Uncle Jim Hart’s Memoirs: Understanding the Hart & Canavan Ancestors
Editor’s Note: With Joe settled in Killybegs, I asked him where he started and what he first focused on as he began his research. Joe explains that he prepared himself with a couple of documents. The first was his Uncle Jim Hart’s family history, in which Jim had set down oral history gathered from his parents and grandparents, who were still living during his high school years — a document very similar in content and format to my mother’s writings. Uncle Jim’s history covered both the Canavan and Hart sides, though the Hart branch remains the shortest and most frustrating branch in Joe’s family tree.
Transcript
Speakers: WJB — William J. Bowe; JH — Joseph Hart. Transcribed from the recording; punctuation added and obvious mis-hearings corrected.
WJB: Okay. So now I’ve got you settled in my mind exactly where you are in Ireland. And as you begin your bicycling and research, what were you first focusing on in terms of what you find? Where do you start? Maybe you can go through the process a little bit.
JH: Well, yes. So to prepare myself for tracing my Irish roots, I came up with a couple of, I’ll call them documents. One was my Uncle Jim’s family history, where he must have been setting into writing some oral history that he got from his parents, his grandparents who were still alive into his high school years. That was a document very similar in the kinds of information and the format that your mother used in some of her writings that I’d seen. And so the only other document that I started out with were some… Oh, and let me say that Uncle Jim’s family history covered both the Canavan side and the Hart side. What we knew of the Hart side, because that still is basically the shortest branch in my family tree, is the Hart branch. It’s been very frustrating over the years not to make more headway on researching that branch. But anyway—
