris and created and maintains the Centre's genealogy database of 130,000 individuals. So, with the help of other people from the Centre and genealogists like Deb, author Matthew Barker, whom we'll hear from on the presentation, Christa Heatley, Ozzy Agamon? Ozzy Agamon? Have I said that correctly? Christa Oh, that's what we call her. Christa Oh, hey, it makes sense. Maureen Coyne-Narris and Patricia McBride flood. So, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Deb Gellison and Margaret Lacoum, ladies and gentlemen, please give them a warm round of applause. So, can you all hear me okay? Okay. I got the short straw. I don't usually do any public speaking, so if I'm not loud enough, just yell at me. Thank you for joining us today to learn more about the Maine Connection to Ireland, the Maine Irish Heritage Centre, and our Maine Galtech DNA project. Special thanks go out to Morris Gleason for inviting us here today, and for all the help and encouragement he's provided us over the last few months. We've had many FaceTime conversations with him to prepare for this. Also thanks a big thanks to Matt and Christa back home, and to Maureen, who couldn't be here today. We give them all our best, and thank you again for all their help with this project. So, my name is Deb Gellison, and I'm here along with other volunteer genealogists from the Maine Irish Heritage Centre and the Karna Immigrant Centre to share with you our unique project. Our project does not delve into the science of DNA. I can't tell you anything about SNPs. We are here to show you how DNA, along with our regional concentration of genealogy research, combines to make fascinating and fun research and discoveries. Before we begin though, I would be remiss as a genealogy sleuth if I didn't do a plug for my own personal ancestors. Who knows, I just could have a cousin here, and I just couldn't miss out on an opportunity to say hello. My maternal grandparents were Walter and Bridget Joyce, who were tenant farmers. They moved to Boston in 1895 and then on to seek work in Portland, Maine. My paternal grandparents were John Sullivan and Margaret Kilday. The Kilday family left Ireland in 1841 and came to Portland, Maine to seek work in a brown sugar factory. My Sullivan's passed down an interesting story. It seems that the English stole the family cow from my Sullivan's in Ireland, and John W. and Patrick Sullivan as young boys went and stole the cow back. Their mother, for fear that they would end up in the penal colony in Australia, sent them out on a boat in Galway Bay. Eventually, they snuck passage to America through New Brunswick, Canada, and the rest of the family joined them later. So if there are any Joyce's or Kilday's or Sullivan's out there, I'd love to meet you because I'm sure you're probably a DNA cousin to me. Today's presentation will be an overview of how the Maine Irish Heritage Center came to be and the development of our Maine Galtech DNA project. We will share with you a couple of success stories and you will have the opportunity to hear from our partners at the Karna Immigration Center. We hope that our presentation might entice you to build a project such as this in your area. So who we are. The Maine Irish Heritage Center building was the original St. Dominic's Catholic Church, a church started by the Irish in Portland in 1828. In 1997, this third oldest parish in Maine was closed by the Catholic Diocese, and the Maine Irish Heritage Center was born with the purpose to protect and preserve this wonderful building along with its Irish heritage. The center houses an extensive library as well as being the host for groups such as the American Irish Club, the Clattermoor Pipe Band, and others. We hold lots of fundraisers there to raise funds for renovations to this much needed building. So let's share a little bit of history as our Irish families made their way, escaping from their struggles in Galway to their hope of a brighter future in Portland, Maine. Our local historian, Matt Barker, has been actively researching the Portland Irish since he was a child. Mention an Irish surname to Matt, and he can tell you from memory where they lived, who they married, and most probably where they are buried in our local Calvary Cemetery. He has written many publications on the Portland Irish and has a newly published book entitled The Irish of Portland, Maine. Good afternoon, my name is Matthew Barker. I'm a genealogist and historian at the Maine Irish Heritage Center. Where we do a lot of genealogical research, especially for people from County Galway. The Irish have been coming to Maine since the 1660s, especially to Portland. The first Irish person here was Thaddeus Clark, probably born Tyke O'Claire, and he settled here in 1662. There were a lot of Irish here in the 1750s who even fought in the French and Indian Wars. The continuous Irish settlement began in Portland in many places in Maine in the 1820s. Here in Portland it went on from 1820s to 1920s, a hundred years of study of immigration. And beginning during the famine on Baltimore, especially after the 1860s, and again especially after the 1880s famine, most of the Irish immigrants, especially after 1880, most of the immigrants to Portland were from County Galway, East and West Galway, but especially from Connemara, and