Notes on Our Genealogy

Thomas Steven Quaid and Mary O'Dea were my great grandparents. They're also the last truly Irish couple in my family history. Even though they were married in Chicago. And even though she was, in fact, Canadian. Mary O'Dea and Thomas Quaid, with oldest children Rose Marie and Charles. Probably taken in 1902. A long time ago I met an Irish woman, and when I said that I was Irish she gently drew a distinction between the phrase "I'm Irish" meaning that "I have some Irish ancestry", and meaning that "I am actually, you know, from Ireland." She was Irish; I just had an Irish name. I suppose Thomas and Mary embodied the transition between those two senses of the phrase for our family. Thomas in Limerick Thomas Quaid was born in Limerick on December 15th, 1865 to Charles Quaid and Mary Nealon. Charles grew up on a farm in nearby Ballymacamore  and Charles and Mary's first child had been baptized there, but a few years before Thomas was born t...

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...