The Search For My Irish Roots, Part 5

The kindness of strangers.

The quest to find my Masseys would not have been possible without the kindness of strangers. Jenny had done all the work of getting me the records from Delgany and it should be remembered that this info was of no value to her, she is not a Massey, she did it for no return. And now Annie would do something equally nice. She got her fathers D.N.A. tested for me. I say she got it tested for me because there was little she could learn from the test. You have to rember that Annie already new her lines were from Delgany. If her father and I were a match it would only tell her she had a few more distant cousins out there, that’s it. But for me it had the potential to finally prove once and for all the question that I had been working on for so many years.

I am a Delgany Massey

So as you may have guessed Annie and I are a D.N.A. match. Not a perfect match as I had hoped but close enough to prove what I had suspected all these years - that Annie and I are related and that my William Massey was almost certainly born in the Parish of Delgany. As you can imagine I was ecstatic. To finally have the answer to a question that had plagued me for so long was a great feeling. I was so happy. For about 10 minutes. Then like a true genealogist I started to think about what I still did not know, and I realized my search will never be over. Because for me it is not just about the answer, it’s about the search itself.

More Wicklow Ireland Data

I have added more to the Tenants renting land from Earl Fitzwilliam in County Wicklow Ireland in 1839. Anne Burgess has been transcribing the 1839 Fitzwilliam rentals records, and putting them into a spreadsheet for each townland, hoping in that way to construct a sort of census substatute for 1839 in southwest Wicklow. This is a great genealogy database.

The database now has the following Townlands.
Aghold Townland County Wicklow in 1839. A census substitute.
Ardoyne Townland County Wicklow in 1839. A census substitute.
Coolattin Townland County Wicklow in 1839. A census substitute.
Coolboy Townland County Wicklow in 1839. A census substitute.
Cronyhorn Townland County Wicklow in 1839. A census substitute.
Kilcavan Townland County Wicklow in 1839. A census substitute.

You can see all the Fitzwilliam records at my
Ireland Genealogy Pages