Hello all, my name is Eoin Grenham.
Before COVID-19, like many others, I had a completely different job. I was a gymnastics coach but, again like many others, had to go back and seek out a new job. I did and was lucky enough to be trained and helped along by my dad John. For many years I really didn’t like the idea of becoming a genealogist even though many people expected it. A family heritage business done by a family appeals to a lot of people.
But starting off I fell for it and realised what my dad had been going on about to me for nigh on 20 years. There is a lot of fun in just figuring things out, solving problems. This is what genealogy is, finding things and solving big family puzzles. I dare say I would have gone for it before now if I had realised what it was about. When starting off though, I had problems and made mistakes. Mistakes and problems, I would say are not confined to just me. I thought I should share them with the world to let other people off the hook too.
First off, Irish names are annoying; I’m allowed to say this because I’m Irish. Vowels can be meaningless to us. Historically, starts and ends of names can shift for no reason. Even now, our accents will replace an ‘A’ with ‘I’ or ‘U’ with absolutely no pause and we look at people who call us crazy as if we have no idea what’s wrong with doing it. The saving grace of most Irish research sites now are the ‘wildcards’, ‘*’ and ‘?’. These can go in for * = any number of characters, ‘?’ = a single character. These are your best friends when you are starting off with family research. After the first 2 weeks of doing research, banging my head off the keyboard and screaming at the screen, I got the message. Using these can help. It did and I haven’t looked back since.
Along with this I am also doing the videos together with my dad as well as coding and SEO work for the site. Busy times ahead.
*Title and images added by the editor.