they came right through the 1920s and again in the 1950s. And even in the 1980s, that Galway Irish settled here in Portland. And to this day, we have a strong connection to County Galway. The first priest to St. Dominic's first church in Southern Maine, which was built in the first mass in 1828, was Father Charles French, a native Galway city in Dominican. So from 1828 to the present, there's been a connection to Galway. Portland, our main Galway connection continues very strongly to this day. So we know that the Irish began arriving in numbers in the early 1800s, most of them coming from County Galway. And our research leads us to believe that the percentage of Galway Irish is as high as 90%. Going ahead to today's times for a moment, we have attracted hundreds of visitors to our center, looking to view our beautiful building and to learn about our DNA and genealogy projects. Ancestry filmed a session here recently with our local news celebrity. The Donnegal County Council, part of the Donnegal Diaspora Center, visited here. The Boston Consul General and our local member, Mayor, I'm sorry, are just a few of the many who have taken an interest in our center and our project. Again, here's an illustration of how the bulk of Portland Irish are connected from County Galway in Western Ireland. As this map illustrates, the Galway Irish settled largely in the northeast part of the United States, many entering the New Brunswick area of Canada. Our volunteers, including Margaret Lecombe and Matt Barker, have spent many years amassing a huge database, and Margaret has now dedicated her database to our project. This graphic illustrates the dispersal of the Galway Diaspora as they emigrated into the U.S. Our DNA project and our research have proven that these areas with the diamonds are the most common areas for settlement by the Galway Irish in the United States. And many of their first stops were in the Canadian Maritime ports. Many of these Irish, whose County Galway families were intermarried for decades in Ireland, emigrated to Portland. And here, their children also intermarried with these County Galway families, creating an endogamous population. We feel that the autosomal DNA testing, in connection with all of the family trees that we have researched, are the best hope for teasing apart this endogamous tangled ball of yarn to reveal family trees. And so taking all of our years of research, along with the ability to DNA test to confirm family connections, our DNA project was born. We have a small team of volunteers who work on this project. Each person has their own unique strengths and interests, and we are able to complement one another as the project moves forward. We have a very unique set of characteristics, which makes this project very appealing for our testers to join. Our project is geographically focused in Galway Ireland and in Portland, Maine, with the opportunity to expand the network out to other locations where the Galway diaspora settled. We have strong ties with the genealogy centers in Galway where we share our knowledge and our historical resources. We have a massive database of over 120,000 names, which we use hand in hand with our DNA matches to achieve family connections. And our DNA testing is ongoing, both in Maine and in Galway. And you can be sure our volunteers here today are out there swabbing cheeks during this trip. Our project welcomes the Galway diaspora, and again the unique piece of this project is our common place of origin, our common denominator. We work to build not only interest, but trust with our project participants. We meet them when we're here in Ireland and offer workshops and in-house training about their DNA testing at our Maine Irish Heritage Center. And now to show you a few specifics on the project within FTDNA. We use family tree DNA to house our project, and primarily the autosominal DNA test. The slide illustrates what the family finder matches look like when you receive your results. We do have permission from these folks, by the way, to display their names today. Again we use the DNA results along with our database of the 120,000 names to build our family connections and help tear down these brick walls with people's genealogy research. You can see here that there are 140 pages of matches listing the match dates, their predicted relations, their shared centimorgans, and the ancestral surnames that the tester has entered. And here is an example of a tool within family finder called the chromosome browser. This tool is probably our favorite tool that FTDNA offers. One is able to compare up to five matches at once to see if there are common matches to others within your results. This valuable tool helps to group matches together into common family lines. Unlike using this tool outside our project, because our project members are so concentrated within Galway and Portland, this tool becomes extremely valuable. As you can see from this graph, our project continues to climb in numbers as more people see the value in our research. This is our homepage, the main Galtech DNA project within FTDNA. It's accessed through the Family Tree DNA website. A project member here can post inquiries here, pictures, and ask questions of our group. Our project is unusual. We are creating a matrix of location-based