Ontario Ancestry Research

Battle of Stoney Creek | June 6 & 7 Battlefield Park, Hamilton

Researching your Family Tree isn’t just about finding old photos. Collectibles like this matchbook from my Great-Grandparents Hardware Store are beautiful reminders of a different time period.

If you want to know more about your Family History, the best way to get started is by asking questions. If you have a grandparent or other older relative willing to answer questions, set up a meeting! Here is a list of questions to help you get started.

One of my favourites. Happy Mother’s Day ❤️

Why the Irish Named Their Children After the Dead

☘️ If you have Irish ancestry, you probably grew up with a name that belonged to someone else first. A grandmother. A great uncle. Someone who died before you were born and whose name was handed to you before you had any say in the matter. You may have spent years feeling like you were carrying something heavy without knowing exactly what it was.

You were. And it was intentional.

The Irish tradition of naming children after the dead is one of the oldest and most deliberate acts of cultural preservation in the Western world. In ancient Ireland a name was not a label. It was a living thing. To name a child after someone who had died was not sentiment. It was a theological and cultural statement that the person who carried that name before was not gone. They were continuing. Moving forward through a new body into a new generation, their story unfinished, their presence maintained inside the family line.

Under the Penal Laws when Irish families were stripped of land, language, and legal identity, the names they gave their children became one of the last acts of ownership available to them. You could take everything from an Irish family. You could not stop them from naming their son after his grandfather or their daughter after the woman who came before her. The name was the thread that connected the living to the dead and refused to let the line break.

When the Famine generation arrived in America with nothing they brought their naming tradition with them whole and intact. Tenement buildings in Boston and New York were full of children carrying the names of people buried in Irish soil they would never see. The dead traveled with them. Inside the names of the living.

You were not just named after someone. You were chosen to carry them forward. That is not a burden. That is the oldest honor your family knew how to give.