 It gives me great pleasure to introduce the next speaker and it is Martin Curley. Now, Martin is from North East Galway and he runs the North East Galway DNA project. He is so successful at the work that he does is that around Mount Bellew and Menloch, he is known as Mr. DNA. He's tested a huge amount of the locals and he's put together a local geographic project that is probably a beacon of hope for a lot of people who want to actually run similar projects themselves and he's going to tell us about the successes he's had with the project that you will get from joining these projects over and above just using your own DNA matches. So please give a warm welcome to Martin Curley. We love you, Maris. Thank you very much for a wonderful introduction. I hope in 14 minutes people will still be okay with that. So good afternoon everybody and thank you to Maris and thank you to Jared and thank you to the committee for inviting me here today. I'm going to talk a small bit about how I've used DNA and social media to connect and reconnect our local diaspora with each other and the picture that I have taken there is of two people walking down to where their great-grandmother was from and accompanied by a person who's about to introduce them to their relations. So I'm going to talk more about that a bit later on. But first I want to just introduce if there are members of the government here to where East Galway is and rural Ireland and people from East Coast know it quite well but maybe not members of the government. And just to see some of the surnames that we have there. Some of them are very, very local. A little bit about the history and a little bit about the diaspora. So just a small introduction to that. So first of all it's on the other side. And it's always been on the other side. Galway has a long history and long tradition of being the furthest away in one way. And we saw that yesterday and today in terms of DNA and how that the earliest migrants, they went as far as they could go and then we have our natural boundaries. As the comedians said the other day, the boundaries of Ireland, our border is the ocean. So Brexit and all of that. So we have Galway and we're going to be specifically talking about where is kindly introduced. This area here where I live now, where I'm from and just right here is where I grew up. And this area here is where my DNA comes from. So I can go back four generations is most places and they're all within that small locality. So what I'm going to try and do is to have a look and see some of those family names that are around there. And as you can see this is Abinak Moin. I've taken this from the Griffiths valuation and immediately rabbits pop out. And they may not pop out in other places but they pop out here. We have Mangans, we have Curly's, my own surname, we have Kelly's, we have Tracy's, Ford's, Murphy's, get around, Mullerys, Conway's and so on. And there are some names then that are kind of slightly uncommon. So we have Divneys or in some places they're called Divannies. And we have Gilmers. So there's quite a few that are spread around and Garrity. So this is a little bit better in detail of some of those names there. And some of you may have those in your family trade. Obviously a lot of us have Murphy's, but not too many might have Concanons. And Concanons were actually there for a thousand years as also were the Mangans. This is My Lot Parish. And now we have the Mangans jumping out here in My Lot Parish. And this was the civil parish of where I grew up. So you have other names there as well like Monahans, and Mahans and Kennedys that we're very familiar with. It's a bit of a cue second. I'll talk about them later on. And again, just a little bit of a higher resolution on that. So Gemsy's there, Kis is a very unusual name. And yet around our area we have loads of kits. This is Kilkern. And again, you see a little pattern here. There's some families that are there for, you know, in most areas. And other families like the Holians only show up in certain parts. Are the Hussies, okay? We're not talking about the older women here who may be a Hussie, but this is the Hussie family name. And so the Kilmartens, another name there. So again, some of those names. This is my own area here. Ruans, and Mahans, and Kellys, and Lallies, and Blates, and Dooley's, and Gerriti's. So when I'm growing up, I hear all of those names. And I think that's who's in the world. And then you go out and you find, it's like, how do you spell that name again? And Gerriti. I saw somebody here with the last name. Gerriti spelled slightly different than the way we would spell it. So this is Kiloran, which is Baligar area. And Kiline. And I'm going to talk about this particular family of Q's ex later on, who are in Kiline in 1855. And there's none there at the moment. If Lindsay is anywhere watching this, we have got your DNA connections as well, because the Lovens came from around there too. And another big name is Prehens. So these are the people that occupied our area. And these are the people that we'll talk about. So, if you look here at, this is the great site from Trinity College with the Down Survey. And you'll see that in 1641, the old manins were the chieftains in the area. This is my home village. And Robert Baron Trembleston, Robert Barnwell, Baron Trembleston, took it over in 1670. So I'm going to use those two names for a little story in a few minutes. So just to give you a little bit about the historical background, like most areas, this here again is from that 1670 down deposition a little bit more. But you see loads of manins, or manning. And they originated from our area. So a little bit about that. So this is a newspaper report from the area in 1843. They sent 100 police out to collect tights. And according to the person reporting, there