Comments on: A Needle in a Paystack http://currach.johnjtierney.com/2011/03/a-needle-in-a-paystack/ Discovering my ancestry before the canvas frays. Fri, 24 May 2013 20:20:07 +0000 hourly 1 By: John http://currach.johnjtierney.com/2011/03/a-needle-in-a-paystack/#comment-3471 John Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:35:48 +0000 http://currach.johnjtierney.com/?p=2257#comment-3471 Just a fast update from your blog host: The nearest matches returned from my FTDNA 37 marker results are with folks in the McTiernan surname group.

I match two people at a genetic distance of 1, so there’s a good chance our most recent common ancestor (MRCA) is somewhere in the 1790 – 1850 time frame I think.

While those closer matches do not know their Irish family origin location, others that are a bit more distance matches in the McTiernan group have locations in Leitrim and Roscommon listed.

]]> By: John http://currach.johnjtierney.com/2011/03/a-needle-in-a-paystack/#comment-289 John Fri, 01 Apr 2011 01:08:42 +0000 http://currach.johnjtierney.com/?p=2257#comment-289 When you sit and think about it, the IFHF has a difficult balance to maintain – provide a vehicle to find relevant records without giving away the farm in doing so.

The two methods in use by companies both have pluses ad minuses -

The pay-per-record model means you need to keep the info close to your chest and risk annoying customers with false positives (and worse for researchers – false negatives!)

The subscription model (like Ancestry) means you have to continually strive to provide more records to keep people subscribing. While the genealogy field seems to be in a growth phase, subscribers are still a fairly finite resource and acquiring and digitizing new records takes a lot of effort.

I was less happy with IFHF before the advanced search went online – there was no way I could keep dropping €5 per record. The staged pricing model takes some of that sting away.

A few months back I did find my great-grandfather’s naturalizaton at the NYC NARA – but in 1885 it wasn’t much more than name, address, occupation and country of origin. I was counting on that record to bail me out, so was disappointing.

So, now I’m waiting for my Family Tree DNA 37 marker test to come through, hoping I match others in the Tierney Clan surname group that know where their ancestors hailed from.

I’m also casting a wider net by trying to find out if any of the other Tierneys in NYC 1850s onward might have been related. I’m slowly OCRing the city directories and plan to map out their locations in the city and occupations and see if any patterns emerge. If so, I’ll try researching those folks and see what sticks.

If all of that fails, I’m really counting on the Easter Bunny to bring me a surprise.

]]> By: Nathan M. Needle http://currach.johnjtierney.com/2011/03/a-needle-in-a-paystack/#comment-288 Nathan M. Needle Thu, 31 Mar 2011 23:05:41 +0000 http://currach.johnjtierney.com/?p=2257#comment-288 Good luck finding these folks in Ireland! I can’t stand dealing with IFHF, but most of my family is from a part of Cork they don’t cover. I suppose there was no town name on a naturalization?

Nathan Needle

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