12:00 – 13:30 Seeking the Primrose Girls, 50 Irish immigrants to Canada from a Small Galway Town
with Martin Curley
Martin will describe The Mountbellew Orphan Girls Project—the Primrose Girls, which is research on a group of workhouse orphan girls who were sent to Canada from Mountbellew, Co. Galway, as part of an assisted emigration scheme. On 16 July 1853, they sailed on the Primrose from Limerick, Ireland to Quebec, Canada, arriving on the 6th of September. The girls’ passage was paid for by the Workhouse Board of Guardians as part of the same scheme which earlier had sent girls to Australia. In Quebec they were taken in charge by the Emigration Agent at the port, A.C. Buchanan, and sent to Toronto and Hamilton, where immediate employment opportunities were available. Through DNA and research the researchers are hoping to reconnect the girls to their families with whom contact was lost 170 years ago.
14:00 – 15:30 Finding the Poor and Destitute Irish
with Brian Donovan
Poor relief, dispensed by the church, the state or private charities, was available in Ireland at almost all time periods. The poor relief records have left information about millions of impoverished people from all over the country. Often these records date from before the Great Famine (1845–52) with information unavailable anywhere else. Given that the poor Irish were the most likely to migrate to America, these records are an essential resource for Irish research, and Brian will explain how best to get the benefit of their information.
16:00 – 17:30 Hunting Through Matches
with Mia Bennett
In this talk, Mia aims to help you identify who your DNA matches are and hence where they fit within your family tree. Often people are faced with just a list of names and no idea how to make them useful in expanding their family tree. Mia will present various hints, tips, tools and techniques to help make each match useful. The talk will cover many aspects: known people; tools to identify common ancestors; approaching a new match; grouping matches; dealing with matches where only limited information is provided; identifying overlapping trees; building quick and dirty trees; searching for surnames and places; and keeping records. Mia will also explain potential pitfalls of some of the tools and techniques. The talk assumes that the audience is familiar with traditional family history research.
My great grandfather and his family travelled from Galway in the summer of 1847 on the vessel “Midas” andlanded at St. John, NB. During the voyage his mother and perhaps one sibling died. a brother died on Partridge Island. This is all recorded in the book J. Elizabeth Cushing and Teresa Casey Robertson, Monica, editors, Chronicle of Irish Immigration to Saint John, New Brunswick 1847, A (St. John, New Brunswick: The New Brunswick Museum, 1979)