was neither horse, cow, sheep, stack of corn, or potato pit to be found. A very impoverished area. And they came back with a considerable sum of 11 and three-quarter pints to pay. So that was 100 police, the county inspector coming out. So Mr. James Lynch of Winfield. And Winfield has a little connection here with Dublin because that was the estate that was bought by the genocents. And the genocents have Donny Brook Dublin 4 and they also have Winfield. And he was leasing it. And he was an esteemed gentleman and he kind of makes things good. So in terms of our history, we have a lot of people who have been displaced from there. That was one of the things when I was growing up, we didn't have too many people in the area. So we found out a little bit more about them. But there was lots of stories that were untold. This is from the 13th of April, 1847. And it's from Barnsville Grove. Lord Trimblestone, Barnsville Grove. I actually live in Barnsville Grove now. But it talks about a family. James Sweeney, Mary, his wife, and their son John, a lad about eight years old were found dead in Gilke. And this is during the height of the great hunger. So this is in a corner of a field. The father lying with his clothes on and his old hat beside him. The wife lay at a distance of three yards from him with the little boy's head and arms resting on her breast. This is what we experienced. And yet it wasn't spoken about. And the people that were affected by that, the Sweeney family, their neighbors, those stories were lost until we started to dig into the archives that started to come on in terms of Irish newspapers. This is from the Goal with Indicator of 1847. This is from 1848. And it talks about the landlord's agent coming down and, sorry about the blur in this, 35 families were dispossessed for non-payment of rent and 13 houses leveled to the ground. So this is 1848. So what happened to those people? There was lots, sorry about that, there were lots of people being evicted from the area. And here in this next neighborhood, Pat Riley, agent to the landlord, 12 people evicted on this particular day in 1849. So I've been looking at that history and looking at my own village. This is the number of people in it in 1841, 367, and in 1851, 176, almost 200 people are gone from that area. When I was growing up, there were 50. So it was always something in my head where did those people go to, what had happened to them, and obviously most of them had immigrated. And over the last number of years I've been trying to find them in records and sometimes got lucky. If you were in Iowa in 1925 and you had to fill in the census, you had to say who your parents were. And Henry Melody filled in the census. He was born about 1855 in Ireland. He was married. And he's living in Buchanan in Jessup County. And his mother was Catherine, the person typing it in put Doulay, which is very French, which was Dolan, which is very Galway, and Henry Melody. And when I looked at that record I knew I'd found somebody from Gilca because those are names that are common in our area. And sure enough, when I traced the family they were originally from our area. But that was several years ago, trying to trace family. It was a bit difficult. Then you had to try and reach out to them by email, try and find if somebody did a family tree, try and look up, as was mentioned earlier, around trying to find them in phone books, trying to find email addresses, and whatnot. DNA testing exploded, all of that, as we know. And so what I'm going to try and do now is just to show how I try to use the DNA to explore the different ways then to reconnect. So I started off first. I was invited by Brandon Curley in California and Brandon was doing the Curley-Surning genealogy. And if you see down here at the very bottom there are not too many Curleys. And the Kennedys and the O'Neill's and the O'Brien's you have thousands. I waited, I think, three years for my first Y DNA close match as in, like, maybe in the 1700s we were related. So the Y DNA, it's great for the CERNIN genealogy and it's wonderful to push and to find out a little bit about where the Curleys come from. It turns out that our family probably originated in the 1500s, so we're a bit later than a lot of Irish families. But going from that then, I started to explore ancestry DNA and autosomal, and to find out that, yes, I'm related to malicious, the king of Spain. Fantastic. Unfortunately, as was mentioned earlier, I got upgraded and my Iberian disappeared. So I'm actually destroyed here because I was hoping to get down here to the Basque country in Spain and say, high cousins. But the ethnicity isn't kind of like, you know, I kind of like was most interested in. It was a nice little bit of frosting on the cake. What I was most interested in was who were my relations and especially on my Curleys side and my mother's side, my grandparent's side. And I started off with, I think, 34. It jumped to 68. Fourth cousins are closer. This is three years ago, two years ago. It was wonderful. I had 178. And then after Christmas of last year, about three, four started popping up every day. So thank you to all the people who bought DNA tests for their long lost relations and give them as Christmas presents. And it started to go up. And now I've just over 300, I think, 355 at the last count. But who are they? And where did they come from? Obviously, when we're looking at fourth cousins, it's going to be much, much harder to try and link them in. When I did it at the start, I was really excited because I was able to go back and some family generations, five generations, which means fourth cousins. And then I discovered that fourth cousins on DNA doesn't necessarily mean fourth cousins on paper. So the disappointment was there, but also it led to other interesting