Unearthing the roots of local history

'Amazing stories' can be discovered in exploring a family tree

ONE member of Martin Curley’s extended family tree survived internment in a Nazi concentration camp, while another helped bring a professional baseball franchise to Kansas City.

Martin is a genealogist from Guilka, Menlough, who delivers family history and local area heritage workshops to schools through the Heritage Council, and runs the East Galway Genealogy & DNA page on Facebook along with Tuam’s Midie Corcoran.

The Facebook page has over 8,300 members, and there is a consistent stream of information passing through it from people in the US, Canada, Australia, England and elsewhere looking to trace their roots back to East Galway.

Martin says that “amazing stories” can be found when a trawl through a family’s history is done, and many members of the East Galway Genealogy & DNA group would testify to that.

“We recommend people who get in touch with us to do a DNA Test through Ancestry.com,” explained Martin…

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