What is a family history?

Is it simply a compendium of names, linked to you by birth and thrown together to form an attractive, fun to look at, tree? Is it the stories your Grandfather told on dark winter evenings, stories you can now recite word for word thirty years later? Is it your collection of dusty old photos? Is it the fact that only yesterday your son qualified as a doctor and your daughter married an Australian? It is all of these things.

Our family history updates itself every single day of its unending life. Every action, every change of direction in our lives, while not necessarily recorded, shape our history. Our first born child, their first hello, they all get added to our family history, some mentally others recorded. History is what happened a moment ago, as well as a generation ago. What might seem like a normal daily event will be reflected upon many years from now. Photographs will be examined in great detail, "Who's that girl with Uncle David. Wasn't she a bit loopy". A family history is a record of events; stories and photographs, a record of trivial, humorous and sad tales, related by the elder generation and hopefully remembered and not airbrushed too much by the younger

The short version of this branch of the McMonagle family, like so many others before them, brings a working class Irish family to Britain, presumably to find work. Once here in Scotland they look for areas of high employment and Glasgow, where jobs are plentiful grabs their attention. Large families seems to be order of the day, but through the years they manage to bring enough wealth to their children to slowly guide them out of that environment and into a richer, financial and social, way of life. As the generations progress, the opportunity to work overseas appears and seeing this as a way of further developing themselves, some of them grab it with both hands. Generations later we now have, Glasgow born, Irish descendants, living in North America, Japan and New Zealand raising families of their own. Don't be surprised if you bump into a McMonagle in the most remote of places.

What is a Family History?

From whence we came

Garngadhill

Occupations

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