discoveries. As we kind of said, well, I know who one person is on my DNA. Who did they share the match with and started to find out if we could find some people in common. And my DNA says, believe it or not, that I am from where my great-great-grandparents are from. So it's a goal way. And I share that with over 1,000 of my DNA matches. And the thing about goal way is that we have a long history, especially of going to America. But one of the surprising things that I found was that some of my DNA cousins ends up in Australia. Shouldn't really be surprised because quite a number of them went in the 1840s and 50s. And I'll tell a story about one of those immigrants a bit later on. So using that information, I started to try and find people then who are from the area, who are from close by. And so my curlies originally came from the parish of Abbenak Moai, so I started to put in who else to put down. Now, obviously this is based upon the fact that people have done their family tree and I've actually put in that location. But at the same time, I was able to do that. Obviously the ones who come up close are my own family. I know about them, but then it's a case of who's the most further out. So for this presentation, I just kept the close ones on the screen. Goal way. Who is from goal way? The distant cousins. Sadly, a lot of them want to have trees. They would have trees possibly hidden or trees not connected to the DNA. So it's a little bit of digging down. So over the course of the three years that I had my DNA, I was doing that. I obviously got it downloaded, put it on to Family Tree DNA, got it also on MyHeritage and got it on to Jetmatch as most people do now. Because using these combination, I was able to explore slightly more. So obviously on Family Tree DNA, you have your finders, you're able to go on the paternal and the maternal, so I was able to say who is slightly connected. But again, people who are being related for five generations away. So not quite too helpful and sometimes you have people who are coming up as cousins that sometimes you have no idea in connections. And somebody mentioned about MyHeritage and again, it's developing a better system because some of the matches don't seem to have any connection to Ireland. Jetmatch was one of the places obviously that most of us are very much aware of and how to use it and especially who matches who. Who matches one or both kids. So I use that quite a lot because if I know who is the person that I'm related to and then I stand and look to see who are the other people that we're both related to and to see do we have shared DNA and in common and to try and find that. So that is one of the main tools that I would use in helping then because if I know that this person is from Aguinoch Boy Parish or Menlo Parish, well then possibly the other person has roots in those places as well. So again, the whole idea of Jetmatch is looking here and hoping that you have a number under four because if it's over four you may or may not be able to find them. And thankfully I have in the last few years got quite a number of my own relations to do the test and through them have been able to do a little bit more. So what I'd like to talk about now is just how I start to use that first with a surname project and then have that developed into using it with an area project and the first one is the Manion Plan. Has anyone got any Manion roots here? Quite a few people okay, hello cousins we all come from the one Roos and it goes back to East Galway. And the person responsible for developing this and getting the history of it together has put together a brilliant website and it's all about the Warriors, Chieftains and Kings. So you may all bow later on to the Manion Kings in our midst here and the whole idea of that was to just to look back, Joe Manion who created this, this is Joe here giving the very first talk in August 2014, a wonderful book then to a guide to residential ceremony of various historical trail. He's really built up the Manion Plan over the last number of years and in 2016 I approached him and said to Joe about doing an Autism DNA group on Facebook. So to use Facebook because I was getting Manion matches and it was emails and it was messages on ancestry and I was finding people were connected to each other but how do I not just CC them into an email and I figured that the easiest way to do that would be to see if they use Facebook which was quite popular back before we realized all of our stuff was being taken and use Facebook to get everybody together and one person put up a picture and everybody else can see it and comment on it and make the links to it. So I set up a Facebook group for the Manions. It was a closed group so it was only people who had Manion ancestry could go in because some people would say oh I have a Manion cousin but I wanted to keep it so that way the discussion was purely on who your Manions are and that way we'd have a very concentrated discussion. Now when I took this snip it was 446 we're up just above 500 now and with the Manion group it was a matter of just communicating what was there so what I did is I started to ask people to share their DNA matches with me and then started to search their matches for Manion or MA in ION and if it was Manning in ING it was a matter of seeing were they in English Manning or in Irish Manning based upon their ancestral roots whether it was in Ireland or in the UK unfortunately Peyton Manning who we are hoping to have one of the great footballers, American footballers turns out he's got UK Manning roots rather than our own Manion. But I think I've got somebody here in a few minutes I think I've got for that loss to our plan. So by going through the DNA matches and then sending out a message and I kind of I know it kind of is a bit on the long