First in a series on the Dempsey Cousins Family Research Team.
For St. Patrick’s Day last year I wrote the first of three posts about my Irish ancestors William Patrick and Katherine (Gormley) Dempsey and their lives in Baltimore, Md., during the U.S. Civil War — never imagining that it would lead to new discoveries, never mind new-found cousins.
So I was pleasantly surprised to open my inbox in October 2015 and find an email that began:
Your gggparents are also my gggparents, William and Katherine Dempsey of Baltimore. I and two other cousins are interested in any info or documents you have found regarding their home in Ireland, their emigration and Canadian life.
New Dempsey cousins? How exciting!
The email was from Barb, who is a descendent of James Joseph Dempsey — a son of William and Katherine and an older brother of my great grandmother Elizabeth (Dempsey) Owen.
And it gets better. Soon after I heard from Barb, a second email arrived from John, who is descended from Catherine (Dempsey) Kratz — youngest daughter of William and Katherine and a sister of my great grandmother Elizabeth (Dempsey) Owen.
Cousin collaboration
This was exciting, indeed! Every genealogist longs to find other family members who share their passion for family history research. Now — out of the blue — here were two cousins doing research similar to my own on our mutual Dempsey ancestors.
How much more could we find if we worked together? Probably more than if we each continued on alone.
So I proposed to Barb and John that we set up a listserv (where we could discuss research strategies and findings without cluttering up our inboxes) along with some shared folders (where we could place documents, photos, obituaries, timelines and the like for group members to see). They readily agreed.
In emails, John summed up our mutual enthusiasm for cousin collaboration:
It would be fun to share information and see if we can figure out the mystery of William’s early life in North America…If you can figure out a good way to have multiple contributor communication that works better than email that would be great. The Dempsey clan is growing by the day:)
Thus began the Dempsey Cousins Family Research Team. After much technical back and forth among Barb, John and I to be sure all of our online components worked, we opened for business in October 2015 and began adding other interested Dempsey cousins.
To date we are up to seven Dempsey cousins — descended from different children of our mutual gggrandparents William and Katherine (Gormley) Dempsey — and have already made some interesting discoveries together.
More on those in the next post.
To be continued.
© 2016 Molly Charboneau. All rights reserved.