matches using both DNA results and our database. If you match one person in the matrix, we may be able to connect you to many others with our genealogy research. It uses autosomal testing rather than the Y or the MTDNA as many of us have no living relatives to test for the Y or the MTDNA. We start from what we know through our extensive database and build outwards. By looking at family names and regions of Galway, we selectively test to build and repair the missing links between Ireland and America. Our contacts and our partners in Ireland and the diaspora help us to prove these matches. Our research uses many types of markers, not only DNA, which again makes our project unique. We use many of our genealogical research tools, such as where our families clustered when they came to the Portland area. In our city, due to heavy chain migration, we are able to tell what areas of Galway families were from by looking at city directories and censuses. We also use surname markers to learn where ancestors lived in Ireland and have been able to trace cousins who emigrated to the other areas of our country, such as Boston, Norwood Mass, and even St. Paul, Minnesota. Both our genealogy tools and our DNA results help us narrow down these specific family lines. We use our genealogy research to use child names as markers and pull less common names out to spot potential related families. With Irish chain migrations, relatives helped each other to get jobs where they worked. We know, for instance, that the gas company in Portland had a majority of workers from Spittle, and the longshoremen in Portland had clusters of Karna Parish people. Nicknames were also a telling sign. James Chinafoli, for instance, worked as a longshoreman unloading clay and always came home covered in yellow clay. Jack Lamb Conley got his name from his father, the Lamb of God Conley, who had studied for his priesthood in Ireland. And I recently verified a family connection with my Sullivan line, looking through a high school yearbook. Patrick Sullivan was known as Bunny in the high school yearbook, and I couldn't connect him to a relative that I was trying to connect him to, but then I found his obituary and sure enough, carried right through many years later, he was referred to from his World War II buddies as Bunny, and he died at sea. That gave me the proof I needed that that young Sullivan was, in fact, my relative. We use cemetery information to help us compile our database. Our predominantly Irish cemetery in Portland, the Calvary Cemetery, not only has digitized records, but they have been great about letting us see the original records of who bought the plots and all the other pertinent information that's jotted down on the back of those cemetery cards. With our genealogy database of over 120,000 names and our main Galtech DNA project in Family Tree DNA with over 400 participants and growing daily, we are well on our way to connect today's Galway Irish to the immigrant population in Portland, Maine. This is an illustration of what our database looks like. The phoenix shown here, number over 193. We have 257 John Foley's or Folens, who were born before 1870, and a minimum of 35,000 people born in County Galway. Since many of the Connemara people went on to marry other Connemara people, the matrix grows large and complicated. We use the reunion program, which displays family trees for quick and easy comparison to DNA matches and their family trees. We enter our members' pedigree with photos, newspaper articles, and any other sources that we have to describe the immigrant's experience coming to America and getting new leads on their relatives in Ireland. So how can you start a project such as this? Begin by creating a team of like-minded genealogists and local historians who would have an interest in amassing a database such as this. Volunteers will be people interested in sharing their research and helping to collect family trees. It will help to collaborate with other centers. Your region-based research, once collected, will begin to pay off by showing connections between families of varying surnames. We test people in Ireland who are known cousins through our research or collect samples from surnames which we know have Portland connections. The people who we have tested in Ireland, on average, get three to five pages of autosomal matches that are second to third or second to fourth cousin ranges, sharing around 50 to 187 centimorgans or more. People from whom we already have family trees. And many of these Irish that we test have never been to Maine. They soon learn they have many American cousins. Pictured here is a relative of mine from Mam. His DNA was collected by Margaret and Maureen as he was working in a peat field one day. It is only through DNA and the Maine Galtech DNA project that we were able to ascertain his family connection to mine. In our research, we have become partners with the Karna Immigration and Diaspora Center located in Connemara. The center was created both to honor the Irish immigrants as well as to provide a research center for genealogy and DNA. Here we are discussing genetic genealogy testing at the Heritage Center in Lettermullen. And here is a short video illustrating our participant swabbing for DNA. I always look weirder than this. You have to do the other cheek. Do it again. Oh, you already did one? Yep, she's done one. No, a little bit more. We need a little bit more. Here, I should be timing you. You need another half minute. But that's a good thing. 