side the message that I send out I wanted them to know that there was a place where they could come to and then I wanted them to know that they had a historical reason for doing that that we go back to the 8th or 9th century so as I said my own Curly Ancestries only to the 1500s here we can go back to the 7800s and we can also talk about just down the road. I was in Plontarch this morning the great battle of Plontarch in 1014 the Omanians were there and we actually know where they were because they were a part of the O'Kelly group that came up to help out the people from Clare and I see Paddy is here, people from Clare need a bit of helping out every now and then so the O'Grines need a bit of helping out the Golgalad said we will go and help you out and the dead, Paddy the dead the sort of things are, but the Omanians were right in the middle of it but to send an email, to send a message to the people who have Omanian roots and say you are a part of something bigger and you are a part of something that has a history that can be traced back I got a lot of responses and the group grew in numbers so that is going back to just two years ago to June of 2016 so what happened with that by 2017 we had gone from just a handful of people from the Diaspora coming to the Omanian gathering to now we have dozens and next year hopefully scores where people are starting to now because of Joe's wonderful work and to find their Omanian roots and to go back and to say this is the place sadly we don't have a nice big castle left you know how we helped us with the O'Kelly's they kind of turned on us and this is a little bit of our castle but you know what you can get your hands on your own castle I'm sure so these ladies here coming to honor their mom who had passed away who was their Omanian roots and this person hopefully will come in the next year or two if there are any Americans in the audience I don't know if you recognize this person here he was a running mate of Hillary Clinton he's Senator Tim Cain and this is Tim Cain's grandmother's father who is a Omanian and his Omanian comes from Tumon County Goalway so Tim Cain's great great grandfather and I had the privilege of having a phone chat you know how the previous speaker said about don't stalk but try and research so we got the phone number of Tim Cain's mom and we had a lovely conversation when she phoned me back because I left a message and I said I'm researching Omanians your grandmother and your grandfather were Omanians and I'm researching that and lo and behold she had done she's in her 80s and she had done a DNA test and so I was able to get her son who is not Tim but the other son to upload it to Jedmatch and in the Jedmatch group we were able to find a few cousins distant cousins but seeing as his mother had gone in 1825 from Tumon it was close enough to say we got somebody close by so when Tim or his mom, hopefully his mom and his siblings come were able to introduce them so if you're looking for famous relations you might want to check out your Omanian DNA roots there so that was the Omanians so how do we go beyond that and the opportunity came pretty soon afterwards because my main job is to deliver workshops to students in high school and in elementary school so in primary and secondary schools and I deliver them on how to research your family history or how to research your local area and I was working with a group of students in Baligar in East Galway and I mentioned to their my coordinator, transition year coordinator that it might be an idea to do a DNA test to invite their parents maybe a few of them might come on board but thankfully Ancestry provided enough of kits for each of the students' parents and so the students here they got their family tree sorted and then we invited the parents to come in to spit it's not normally that you would get a letter from school saying please come in and spit but they got one and I was told that it's kind of a one off by Ancestry so thank you very much for Ancestry doing that the difficulty arose in that communication then with the matches so the people who had done the test they're coming up as DNA matches but life catches up so that was in October 2 years ago and by January February I had people saying I haven't heard back from the person I'm matching one of the first people that came is Pat's Abernathy and Pat's great grandmother was a lohan from Newbridge in County Goalway and she left in 1849 as a 7 year old and Pat wanted to find out who were her lohan cousins and by coincidence the August previously in 2016 had gone on a tour of Goalway with a priest from the area Fr. Louis lohan and he brought her to Baligar and she sat down in a bar was chatting to a person and he said I'm a lohan too and she said would you do a DNA test and he did and when the results came back he was her third cousin so you never know who you can bump into and this is the other knife so this is if I get this right this is Fr. Patrick Mokler and this is Fr. Tommy Conway both from Newbridge and Goalway so they're first cousins and this Fr. Penny Mokler officiated at the wedding of this person Nancy's two children but Nancy and Pat were actually roommates in college so as she said there's only one degree of separation but only if you're from Baligar DNA tests and most likely they're all related there because they have got lohan connections as well and it's wonderful that this is happening because of what we're doing that people this is in Mississippi that they're gathering together and making the connections that were lost for 170 years so by March of 2017 I decided to put up a Facebook group as well for Baligar we have one for Goalway but to make it narrow because I'm getting a lot of people to have just Baligar so we did this and we have just over 370 members there's Pat there on