By Peggy McGeady (Fawnaboy) with an addendum by Mary E. McGeady (Hazleton)
My father, Paul J. McGeady, lived in Jersey City, NJ which had a very large Irish population at the time. He noticed early on that he never met another McGeady who was not a relative and he became very curious about the McGeady name.
He started his research project in 1941. Whenever he found himself in a new place he would check the phone book (remember this was mid-20th century!) and since he was that type of man, he would not tear out the page, but instead would copy all the information into a notebook. When he got back home he would write to the people whose information he had recently found and ask about their parents names, their grandparents names and where their family came from.
Many, many, people were happy to respond and he made countless lifelong friends.
A lot of years later as I backpacked through Europe, my father (who had never been to Ireland) met me for that leg of the journey. Ireland is a very beautiful country, but we spent most of our time researching McGeadys, pouring over census records, and putting together information for him to use at home. There are many genealogy tools today that did not exist then, and we did everything by hand.
The highlight of that trip was a visit to Dunlewey, Glenthornan, and surrounding areas. I saw more relatives on that trip than I had met in all my previous life. I stood in the house my grandmother had lived in, and the ruins of my grandfather’s house and truly felt I had come home. This feeling was reinforced by the consistent introduction: “Here’s Paul & Peggy, home from America.”
The information we put together on that trip allowed Dad to greatly expand his McGeady project.
In the course of his research he was frequently able to link groups together without being able to connect them to his own family. He came up with the idea of creating “branches” of the McGeady family based on something that each inter-related group had in common. For example, he used the term “Fawnaboy” to describe his family group, based on an area in Ireland. He used “Hazleton” and “Mauch Chunk” to indicate the area where other major family branches had settled in the U.S.
Around this time some other McGeadys had started to talk about getting everyone together for a “gathering of the clan.” My Dad had little interest in this initially, although he grew to love it very much. He said that it was enough for him to know everyone existed, he didn’t need to get them all together in a room. I think some of that may have been that he had personally been in contact with so many McGeadys that he felt as if he knew them. Needless to say “getting everyone all together in a room” ended up being one of his favorite things!
Note from Mary E. McGeady a member of the original Philadelphia Committee:
In March of 1983, a group of McGeadys met in Philadelphia (Ann, Anne, F. Xavier, Georgia, James, James A., Leon, Mary E., Roy, Stephen, Susan and of course Paul) and decided to have a “gathering of the McGeady Clan” on September 24th in Philadelphia and invite as many McGeady families as the committee could find. Except for Paul, nobody had ever met a McGeady outside of their family. We had no idea what to expect. It was a huge success. The room was overflowing with McGeadys, a sight never seen before. What a great day! Some of the older McGeadys were reunited with family members they hadn’t seen since they were children. We all walked around staring at name tags. Never met a McGeady before and now here are a few with MY NAME! It was indeed the beginning.