15 seconds more. There we go. So this is a good phoenix swab. So what is the value of DNA testing for this project? This short video illustrates how DNA testing as part of a project such as ours is bringing community together. These people in this little video who have perhaps known each other for years are now first learning that they are blood relatives. So our goals? We hope to continue to test in Ireland and in the Galway cluster cities. We want to continue to network and collaborate with other heritage centers all over Ireland to help them start their own projects. We want to work to find funding for more DNA testing for publishing our project and for outreach. For instance, we have a lady in Chicago who's dying to start a project and she wants us to come out to Chicago to help her get started and we need some money for that. Additionally, we have many Irish and Massachusetts in Maine and in Nova Scotia that would like to test and to start projects. And we're looking for funds for kits and for travel. The benefits to Ireland are many. We will improve the outreach to the diaspora. The project will encourage more tourism to Ireland as people visit their ancestral townlands for both genealogy research and DNA testing. And with our help, we will be able to pinpoint the clusters of descendants and connect families within the U.S. and Ireland. Ireland could sponsor gatherings in cluster areas, which would be a huge draw for Americans looking to do their family history research. And we can help heritage centers like the one in Karnah to start their own projects. So thank you for letting me share our project with you. We are very excited about this project and we hope that this little presentation might encourage you to consider starting a project such as this in your area. Next, we will hear a short video from Terry Fitzgerald, a Maine Galtech project success story, and then from Eileen Flaherty Davis from the Karnah Heritage Center. We'll come forward to speak about their project in Karnah. Following that, I invite Pat and Margaret and others from the Maine Irish Heritage Center up to answer any questions that you might have. My name is Terry Fitzgerald and the Maine Irish Heritage Center asked me to speak about my genealogy and DNA research thus far. My paternal grandmother, Mary Bridget Geary, was born in Karnah in Galway in 1908. I knew her parents' names and with basic research determined her paternal and maternal grandparents, and some details one more generation back. But without DNA testing, it was unlikely that I might get too much further in my research. Using autosomal DNA testing across different sites offered a wealth of new information. I've tested myself and various family members at them all. The group project created and managed by the Maine Irish Heritage Center offered me the greatest insight into my Galway heritage, however. What a unique opportunity to meet extended cousins all descendants from this remote and beautiful part of Ireland. So what do my successes with DNA testing look like? The first confirmation is a third cousin one's removed. For this match, I worked with local Karnah context to learn the match's parents and grandparents' names. Using the information provided, I built a tree and worked my way back to his great-grandparents, Thomas Barrett and Mary Ridge of Minish Island. Based on the marriage record and Mary's birth record, I determined that her parents were Thomas Ridge and Mary Fohlen. My own second great-grandmother was Sarah Ridge of Minish Island, daughter of Thomas Ridge and mother previously unknown but suspected to be Mary Fohlen. There were no baptism or birth registration records for Sarah. When I added the match to my main tree and connected Mary and Sarah as sisters, he showed up in the predicted range that FTDNA provided and confirmed the long-held suspicion that Sarah was the child of Thomas Ridge and Mary Fohlen. My second confirmation is a fourth cousin. Using similar research processes, I worked again with local Karnah context and determined that his great-grandparents were Joseph Madden, Mary, and Geary of Minish Island. Mary's father was Michael Geary. My match's ancestor is born roughly at the same time as my second great-grandfather, John Geary, also of Minish. Without further proof, it is assumed that Michael and John were likely brothers and the genetic distance matches what FTDNA predicts. My hope is that with additional testing, it will help tighten up this line. I suspect we might have more than one ancestor match because the amount of DNA shared with this match is larger than one would have expected as a fourth cousin. My favorite confirmation, though, is a third cousin once removed. By far my greatest find was through ancestor DNA testing, but I've now had that cousin transfer her test results to the FTDNA main galtech project to see who all she matches in the Galway data pool. She showed us a good match to my dad and my other paternal cousins, so we knew we were cousins. It was for stories, however, that sent chills down my spine. She said, I believe that my