that and the reason for making it very specific is because Goalway is a big county and Baligar is a small place so if people at Baligar who can you talk to and advise as well locals to join the group so people who had not done a DNA test but who knew the area invited them in so that way and literally this morning in another group where a person who's a neighbor of people who are looking for information and I was able to connect the two and say oh you know that Thahi family can you answer this so the person who answered it from the area has not done a DNA test but she's able to fill in the connections and that's what I like about the groups because we have a wide range of people in different places not everyone will be as good as this member who puts in their jet match number and then gives you not just the names but also a wonderful family tree sometimes I will get people say thanks for adding me and I'm like okay but I thought you wanted to find out who you were connected to so I suggest gently remind them can you post your ancestral information and your jet match number if you have it and then the ball starts rolling because then people want to find out who are they especially to find out a name like Cranon or Kilolay or Kilcommons or Lohan these are very specific to this area if you have those names in your family tree and you have East Gaul relations you want to check out his jet match number see are you related as well and to do that and there's where the social part of it comes about because it is a conversation people are chatting to each other people are finding out loads this family I kind of did a bit of research I saw a program on TV about a certain person I reached out to the family to find out and they came to Baligar to find them and they gave me a little bit of information that was able then to link them definitely to the area now apologies my phone is not too good and it was dark and it's a little bit crappy but this person here is the family historian and her family Catherine and Catherine's grandfather's name is Cusack so I mentioned Cusack's before I don't know if you know anyone in the world who's into acting who's a Cusack one or two people might be nodding their head here because Catherine we were searching for the family of Francis Cusack Francis Cusack and Margot Tracy their son Dennis goes to New York and Dennis's grandson grandson is an actor called John Cusack so through this group through the Baligar group we brought back John Cusack I was able to find through some friends we got the debt certificate that put him to Baligar but not just that we also found that one of the Cusacks who had stayed in Ireland and who was actually my friend's aunt who coincidentally is in Mississippi as well had done a DNA test and were able to match up John Cusack where he had come from in Newbridge County Goalway so again just the power of social media the power of making those community groups together so that way people can chat and talk to each other and then share that information just a story that kind of like touched a lot of us in East Goalway back in May it's about girls who left in 1852 and just to tell you a little bit about the background of it those girls were in the work house in Mount Bellew and it goes back to a lady that I was actually chatting to this morning up in Clungtarth a lady called Nula Healy Nula is passionate about her family history it's from an area close by me called Caramore in Abinac Moe Parish and in Caramore in 1861 62 the local landlord his name was Blakeney there's a village named after him in County Goalway Castle Blakeney the local landlord decided don't really want people in my area anymore in this townlet I want to put cattle in and want to put sheep in so if you see the big X's here those are the people whose land was gone and down here it says the few remaining houses are to be knocked down in May of 62 the whole village was wiped out now he gave them land but it was in a much more boggy area a place called Clungtain and because of that Nula's great-uncles immigrated and were never heard of again they immigrated to America and Nula wanted to find out about them so I was helping her out through ancestry through records, through immigration but to try and find a healing going to America in the 1870s 1860s is well-nigh impossible so I suggested to her in December just before December of 2016 to do a DNA test and to find out a little bit about the healies and where they were this Thomas Healy is her great-great-grandfather and he had 10 acres of land and worth two pounds and a house worth 10 showings so you're talking about maybe a two-roomed house there at best and lo and behold were able to find the family that had gone to Philadelphia and so Nula's DNA results worked these here are her second and third cousins in Philadelphia and were able to get in touch with them and find out a little bit about them and who they married where they are today but Nula also had another name which was kind of unusual, Hensbury and it's very local in our area so I was doing nothing one afternoon and I decided to have a look for the Hensbury's to see Nula's matches and one of the matches that came up was this one and managed by Kin and Catelyn so as I did I responded to the match and I said that I'm looking for this match of Hensbury, there were fun men there and I got a response from Kin to say that his Ellen spent time in the Mount Bellew Workhouse and we were part of rather I was a part of a group of four that were researching that particular group of girls who had gone to Western Australia and they had gone on a ship called the Palestine and this is the debt record from the Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser in 1917 about Mrs. Ellen Daly she had got married, she had family she died at the advanced