Greetings, I'm from Boston..looking into Ancestry?

Question

I was wondering how you can go about ( or who the main connection would be) to find out a little about my grandmothers side of the family...she was from Kilarney...last name was originally O'Sullivan but she dropped the O when she came here...it would be so neat to think i had 2nd and 3rd generation cousins or great great aunts and uncles still!..I went about 15 years ago and I think it was St Patricks Church?..but the Priest was on a Holiday so I went home empty handed

Answer 1

Yes, you could have living relatives in the old country. My grandmother immigrated before 1900, from Norway.. and a distant cousin there, wound up posting online to find her living descendants.

The door to finding them.. is valid records. Using the census here, will give you information on her actual birth date (1900, I believe), year of immigration (leads to immigration records), so forth.

When you DO have the correct original name and place, you can access microfilm records there, if they survived, through an LDS family history center.  The church has made an effort to film existing records from all over the world.. the key word, being "existing".

Next from that.. www.rootsweb.com has email discussion lists that you can subscribe to, that focus on all areas of the world.  Networking is the key to finding persons who are knowledgeable about the area. MOST of the subscribers will be persons "here", looking for info "there".. with luck, you may find a person "there" on list.. not always the relative, but the one who has that Irish phone book on the table.  The info is not always ON the internet.. the internet can bridge TO where the info is.