Welcome to the web pages I have created while researching my own family roots in southwest Cork! I hope you find them useful. My objective is to keep this information open and freely accessible to site visitors. However, original materials are under copyright and should not be copied.
This is the website I wish I had in the spring of 2009, when I decided I better get serious about researching my mother's purely west Cork family history.
Since there was so little information online, or only accessible on rolls of film, Skibereen Heritage did some of the initial research. Eventually, church records started going online and I started looking at land valuation records on film. The unreadability and illegibility of many of these records was disheartening, to say the least.
Gradually, I started to realize how inaccurate record indexing could be. How, I wondered, are people supposed to be able to FIND anything?!? (I've lost count of the corrections I've sent to Find My Past for their indexing of R.C. church records.) That concern, plus the need for a place to put my leftover research were the impetus for this website. I was hoping to take over the County Cork web pages for a major British Isles genealogy website, but those plans did not materialize. In December 2010, corkgen.org was launched. Making data more accessible became the goal.
Skibbereen Heritage, incidentally, has subsequently done enormous amounts of work on my mother's family history and in some ways may know it better than I do. There are a few reasons for this. The people who work at the Centre are all area natives so they know the location. And, they can do something that no website or digitized record can do - go talk to the locals. If you have ancestry from the area, they just might be able to turn up a relative for you still there. You won't know unless you make an inquiry. If you're planning a visit to Ireland and you are some generations removed from the immigrant ancestor, it doesn't get any better than that. Their services are highly recommended. Please give them your business and support!
Please see Latest News for more on more recent website changes and info on the 2020 remodel.
This website is implemented with plain and simple HTML markup along with CSS, Javascript and some PHP. The website does not use a database or logins accessed by visitors.
I do not use Content Management Systems like Wordpress for a reason; they rely on databases and are more vulnerable to being hacked. The logs on my hosted space show continuous attempts to break in to the website through loopholes and vulnerabilities in commonly used CMS's. I once had a Wordpress installation on my hosted space. It got hacked, and I vowed Never Again. Nor do I entirely trust my ability to make a database completely hack-proof.
Behind the scenes, the tools I use for development are a web page editor; Java; XML with XSL; PHP; and MySQL with a desktop database. For graphics I use Corel Draw and Microsoft Paint.
I purchase the hosted space (renewed annually) and the domain (renewed November 2020 for five years).
The following people deserve my thanks for their help and support of this website, either monetarily or with content, materials, or other assistance:
Ann Marie Coghlan, Cork genealogist - I rarely visit the Facebook groups but I know she publishes corkgen.org links and promotes the site there.
Eddie Wallace - the man who keeps things running at the Cork Genealogical Society.
Tommy Collins - friend, fantastic proof reader and provider of materials.
MC, Canada - former research client.
DC, Florida - former research client.
Frank at BMDNotices - you've provided some useful links.
Pat Crowley, Ireland - friend, proof reader and PROLIFIC transcriber and provider of materials!
Bruce Hamilton - proofreading assistant and a map artist!
JH, Wales - friend and provider of materials.
Margaret Murphy, Skibbereen Heritage - probably knows my family history better than I do, is probably a distant relative, has provided useful historical information
Patrick Johnson, Australia - genealogy friend, fellow DNA project member, and former research client.
PMorrisey - thanks for the formatted materials!
Margaret Jordan, Ireland - genealogy friend helping with Cork Ancestors materials.
Jean Prendergast, Ireland - thank you for letting me salvage your website!
I am not a genealogy or genetic genealogy professional; rather, I was a Mathematics and Computer Science major in college and am a retired software engineer now. My husband and I enjoy a private, quiet life. We have commitments, obligations and interests outside genealogy.
I grew up in Los Angeles County in Southern California after my family moved out there from New York. I met my husband when we worked for a high tech company in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. He got interested in genealogy some time in the 1990's and he worked on his own family history for years before I caught the genealogy bug. My husband ordered his first genetic DNA Y test of 25 markers in the spring of 2003 at FTDNA. At some point in the early 2000's we both read "The Seven Daughters of Eve" by Bryan Sykes (now a little outdated - but still a great read). Then I got interested in genetic genealogy. (Actually, my interest in DNA was first seriously sparked in a high school biology class in 1974, but life circumstances were such that I never attempted to pursue a career in it.) We took the basic mitochondrial DNA test at National Geographic (no longer offered) to learn our parent haplogroups. We were both haplogroup H - no big surprise there, as some 40% of people with European maternal line ancestry fall into that major parent haplogroup. In 2009 we took the full sequence mitochondrial DNA test at FTDNA. I learned that my more refined haplogroup (a subclade under H) was somewhat rare in western Europe. That got me thinking a lot about my grandmother, and the few days I spent with her in the summer of 1974 when I first traveled to Ireland. That ignited the genealogy spark, along with a lot of regrets that I did not have a notebook on hand during that trip, interviewing my grandparents. I was also among the first autosomal DNA testers at FTDNA in early 2010.
One of the reasons why my husband and I chose Salt Lake City as our retirement home is because it is the location of the headquarter Family History Library. It is accessible by foot, by bike and by train from where we live. Sometimes I attend the British Institute's genealogy session at a hotel by the library.
In addition to researching and authoring for this site, I voluntarily administer several County Cork related genetic genealogy projects. My work at the Cork Ireland DNA project, which I co-administer, is limited mainly to the maintenance of the information pages at FTDNA and giving a research pointer or two if someone asks a question in the FTDNA Activity Feed. Every few years I collect statistics on County Cork yDNA and update a pie chart. There is also an ongoing County Cork mitochondrial DNA study there, to discover any Cork maternal haplogroup clusters. The remaining 99.9999% of the work for the Cork Ireland DNA project is really done on Facebook and in GEDMATCH by some dedicated volunteers, including professional Cork genealogist Ann Marie Coghlan. The Y DNA surname projects I administer are all County Cork relevant: Collins; Connolly; Driscoll; Herlihy and Hurley; Hourihan and Hor(ri)gan. In 2018 I was asked to take over the Corca Laidhe regional Y DNA project. It got overhauled into more of an archaeogenetic study of Cork. This study carries with it dozens more Cork and Munster surnames.
Occasionally, I put research notes up on my blog skibgene.blogspot.com. Some are relevant to my own family and some are not. This is part of the fallout of researching one's own family history. I believe that if you're doing your genealogy research right, you end up with a ton of data on who you are NOT.
If I ever have a chance to visit Cork, I try as much as possible to photograph Cork tombstones and upload photos and transcriptions to findagrave.com as contributor 47408455.
Because of various difficulties, my email pen pal list is restricted, I do not hang my email address "out there" and I rarely assist people directly any more, except maybe in my projects. My "real" time is spent on books (fiction, history), music, movies, art, sewing, knitting, gardening, improving my physical fitness, whole food plant-based cooking, and walking our dog.
Future Irish-side genealogy endeavors include writing about and publishing my mother's family history and maybe some research on the Corca Laidhe. There is also an Italian side to me which is a whole other avenue of research!