years of 80 years so one of those girls we now had an end story for her and a little bit about her life she had lived in Sydney in East Madeleine for nine on 60 years and then she was a native of Ireland didn't say where we're able to confirm that it was her Ellen Hensbury, this is the group of girls Ellen comes up there again Kilroy, Mayans that are leaving and we're able to confirm through the DNA that she her descendants and Nula were actually a match predicted fourth cousin or so but it could be on different sides of the family so I just wanted to make sure it was a Hensbury connection so I looked at other Hensbury's that I had and I found that yes they shared common DNA in the same place it was a definite Hensbury match and this is Ellen's family tree going down to the person who matched there's a picture of our husband no picture sadly of Ellen but pictures of our children her grandchildren and also the family were able to show where the family lived in Sydney sorry about that from poverty in Ireland to a pretty nice place in Sydney any Australians in the audience so you might have Dramon, I don't know if that's familiar with you so there's the daily family home and this is the daily grandchildren of Ellen Hensbury so this is in 1928 and one of their children the great grandson came to visit in August of 2017 rather with his wife so they came to visit and we brought them back to where Ellen was from and introduced them to the newest Hensbury relation of a few months old so making those connections was important and not just kind of like just one family the group that we had Paula Kennedy, Captain Connolly and Mary we gathered together as many descendants as we could and there's a wonderful documentary on RT's nationwide this is the kin that responded so in May last year we gathered the descendants of as many of the girls that we could find and brought them back and kin spoke about this is Nula's brother Christie the bond that was immediate with the family because they recognized the cousins they recognized the cousins from the family in Australia so bringing those stories together is a big part of what we do in the groups and trying to find maybe a common this is John Lander I'll just go back here to Cameron so Cameron and kin are first cousins John Lander the great grandson of a girl sent to Australia from Palestine Brideship he was the former ambassador to the Islamic Republic he was the first ambassador actually from Australia so when they restored ties with Iran the Islamic Republic after 1979 he was sent down there so there's amazing stories that we're finding through DNA through connections and bringing back home Michelle here is another descendant this is the graveyard in the old workhouse that we have now restored and we have put up a plaque there there's 825 people that died from 1864 to 1900 and we put up their list of names on the workhouse graveyard and Jim Fahey and Michael Blanch of the commemoration committee for the victims of the Irish hunger finally donated a plaque as well so there's a plaque there for those who died there were victims of the great hunger and obviously Ellen and the other 29 were so what is the advantage to having localised groups we already have wonderful groups with thousands of members I think 5,000 but it's probably a lot higher the Irish DNA registry 4795 the Galway genealogy group has got 877 that was going back a few months ago so there are wonderful groups out there so why set up new groups for me when I'm looking at the Galway group this is Galway from Banalaslow to Clifton you're talking about a 3.5 hour journey so if somebody asks for a query about something happening in Banalaslow nobody in Clifton will know when I need something from down here I ask Pather or Jim because they're connected to this area of Galway so the idea was to make it very specific and how I put them up was through the poor law unions because they became the registration districts so when people are looking at birth certificates they will see the poor law union they were born in Montbelieu now Montbelieu is a big place but that they could be here so again to narrow it down so what I did is to build it within the parish and within the parish again as I said before what I've done is to invite people who have not done the DNA to still join because they're the ones who are going to be giving the information so a person is coming on and asking for information about a particular family and they've done the Jed match they've done DNA but they don't know the local knowledge so it's a matter of getting it down that way and again the numbers in the groups were up to almost 400 in some groups and we have some other successes I wanted to mention this finally this was the former Cahirla the chairperson of Galway County Council two years ago he's got mangan roots and because I've been talking about the mangan DNA he said let me do a DNA test and he did and it came back and it said couldn't do it because you'd have to retry as some people have found so I was like yeah go ahead do it so he went and did it and sat down we started looking at his relations and the first person that we kind of looked at was Barbara and Barbara was coming up as a second cousin and she had done a family tree so we looked at the family tree Barbara's last name was Donahoe Michael here, Michael Conley his grandmother was a Donahoe and Barbara's family tree had Michael's grandmother's twin brother on it and that was it it turned out that William Donahoe had gone to America he had married his wife had died so his wife's family took in the children and then he died young and all they knew was there was a Donahoe in Ireland which is quite an easy name to research I'm sure and to find a Donahoe in Ireland so 35 years trying to plot through and eventually they kind of like