Happy New Year. I hope all of you had a great holiday season and are looking forward to an exciting year of discovery in your genealogy research. My plan is to continue to digitize my many file cabinets to consolidate and organize my records. My other plan is to spend at least some time every day writing. I have again signed up for 52 Ancestors, the program by Amy Johnson Crow which provides prompts for each week of the year. Yes, I have signed up in the past but I hope to be more focused this year. Since I only have one blog, you will see the 52 Ancestors blogs interspersed with other blogs. I'll try to have a bit of methodology in each one to give you some ideas to help with your own research. Here's to a great year!
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Having just celebrated Christmas, what immediately jumps into my mind is the first verse of the Book of John from the New Testament…”In the Beginning was the Word.” In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke there are two different genealogies of Jesus. Some scholars suggest that one is the paternal line (of Joseph) and one is the maternal line (of Mary). Robinson, Richard. “Are there two Genealogies of Jesus?” Jews for Jesus, 6 September 2022; online (https://jewsforjesus.org/answers/are-there-two-genealogies-of-jesus# : accessed 30 December 2024).
The various genealogies of Jesus go back to Abraham who is believed to have been born between 1800 BCE and 2000 BCE. What are the chances of errors there! No original sources, no primary information, no direct evidence. Sounds like researching the Irish… I’m happy if I can document an ancestor back to 1800 (CE).
The beginning of my genealogical journey was in 1992 when my daughter, Sarah, had a capstone project at the end of a gifted program prior to moving into high school. She knew no other Moughtys (other than a vague knowledge of some cousins) and teachers couldn’t pronounce her name...it sounds like Mooty. Her project was to find out about the Moughty family. Step 1 is start with what you know and check with other family members. Her Aunt came up with a box of documents including a Social Security Card, chauffeur's license and the document below.
Our Winter vacation that year was to Park City, Utah to ski. One day Sarah and I went into Salt Lake City to visit the Family History Library. Starting at the Help Desk, I pulled out the card and asked if it would help us find the manifest of Patrick Moughty’s arrival (Sarah’s great grandfather). The response from the person at the desk was “I’ve never seen an original.” Sarah and I looked at each other and said, an original what?” This was the card that was pinned to his coat when he arrived at Ellis Island. It led us to the Ship’s Manifest of Patrick’s arrival in the United States from Ireland.
Back at home, a first visit to the Family History Center at the LDS Church in New Canaan turned up two Bernard Moughtys in the Social Security Death Index. Bernard was Sarah's grandfather who died in 1980. The second Bernard Moughty died in New York in 1960. No one in the family knew of this other Bernard Moughty. That's another story which I solved eight years later. But here, a word of warning...just because the name is the same, it's not necessarily your ancestor! Naming patterns in Ireland (and in other areas around the world) lend themselves to having many people of the same name, born about the same timeframe, even living in the same area...even a name as unusual as Moughty.
The result was Sarah got an “A” on her project, and I got hooked!
Happy Hunting!
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