great-grandmother, Catherine Leiden Adams, was McDara's sister. The oral history passed down to me was that she was born in or near the town of Letterfrack in the northwest part of Galway. Her father and all her brothers were blacksmiths. Her father, who I think is James now, according to your tree, helped build a wrought iron fence around Calmore Abbey. Two of her brothers, McDara and Joe, set up shop in Karna. Two other brothers set up shop in or near Clifton. Catherine was born around 1865 and married Michael Adams from Moyard. They immigrated to New York. Of immediate excitement was the details that confirmed that McDara Leiden was indeed a blow-in from somewhere else in Galway. My father laughs when I use that term blow-in, but that's how it was described to me and it's always stuck. But the details never made sense to me. Previous research had identified his possible parents as James Leiden and Mary Mangan, but that he was born in the Letterfrack area. He had arrived in Karna sometime prior to his marriage to Ann Keeney. Now my new cousin was providing the context and history to explain his arrival. Looking further back at my cousin's online tree, I discovered an additional shock. Her grandfather was Joseph Davit. I remembered Dad telling me several times that Joe Davit used to come to the house, his mother's house in the Bronx, and they would speak in Irish for hours over tea. Both were worried about losing their Irish language. I had tried in vain to figure out who this Joe was several times, but I could never figure out how a Davit connection fit into our tree. History now tells us that Joseph Davit was married to Kathleen Adams, daughter of Catherine Leiden, and therefore cousin to my grandmother. With newfound details about McDara's siblings, I know that Joseph Leiden in the carnet 1901 and 1911 census records is McDara's brother. I could never figure out the connection before. Again with the help of Karna friends and family, Joseph's descendants are documented and the tree is exploding with details. Oral history combined with DNA and building a solid paper turtle has now allowed us to fill in the tree with all of the known siblings of McDara Leiden and most of their descendants. Two of Joseph's descendants have agreed to DNA testing to help us further isolate the chromosomes passed down from this line. With autosomal testing, I found at least one match that helped build out the siblings of three of the four grandparents of my paternal grandmother. What a gift. I firmly believe this would not have been possible this quickly without the Maine Gale-Tex project and the focus on Karna DNA. As more people test, I'm hoping to make even more breakthroughs. I have several cousins where we're so close to figuring out the connection, but I just need that one match that cracks open the connection. And so the story continues. So please welcome Eileen Faraday Davis and Sophie Cook from the Karna Immigration Centre. Hello, good afternoon. I'm a small chair. The gentleman on my left hand side has many names. But his proper title today is Joseph Cook. He's also Joe Cook. He has a couple of other titles in Irish, but he's very welcome. And he's a fantastic genealogist and local historian in the Karna area. My name is Eileen Davis. My married name is Davis. My father's name is Faraday. Going back on my mother's side, we have Davis. And a lot of that Davis family have immigrated to Portland, Maine. And Pat Davis, my mother's uncle, was a long-shoreman there. I test and come up with DNA to many, many people in Portland, Maine and in Karna. I'll just say one thing for the moment which has become a parent from listening to people. We in the Karna area know where our people went. We know the family lines when they got to the States. The people who went did not realize that the people that they left behind remember them. We remember them in song, we remember them in story, we remember them in the folklore. My grand-uncle was Colin Kane. He had over 215 songs in his head. He could possibly maybe write his name. He spoke very little English. Those songs that he told that were collected by Seamus Innes and the National Archives of this country document the passage of many of your people. They document them, how they happened to them, why they left, where they went. We know their stories. People here can attest to the fact that if you come to visit us in Karna in our center we will take you out across the gardens and over the fields and up the ditches and into the schoolyards as we have done with people like Joanne Riley. We have done the DNA testing on people that we consider to be worthy candidates. Not because they have told us who they are, but because we know who they are. Because people like Mortino Covent, who has put his heart and soul into the community that is Karna and Erisanyuk and South Connemara and North Galway and into Finney and that little Joyce County and out to the islands and into Leathermore and across Leathermore and into the Arran Islands. We are building a center to honor the people who have left. Not because we have forgotten them, but because we want them to be remembered and we want the people who have remained behind to remember how well these people did. Not just the fantastic wonderful connections that we have. The likes of Johnny