Roots

The search for documents continues vis a vis Irish citizenship, and my interest level surges and then diminishes because finding documents and then obtaining them even when you have all of the information about how to get them is darned challenging.

The folks in Ireland couldn't find my grandfather's birth record, but I knew what it looked like in scanned versions on the Internet. So I called Ireland early one morning and guided them to the page and then the part of the page on which the record was to be found. Sure enough, the certified version arrived a few weeks later.

American records are proving much more difficult. Pop was born in the state of NY, and those guys are TOUGH with their records. Getting his birth record was going to be impossible, but I have his certified copy from the City of NY that he used to get a passport in 1970-something, and that's what I'm going to use.

My grandfather's death certificate was the toughie. A few years ago I looked, but didn't know the location of death. I remembered from conversations with my aunt many years ago that the "country place" as they called it, was situated at the crossroads of several municipalities. They paid partial taxes to each. I have spoken to or corresponded with each of the registrars. Some were allowed to answer questions, and some were not. Each had elaborate conditions I would need to fulfill in order to even ask for the death record.

Eventually I remembered that I had some contracts related to the sale or rental of the house. I looked in them and the house did not have an address. It was at this point that I was feeling overwhelmed and decided to hire someone with more experience than I to help me through the hard parts. At about that time I discovered two things: a) I might need a court order to obtain a death certificate and b) I found the NY death index and learned the death cert # and locality of death. Whew.

The intricacies of this whole project are pretty daunting. My grandparents were unmarried (to each other!), which for Irish records folks is unusual. And my grandfather often misstated his mother's first name (half of the children called her by one name in records and half of the children used another). And he lied about his age. So there will be extra documentation and affidavits to produce. None of this is cheap, either. But I want to prove that I can do it.