New Hegarty photo: my great-grandparents

Margaret (Deasy) and John Hegarty. Probably taken for their 50th wedding anniversary, at which time they renewed their vows.

Brooklyn represent!

I’ve been very busy with professional responsibilities lately, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but is why this blog has been quiet.

My eventual plans for this site are:

• rewrite the family pages to incorporate better sourcing, which will force me to analyze the material I have and hopefully clarify my next research steps
• scan some more photos
• read more relevant history

I am not really pleased with Ancestry.com’s new Irish databases, since they are mostly barebones indices. Many of them replicate information I already had from FamilySearch.org (because it’s the same info being indexed). I think I’m eventually going to have to join one of the Irish-specific sites, and probably also seek professional guidance, but that’s further down the road.

Today I just went through my “people with hints” list on ancestry.com, and discovered that some Deasy ancestors lived right here in Brooklyn! I love it when things get local!

New page: James Deasy’s ledger (10¢ Church, 40¢ beer)

I added a new page to hold the transcription of my great-grand-uncle’s ledger, which contains a Deasy family history and 3 months worth of a combined budget and diary kept in Cambridge in 1892. I can’t vouch for how reliable he is or isn’t, but it’s an interesting snapshot of an immigrant laborer’s days. Mostly work!

A few notes:

• Cambridgeport is a neighborhood in Cambridge, Mass. It runs roughly between Central Square and MIT.
• Kennedy Biscuit was the factory that made Fig Newtons and Lorna Doones. It is now luxury housing. A family cookie connection!
• According to this Lexington, Mass. history, Lexington had a whole community of immigrant Irish farmers hiring immigrant Irish farmhands in the 1890s.
• The Ivy Leaf was a melodramatic Irish musical theatre production, according to Gerald Bordman’s American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869-1914. (via Google Books)
• The Palace Theatre was in Scollay Square in Boston. There is a long discussion of the Palace Theatre at the Cinema Treasures site.

theatre poster for The Ivy Leaf