McDonough, the likes of the mirrors of Portland, the likes of the people who are there in the White House with former presidents and present presidents. People like Dennis McDonough. We want you people to realize that when you hit Karna Maris soil you will feel the beast of the music that has never died, that we have kept it alive for you to come back. That you will feel in your heart and in your soul what you have known and what you have not quite put a name on it. We are the memorial people. We know where they are buried. We have studied the graves. We have looked at church records. We eat it. We drink it. We are honored by those people. I don't know if you realized how hard they got it to get out of the country. Connemara is a beautiful, wonderful place back on the West Coast. Back in primary today the sun is shining. The white waves are rolling in. It's a beautiful, beautiful day. But what is it like in the winter as some journalist walking down the road said to marching O'Connor's father who was cleaning your drain. He said, would you like to live here in the winter? So I mean the point is we live there. We are honored that you want to come back. We are honored that you want to make the connections. We have kept the traditional, the culture, the living music, the living poetry alive. The centre that we are building is a link. We are delighted when Maureen Kainara comes to visit us. We love when Maureen Feniala Khan comes to visit us. When Terry Fitzgerald came along with her father Maurice it was absolutely wonderful. We were able to round up all the cousins. We had a big meeting in the local pub. People like John Rainey, Sean Rainey that I never knew I was related to but now I am. That came through because of the DNA system, the further cousins out. We are honored that you have come here. We hope and we pray that you will visit us back in Karnat. Back on the west coast where your people left. We will take you around by Clifton. We will take you back to Rimbain. We will take you to the islands. We will put you in touch with the people who can help you. We have photographs. We have church records. Myrus, well done to Terry Fitzgerald. We didn't have to do anything in the line of photographs. The photographs you saw there today was the church in Karnat where your people were baptized, where they married, similarly to churches through the villages. The graveyard of Myrus, there was graves going back there to 1668 when the Keynes, the Mcdonalds and the McGlynn's were sent there by Cranran. We have deep roots. All through the country. We pray that the DNA, there's a lot of praying going on here today, but we realize the value of the DNA because it merely attests to what we have already said and proven. I will now pass you on to Mr Joseph Cook. Good morning. I have a few names as she says. In Myrus I am Joseph of Kuik. I am also known as Joseph Cook. Sometimes Joe Cook. And my mother called me Josie Cook. And today I'm Sophie. Forevermore, where I come from, Nickname Stick. And sometimes they can be a great help to trace somebody. I'm glad to see that, a little from Maine again, I spent four days in Maine at one stage at a conference. It wasn't genealogy, it was lobsters. Great place for lobsters. I also did part of a television documentary in Colby College on James Trenton Connolly, the first man to win a gold medal in the Olympic Games and a great writer after that. Now, I am Sophie Cook, but again where we come from we have a kind of a biblical way of tracing back to the roots. Something like the Bible, the son of Abraham, the son of this and that way back. And in my case, I am, on my mother's side, I am Josie, the son of Maine, Josie, the son of Maine. Tom was her father, Sean was his father, Porick was his father again, Nehal was his father, Amon was his father again, and Muirra. Now that is, I mean my mother could recite that and other people in the area. Now, I won't bore you and go back to Muirra, but if we did, and if we took what I've been learning about genealogy that you're talking 30 years, you know, span for a generation, Muirra would be a young man when the War of Independence of America happened. The War of Independence. So, I can go back to there. On the other side, Cook, incidentally my mother was born in Chicago. This is another link. They went over there and she was born there and they came back. And in a curious way or whatever, she married a cook and she was born in Cook County. Now Cook County has 5 million people, I think, in Chicago. And so, and this Republic of ours would have 5,000 as well, or 5 million I should say. So I'm glad to see the main people and the people from Boston and Seattle and so on. I have good memories of days in America. I can tell you that. Now, Eileen spoke about our traditions. They can be very helpful if you want to get a grasp of what it was like for people before they immigrated. And I think that's important. And there is no better place to come to than Karnah and our centre which we are building. And I'll tell you why. First of all, the language in Karnah is mainly Irish, the Irish language. Most of the immigrants spoke Irish as you have referred to earlier. And there are examples of bishops in America. I could bring them up, but it would take a bit of time to talk about it. There are