got a death certificate which is said that Donahoe his parents were Donahoe and Cougan so they kind of narrowed it down to East Galway and then Michael's DNA said this is family second cousin and what happened is that the family were reunited this is Michael and Barbara first time of meeting second cousins Barbara brings home with her 19 family from California to go back Michael brings his first cousins and their families together they go to the size of where William had left and there unveil a plaque to the whole lot of the families I started with talking about why I was interested and now there are people making those same connections there's an interest the DNA Barbara now she put this up here on Facebook yesterday I said can you send some pictures because I'm doing the presentation she sent it up and to gather people together to say we are family after 100 years of separation but then to join the local community groups or if there's a family group around to join those and to connect and while the huge groups are fantastic for answering questions that are very general the smaller groups I feel are fantastic for reconnecting people and people say oh I know who that person is they're down the road from me so I also invited Morris and Paddy and Jared last year to a genetic conference in Galway and there we explored people's jetmatch numbers people started talking we have a few in the audience today that said you're my cousin you're my cousin it was terrific it was a conversation so we're hoping to do that again on Saturday May the 4th in Montpellier and to invite people again last year's conference to this year's conference we're going to have maybe a doubling of people in the area who have done the DNA and also have uploaded to jetmatch I have to include here Sean Tracy from Houston, Texas Sean has done DNA through family tree DNA of about 60 people from a small area called Kiltala it's between Kilkernan Glenamady and County Galway and because I see Sean's email addressed in our jetmatch if a person has two or three of them I invite them to the Clonburn group because I know that they have some connections there and there they're able to say who their family was and then we can reconnect them to the family so I hope I answered some of the questions that Morris had sent to me which I had a quick look at last night again so Karameela Mahagif and thank you very much for listening I appreciate it I think your presentation really illustrated how powerful it is creating these Facebook groups where the local people with the local knowledge can help the Diaspora Irish to reconnect with their ancestral homeland and that's something that Ireland Reaching Out we're trying to do we can talk a little bit about that I was a part of Ireland Reaching Out I'm the parish administrator still and Ireland Reaching Out is a fantastic program to know if you're familiar with it and the gathering it had in 2013 that led to the Irish gathering the idea there was that the local people would research the records and then reach out so in one way I'm kind of doing that but instead of looking at the local paper records I'm looking at their DNA profiles and I'm kind of picking out who's born in Avionakmoy who's born in Minda who's born in my law and then saying please join this group you've got relations here and then find out who those relations are on the ground bring them together on social media and then hopefully we'll bring them together as well like Judy will be coming down to Galway and we're going to track her mangins in gloves and next door and just invite them to say come seek Galway even if you're not a government minister Well Kieran Cannon did come down and made, didn't he? He did, he's local he's from Kiltala which is great and it's great to have the minister for the diaspora from our area because he's well aware of what's going on there I was very encouraged by his speech because he was actually very complimentary about DNA testing about the work that you'd done on DNA testing in the area so it was great to see that I came away certainly feeling that DNA had been normalized in the area where you've done so much work If you went to a person about five years ago and said would you like to do a DNA test then kind of look for the horns at the back of you and stuff now it's kind of like that DNA test where can you get it from at first, I'm getting those questions all the time and so thankfully answers you down there have a nice sale, family tree DNA have a nice sale, my heritage has a nice sale and it's great that those companies now will be taking some back to East Galway and having a few more people test the speaker before had spoken about older people testing so one of the difficulties obviously is SPIS as opposed to that and you know there's ways around it but at the same time for me it's nice to do an ancestry test which you then download and then you can go and put them on the other sites and the oldest person that I've had do a test it was a friend who had done a test because she was a relation she was aged 100 when she did the test and it came back straight away so it was good, it was family tree DNA so well done to them that was tested in the audience has anyone tested more than a 100 years old Jim Holleram and Peter 101 he has your bet when did you test 4 years ago ah there goes my maths, well done guys well done Jim, well done the only consolation is their manuals that's a big consolation any questions for Martin yeah Donna actually because I've just started a group like this for the pioneer settlers in New Zealand fantastic and I have to say this is absolutely brilliant because this is exactly what I'm looking for like a template to run but I just wanted to ask you a practical question in the background are you keeping our spreadsheets of DNA kit numbers or