Hi Dave
Happy New Year to you and your family, and brilliant you sent these 2 photos, that is awesome, and thank you so very much....your help has enabled me to find another whole set of family members to research...its fantastic. The William Carson whom I am researching, turned out a bit of a "jack the lad" as well. He moved with Ellen Irwin and her 3 children to Scotland (not sure what date he went to Scotland yet); anyway he and Ellen had 4 more children, my husbands mother (Ellen Carson) being one of those children; then William went off to America on his own. Ellen was told that her father had been lost in the Iowa floods...so believed her father to be dead, but we have found passenger shipping records of him coming backward and forward to Scotland several times, and then we found him in American census records etc, and he didn't die in actual fact till he was about 80 years old.....so he lived for about 35 years in America. This ancestry is such a mystery tour finding things out...its so obsessive...and I'm now addicted. Like yourself I am studying my own family history, both maternal and paternal, and also doing my husbands on both sides...its just huge where this all leads, and we have found some wonderful skeletons in the wardrobe that's for sure.
Anyway I truly appreciate your wonderful help and would really like to take a trip across to Monaghan maybe this summer with my husband, just so we can see and get a feel for where our ancestors came from, and in the meantime I will keep searching the names I have now...thanks to you, and I may even come across some relatives who live over there
I'll keep in touch and let you know how and where the journey takes me
regards
Marie