examples of bishops making special provisions for the Irish speakers streaming into New York, streaming into Boston and streaming into the other places. And as a matter of fact, this is the Irish language. This is very important. And most genealogists in Ireland, I'm afraid, dismiss it. I forget it. I think we might have a better chance with the Americans, quite honestly. But it is very important. The other day, when the bishop was in Cuba, he went to a place which is dedicated to a Cuban priest called Felix Varela. He is a hero in Cuba. He was sentenced to death in Spain. Spain controlled Cuba at the time. And he eventually ended in New York, in a high position in the church in New York. And he learned the Irish language, a Cuban priest, after the Irish streaming into New York. There you go. Will I talk about dancing? Will I talk about singing? I'm afraid to talk about singing in front of this lady, because Colomockean was something else, was something else. Over 200 songs. And when Alan Lomax, you've heard of Alan Lomax, the great American collector of folk music, who went around the world to collect the folk music of the world. When he came to Canada, where did he go? Where did Seamus Innes bring him? To Colomockean. Now there's another man, and you've heard of the great American folk singer Pete Seeger. Now Pete Seeger said at one time, I am acquainted with probably the best singer unaccompanied in the world, or one of them. And he said, that is Joe Heaney. Another relation, of course, in Colomockean. Joe Heaney, who was well looked after in America, I'm glad to say. Especially in Seattle. He was one of the best in the world. And his people are out there. I've talked later about dancing, and I'll do a few steps as well. But, you know, all of these things, I maintain that Karna could be a laboratory a genealogically laboratory, if you can imagine that. It is turning into that. From the point of view of giving a real picture of the real island they left. And we won't cover over the poverty and the hard times and that's part of our background as well. I'll talk about the dancing later now, and Michael Flatley. I just have one word to say about how we actually go around building the social history and how we put together the family history that we did in turn pass on to the Irish centre in Maine. Susan Cain and I work closely together. We actually go out into houses and we visit people and we take down their parents and their grandparents and who they were. And we have a list of names from of whom who would like to become acquainted with their people. We take down those histories along with the social history of that family in longhand and when the people come back from Maine we take them on a visit to the homes of those people. We've already sought permission and at that point then we do a DNA test. We have had wonderful successes with the DNA testing. We are absolutely delighted to have the Maine Irish centre on board with us and we are also delighted to have contact with other people such as the Fitzgerald family and various families all around America. We have higher regard for the Americans. We have higher regard for our own people who left the area who made a good living in it tonight out in the Sinterman Highlands Cross. We're putting on a concert in Monctown Monctown you'd be heading for to the concert and it is out there tonight that a lot of our wonderful channel singers will be Josie Jean-Jacques McDonough a lot of the young or good musicians from the current area and some of the people from Kyoto. If you'd like to go there the concert is there tonight it's at 7pm the reception is at 7pm and the concert follows at 8pm. I wish you luck and we're here to help you in any way that we can. Thank you. Can I ask Deb and Margaret and Leigh Ann and Pat to come up here to the front just around that area there because I'm sure there's going to be some people in the audience that would like to ask a question. We have one here from Gerard. That was absolutely amazing. This is exactly the type of project we should be doing for outreach connection for our diaspora. I was fortunate enough to know the great Seamus Ennis about the little boy and he was like the pipe piper of Ennis and we listened to the music and also his father by the way and my book was came from Conferred Leigh and I recognized all the names up there because these are my closest matches on empty DNA and also found in my big tree and our big tree results our cluster is called all the cluster by Leigh and I organized a gathering for them in 2013. We had a big group day set in Minnesota in Green Isle in Jessamland which is in the county of Sibley in St. Paul probably connection there and we brought them back to a gathering for the first language TG4 made a documentary on that which is called Paraguayia so I will send you a link to that in a few minutes but congratulations absolutely brilliant project. I encourage you to connect with Margaret before you leave and maybe exchange emails so that she can complete. She's a phoenix my role is common ancestor. So the question we don't have a question here from Mark second great project sounds like a great partnership on both sides of the planet so my question is you mentioned cost and I think you said maybe 80 people in Ireland have tested