Dr Paddy Waldron - Esteemed Genealogist and County Clare records - The Genealogy Radio Show

Dr Paddy Waldron is a third-generation genealogist. Paddy's grandfather began work on the family tree before he retired at 65 in 1949. His mother had four children before she turned 21, including my grandfather and his identical twin, and she lived to 88, so was still around to help him. The identical twins posed a further problem for those who like to calculate expected percentages of DNA shared - by marrying two sisters, whose own father had married twice, to two first cousins. My father caught the genealogy bug from his father and passed it on to me at a young age. At the age of 13, Paddy rewrote the whole tree and has now spent 30 years trying to get it all into a computer database. Every time Paddy thinks he is nearly finished, another batch of new records comes online.
Tell us about your involvement with genetic genealogy
Paddy Waldron's degrees in mathematical sciences, economics and finance included a lot of statistics, which inspired my curiosity about drawing genealogical inferences from genetic data. The jargon finally began to make sense when he first heard Maurice Gleeson speak at the Irish Genealogical Research Society in March 2013. A few months later, Katherine Borges swabbed me at Genetic Genealogy Ireland 2013 and Paddy has been hooked since his results arrived a month or so after that. Paddy's closest match at the time was a lady who was adopted in 1938. His best efforts to help her over the next three years turned up nobody closer to her than second cousins, but search angel Julia Bell has since found her original birth certificate and located some of her paternal first cousins and maternal half-siblings. Other adoption and fostering cases, including the one that inspired the title for my talk at GGI2016, have proved much easier to solve. Paddy has also taken my own County Limerick ancestry back another two generations as the result of a DNA match between his first cousin and our fourth cousin twice removed, whom Paddy already knew without ever suspecting a relationship or discussing common roots.
I am now co-administrator with Terry Fitzgerald of the Clare Roots project at
www.familytree...
which was established to coincide with Maurice Gleeson's talk at the monthly Clare Roots Society meeting on 19 November 2015. By 29 Sep 2017, it had 816 members. Anyone with an ancestor who lived in County Clare is welcome to join. I am also co-administrator of the Clancy, Durkin/Durkan/Durcan and O'Dea/O'Day/Dee surname projects and am working on establishing an Irish Waldron Surname Project.
Paddy has recruited hundreds of people to genetic genealogy in Clare, Limerick, Mayo and other ancestral heartlands via the DNA Outreach IRL project. In 2013, the top 30 matches for any Irish person getting autosomal DNA results were typically complete strangers; nowadays, I expect to know personally about six of the top 30 matches of anyone from West Clare that I swab. Working out the relationships can still be a challenge.

[@williamlaurencemaheroz]

I am listening to this video in February 2024 at Melbourne, Australia. There are some very salient points raised in this interview. The point that resonated most with me is that genealogy should not become elitist. Genealogy for the dedicated is a reason to get up and face the day. It should not depend on your financial position to determine your ancestral stories. My two cents worth. céad míle fáilte & good health to all; Sláinte. 🤓🤓🤓💙💛💜❤🖤☘☘☘☘☘☘☘☘☘☘