Is Meets Was

Greek Like Me?  has just been published on Lulu.com. I wrote this book to provide a vehicle for teaching our grandchildren and great nieces and great nephews about their Greek heritage. Greek? Take a peek. If you have a story to tell, you may want to use a similar approach. The book is 79 pages filled with illustrations and easy prose designed to provide children with an overview of Greek history from ancient times until the 1930s. In presenting a series of major historical events, I tried to provide a vision of how these events impacted one town in Greece and the lives of the ordinary citizens of that town, especially the family of Pavlos and Irini.  Also, I have published a private version of the book for family members only. The private version, called Koroni, Pavlos, and Irin i, includes an extensive set of charts displaying our family tree. Family members may contact me for the website address of the private version. © 2011, Cathy H Paris

Meet Timothy and Margaret Ford of County Cork with two of their daughters, Eliza and Margaret, and two of their sons, whose names are still to be discovered. Timothy and Margaret are my great-great-great-grandparents. I have known their names for only two days. Based on a consultation last year with Maureen Taylor, the Photo Detective, I believe that the above picture of Timothy and Margaret with four of their children is a photograph, possibly taken in the 1880s, of a daguerreotype dating back to the early 1850s. On Saturday I went to a class on New York City research offered by the California Genealogical Society (CGS) and taught by CGS’s President, Steve Harris. Steve told us about an indexed collection of probate records, New York, Kings County Estate Files, 1866-1923, now available for viewing at familysearch.org. I perused several of the probate files and oh joy! I found a probate file for one of Timothy and Margaret’s daughters, Catharine Ford. The file rev...

Mrs. Kramer, Aunt Gus (Augusta Bals), Mrs. Hughes, Frances Grant, and Aunt Marie (Marie) Bals of Flatbush c. 1915 Cathy Merrill holding Stephen Cidlowski and Christine Cidlowski and Laurie Press Happy Halloween! I can't find any photos of my parents or their parents celebrating Halloween. That may be why I especially cherish the above photograph of my great-aunts. At the time, my aunts were still living with their parents at 32 Kowenhoven Place, Brooklyn, Kings County, New York. The next photo was taken in my parent's backyard in Valley Stream, New York about 1957. Right now, I am sitting at the computer and waiting for the next group of children to ring the doorbell, wishing my grandchildren lived nearby. Hopefully, by tomorrow I will see photos of them in their costumes. In the interim, the last picture is a collage showing my three grandsons, all superheroes, and our granddaughter, a very serious-looking bug. Two of the photos were taken last Halloween and t...

Knocking down one brick wall after another over the last decade, each celebration of victory has been dampened by a twinge of guilt for not tackling our gaping hole. For our family, the gaping hole is our Greek heritage. When Nick and I were first married, we enrolled in a conversational Greek class, knowing that we wanted to meet his uncles, aunts, and cousins living in Greece, the homeland of Nick's father. That was 39 years ago. With the advent of 2010, we still hadn't learned Greek or met his uncles, aunts or cousins living in Greece. And we know so little about our Greek genealogy!  For the other branches of our family, we have family history information extending back at least to the 1850s.  Not so with the Greek side of our family! Rather than delaying a trip to Greece until we could overcome the language barrier and establish a relationship with Nick's cousins, we decided to enjoy Greece as tourists, deferring the finding of family to another trip. We arrived in ...

As a young man of 25, Ebenezer Webster left Ireland, sailing to India in 1887. He served the Methodist ministry in the Negapatam District for 24 years, rising to the position of Chairman.   A contemporary of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), Ebenezer Webster (1861-1954) "... was a scholarly man, and found much pleasure in reading good books.  He had great understanding, sound judgment, and a capacity for friendship that enriched all his work.*” In 2006, I had the good fortune to meet Sarah Pickstone of Vancouver, Canada who shared with us a family treasure, her grandmother’s album, the source for the above video. Sarah is my husband’s third cousin, and Sarah's great-grandfather, Ebenezer Webster, was the tenth and youngest child of   Henry Webster and Agnes Low . *This quote is from an article about Ebenezer circulated amongst family members without a source citation. © 2010, Cathy H Paris

Bradley Lake in Andover, New Hampshire     2002 by Cathy H Paris Little Mary may have been the price the Fitzgeralds paid for coming to America.  By the fall of 1852, James, Betsey (Graney) Fitzgerald, and their 3 sons had joined James.  What happened to little Mary?  Was she with her sister, Joanna, on the other side of the pearly gates?   In June of 1853, James and Betsey welcomed a new Mary into the world, the first of five children to be born in Andover, New Hampshire.  Mary was followed by Lizzie (1854), Annie (1856), James E. (1857), and Nellie (1861).   Meanwhile, back in Ireland, the family of Henry Webster and Agnes (Low) was growing too.  Like James and Betsey, they had 10 children.  Their first four children were born in Scotland:  Jessie (1845), John (1847), Henry (1848), and James (1850).  I don’t know where their fifth child, Margaret (1852), was born.  Their last five children were all born in Ir...

Sometime in the 19 th  century, the landlord forced the families living in Killelton to leave. James Fitzgerald’s wife, Elizabeth Graney, may have been one of the people who were evicted. The ruins of the abandoned village  are a reminder of the people who once lived there.   On our incredible journey to Ireland in 2008, we stopped in Dingle and found a living Graney, who spelled his name a bit differently. He said more Graneys lived over the hills on the northern shore, reinforcing our belief that our Graneys came from Killelton.  Killelton is across the peninsula from Dingle, the mountainous terrain separating these two coastal communities.   We returned to the car and continued along the road, heading around and across the peninsula. We stopped at a delightful pub in Camp, the John Ashe, for a bite to eat and an opportunity to chat. The proprietor didn’t seem to know any Graneys, but he reassured us that we were not far from Killelton.  We g...