already how do you a lot of it that's we thank you well when we started we pay for it ourselves we would buy kids some kids we got a little discount and so we've been paying for it that's why we would like to do more but we can't keep paying for it all by ourselves so we'd like to help I was going to add something just in the case like of Joanne Riley Joanne is with the University in Mass and Joanne came to Connemara and she was brought by Joseph Cook and Mochino Kalman to meet her family and a member of her family had been DNA tested by the main person so we encouraged Joanne to do her own test and pay for it privately and we've done that with a number of people and that's how we add all people in the system without it being a direct task because the main thing can have been excellent with funding can I just ask a quick question on that point where do you want to get funding from and could anybody in the audience suggest as well where they could get funding for this type of project because I think this is going to be the template it should be the template for every single heritage centre in Ireland it really should where do you want to get funding from? the people of Maine are looking for money as well for their centres I'm not to cut across but I'll talk about our centre we're doing quite well we have money collected and the state is coming in which department? the Department of the Bay of Tugs at home diaspora affairs as well? 70-80% of the cost and it's gone out to tender it's gone that far now just a few very quickly you mentioned Minnesota I did a documentary in Minnesota some years ago of Kalamara people who are flattened out there on the prairies and told to become grain farmers can I imagine that so there is a film there can I just say sorry now to cut across one of the things that I'd like to say the centre in Ireland is being built on the site of the old boys school and the site has been fought for and I got from the Diocese of Chum now the fundraising is ongoing there's a lot and a lot of hard work involved in it one of the things that this centre is going to have is it's going to have a purpose hall so that the community can use it there's going to be a library there that's going to be run and open to the public there's it's not going to have a restaurant or whatever but anybody coming in can have a cup of tea we're going to have a lot of stuff there that people will be interested so we're going to run it as a business that will in turn fund a lot of the collection that is required to build the database so we're shy people as you notice so we're not going to look for we're not going to look for phones right now here at this time but if you have any millionaire friends anywhere or even even less money we would accept them so would the people in Ft. Maine I am sure just to finish from my side one of the highlights of my help to American people looking for their roots was the day I brought the sister of Dennis McDonough who is probably the most influential man in the White House at this minute when I brought him out to the cemetery in Muirus where she was looking for a relation of hers for a long long time and now we had cracked it and we brought her out and she stood at the grave and took a photograph it was very moving in the first place and the last thing Michael Flatley the dancing practiced by most of the people who left was Shamos dancing old style dancing step dancing that is a very loose kind of dancing but you do a few steps but a very loose-limbed type of dancing unfortunately very conservative people took over in Ireland and we had censorship and we had all kinds of things sex was a banned word you would say and they reckoned that this was nearly as bad as jazz in the early stages so they got our dancers to drop their sexy kind of dancing and then we had people with their hands down beside them you know, prim and proper anyway, when you come to Carmel we have the best Shamos dancers in Ireland in the world best Shamos now that's not a nightly boast that has been tested in national competitions and you have heard of River Dance now Michael Flatley was on our late late show on television one night and some of these Shamos dancers were there and he said the gay burden who is the host he says gay, that's where it all came from that's where River Dance came from so if you want the real thing come to Carmel I'd like to add I'd like to give death a last word because we have to finish of course we have to pass around some family trees we're going to give away a couple of DNA kits today so if you could fill out what you know of your family tree this box is out at the family tree DNA one of the small tables we encourage you to drop it in and we're going to draw our winner for the DNA kit after the next lecture we'll do that also while I have I divided the attention we brought a little main Irish Heritage centre gift to our friend Morris and to thank him for inviting us here so we're very much required and it only remains for me to thank you Deb and the entire team for a fantastic presentation it's one of the best projects I've ever seen in family tree DNA and I'd like to present you all with a free DNA kit in recognition of the amazing work that you're doing and a big round of applause for the main Irish Heritage centre and thank you