52 Ancestors: #11 Lucky in Love

Week 11 (March 12-18) – Luck of the Irish. Do you have an ancestor who seemed particularly lucky? Do you have a favorite Irish ancestor? This is their week.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Shona Duit!

 

Why Lucky in Love? My husband and I are celebrating our 37th wedding anniversary on the 16th, the day before St. Patrick’s Day, AND on the 18th, the day after St. Patrick’s Day. The first date was our civil marriage and the second our religious marriage.

A Luxembourgish groom and his redhead DEMPSEY bride

Dempsey is an anglicised form of Ó Diomasaigh, from the Irish adjective diomasach, meaning “proud”

If we had not been so lucky to see each other twice on the first day we met, we may never have gotten together, married, and had our two wonderful children who are the focal point of our MEDER-DEMPSEY family tree.

My husband and I are not our ancestors however the knot we tied brought together all of our ancestors.

I’m doing the stories of the families in Luxembourg this year for my children. I thought that it would be easy going as the records for Luxembourg are available online at FamilySearch. The family groups are large, often with as many as a dozen children. But the records are not indexed. As long as I know what town they lived in I have no problem with the civil records.

However, the census records are doing me in. I have to go through them page by page unless they have a listing for the neighborhood which I have to locate in a batch of 500-600 images. I love FamilySearch but hate slow loading while browsing. And I’m not talking about one census every ten years. Luxembourg did 19 censuses from 1843 to 1900 – in 1843, 1846, 1847, 1849, 1851, 1852, 1855, 1858, 1861, 1864, 1867, 1871, 1875, 1880, 1885, 1887, 1890, 1895, and 1900.

Last year I spent a week at a time on an American ancestor and on a family group this year for Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks. This hasn’t given me any time to get ahead on my posts. I research, scan paper documents and photos, cite sources, write the story during the week, just making my imposed Monday deadline. Last week I posted a day late and without the source citations (now done!). It was hard for me, considered so perfect by others, to admit this. Is that my proud Irish blood?

It turns out that I need to sneak in a little break and cheat a bit so I can get ahead. So this week I’m posting a photo of the two lucky people who found each other. Next week I’ll post some wonderful original documents that were loaned to me for scanning by my husband’s cousin.

© 2015 Cathy Meder-Dempsey

This is my weekly entry for Amy Johnson Crow’s challenge:
52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks – 2015 Edition. It was so successful in 2014 that genealogists wanted to continue or join in on the fun in 2015. Be sure to check out the other great posts by visiting Amy’s blog No Story Too Small where she’ll be posting the weekly recap on Thurdays and allowing all participants to leave a link to their post(s) in the comments.