Notes on Our Genealogy

My family moved to Arizona in 1968, when my father's division of Motorola relocated to Scottsdale. Arizona seemed exotic and distant and brand new, so I was surprised to hear that we weren't the first Quaids to live there. And it wasn't even close -- my great-granduncle John Pier Quaid had spent time in Arizona shortly after its statehood in the 1910s. John Pier Quaid in 1918 John Quaid appears to have led an eventful life, so let's start at the beginning. He was born in Limerick, Ireland to Charles and Mary Neylan Quaid on October 25, 1879. The family called him Jack. He attended the Christian Brothers School on Sexton Street  until he was about 18, which I think shows that he wasn't under economic pressure to go to work early, unlike most of my other ancestors in this period. John Quaid at the Christian Brothers School. He's the one in the top-left, facing sideways. John's father Charles was a pig buyer, and John initially followed in his footsteps. In the...

 My grandfather Marshall Jackson and his cousin Cecil Ashcraft lived parallel lives. Their mothers were sisters, their fathers were brothers, and both couples married at about the same time. Marshall and Cecil were both first-born sons, born just 6 weeks apart, and they both had just one sister, in both cases 8-10 years younger. Their families were farmers in Western Kentucky, just as they had been for generations. It’s easy to imagine – possibly too easy – that Marshall and Cecil’s lives would have played out similarly, had it not been for the one inescapable What If? difference in their lives: Marshall’s father died when Marshall was still an infant. Wickliffe High School Sophomore Class of 1920 Cecil Ashcraft is in there somewhere. Because of all this, I find Cecil Ashcraft pretty interesting. I know very little about him or his life, but I thought I would record what little I do know. William Cecil Ashcraft was born September 17th, 1900 to William Samuel Ashcraft and Dora Bell...

My great-grandmother Bertha Lee Simons was born in the Wild West. Her parents William and Alice Morris Simons had migrated from Kentucky to Texas, most likely to the Fort Worth area, somewhere around 1881. In those days western legends like Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp could occasionally be found gambling in Hell's Half-Acre, the fun part of town. Bertha Simons Jackson and her second husband Charles Henry Jackson There And Back Again The Simons hadn't come alone, though -- the whole extended family, on both the Morris and Simons sides, had made the same trip. They all settled in Texas, and then later a few of them branched into Oklahoma and Arkansas. Their descendants live there today. But not William and Alice. Life in Texas didn't suit them. A few years after moving there, they said goodbye to their parents, their brothers and their sisters, packed their young girls in a covered wagon, and returned to Kentucky. So it was that Bertha grew up on a farm in Ballard County, K...

About 15 miles southwest of Limerick, midway between the villages of Ballingarry and Croom , sits a little collection of farms known as Ballymacamore . In Irish it would be Baile Mhic Aodha Mór , "Place of Big Aodha's Son". Ordnance Survey of Ireland, revised 1898-1899 The area is farmland today, just as it was almost 200 years ago when my third-great-grandparents Patrick and Ellen Dundon Quaid lived there, surrounded by extended family. Quaids in the Ballymacamore House Book, circa 1852 Land records from the 1850s show Patrick living in Ballymacamore, next door to Timothy Quaid. A couple of doors down was the home of Michael Quaid, and further down the road lived John Quaid. Godparents I don't really know the relationship between these Quaids; it's possible that one of them is the father of the others, or perhaps they have more distant relationships. But in addition to living near one another, they show up as Baptism sponsors (i.e. Godparents) for each others...