doing anything else in the background or kind of just letting them test and get on with it in the Facebook group I invite them to put their numbers up on a page on files so people who are just joining can go and see the other jetmatch numbers and I have an Excel spreadsheet as well on that and I've done that on a few of the other groups it doesn't always work but it's worthwhile to do so putting a file and just putting jetmatch numbers in it and to kind of done that I thought I had no I have it in for the panel discussion what to do with that and basically when somebody comes in then I'll say can you look at the jetmatch numbers but now we've got like 400 manian jetmatch numbers so it's kind of hard so it's for me now to say okay this person is from this area let me check if they're related but I look down to their list and I see they're in their 2000 to see who do I recognize and seeing them in that way but it's a matter of having it in your head but also making sure that other people can access it as well thank you very much great, thank you Donna great question, we've got a few here I'm going to go to Andrew first and then I'm going to come down now we do have a social, we have a panel afterwards where we're going to be discussing Martin's project the main Gale Touch project the registry project and the Clare Roots project to look at the different ways that these local geographic projects are actually conducting the work that they do so that you can compare and contrast to see what kind of methods they're using and if any of you are interested in starting a local project you can pick and choose from the array of different methodologies which is the best one for you there's no right answer, no wrong answer there's a variety of different ways to skin a cat that's the panel after this Martin, is there a directory of all these local projects somewhere? they're in the Galway DNA project if you join the Galway DNA project in files I have a word document and what I've done is just put up those and I pass that on to Morris as well so it's in the directory here so basically if you're looking for somewhere in East Galway if you type in the name the parish and type in DNA it should come up there have I just knocked myself off? probably your batteries have just died sorry, it should come up there's also the ISUG Ireland website which is I'm going to get you new batteries for that the ISUG Ireland website which will have a list of some of the local projects in Ireland in fact we're trying to expand that all the time so ISUG Ireland would be a good place to go there was a question here yes, here we go I just wanted to share as well as DS4 guys there are many many many of these types of groups I've got one in Cork I've got one in West Galway I've got my Newfoundland Costelos so it is a broad community that's developing just look for your place there probably already is someone starting something up already to join thanks very much for that comment because I think that is very very important that we actually have a central area where all of these the projects can actually be put put up do you want to comment on that? yes that's great and especially one of the groups that I kind of referred back to is the main Irish project as well with Matthew Barker he's amazing in Portland, Maine and if there's this Irish and I know there's a West Galway group as well and again it's going down to families I've got my own descendants of my Reynolds, Blade and Mordens who are in a small place called Liss in Avionak Moi in 1800 so those families now are spread around the world and again it's true there have been refugees in some parts several of them end up in 1851 senses in North which in Cheshire and they live together and there's a two year old who is born in Ireland so when I was going back and researching that I found that the local landlord had actually evicted quite a number of families and these were the refugees they're now in Australia they're in England, they're in America they're either Reynolds, Mordens or Blades and it's great to have a Donlan connection as well because Gerrit here, myself we're working on the Donlands just around the D'Amour, Glenamadi Clunburn, my law areas and Chum areas that there's a concentration of Donlands there and the DNA is coming back to say that we have shared ancestry that shared ancestry is probably from the late 1600s, early 1700s and there's a ton of family and Joe Metz in Cincinnati who has done amazing work with his extended family there but yet there's tons of connections being met and it's a matter of just finding the right group for you and if it's not there, set it up Very encouraging words and also if anybody knows of any groups that aren't on the ISOG Ireland web page and just Google ISOG Ireland and you'll actually come to it and you'll also see local autosomal DNA projects please send me that information so I can update the page and that way we can have a one stop shop for all of these local projects parish by parish throughout every county in Ireland that would be the aim and that would help the diaspora with the local roots and the local people find cousins that have been missing for 150 years like you said one last thing, we're going to have a panel discussion afterwards and we'll take a lot of the questions at that one as well I'm missing something Dan and Minnler today my dad's second cousin is a hundred so what I'd like if it's possible Mars if we could sing Mary a happy birthday from everyone up in Dublin some of you might be her relations but if we could sing now we're heading back to Mars one, two, three happy birthday to you happy birthday to you happy birthday dear Mary happy birthday to you very good thank you very much we'll set up for the panel discussion but take a five minute break and come back to join us then