Greenock Family History

Greenock Family History: 1847-2000 was written by Nancy Jackson Quaid in the mid 2000s to update and extend The Greenock Record, a family history written by her grandfather John Greenock in the mid 1940s.

Presented here is the most complete version of the story I have, with details about living people largely removed. I have included a few extra photographs.

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Where does the name Quaid come from?

Where does the name Quaid come from? It comes from rural County Limerick, Ireland. And contrary to what you'll see on practically every name origin site on the Internet, the surname Quaid is entirely unrelated to the surname McQuaid. Quaids (blue) and McQuaids (red) in the 1901 Irish Census. Explore the interactive map . Of course I'm talking only about the Irish name; there is also the German Quade and Arabic Quaid , which are unrelated, as you might expect. Growing up, I was told that our family name was originally McQuaid, and that perhaps my great-grandfather had stripped off the Mc- part to blend in when he emigrated to the United States. And of course that's roughly the story you hear from essentially every surname origin site you can find (an example , and another , and another ). I have gradually come to the conclusion that all those stories and web sites are just plain wrong, and I'll explain why. Irish Names and Surnames My second cousin Charlie Quaid plan...

Our Last Irish Family

Thomas Steven Quaid and Mary O'Day were my great grandparents. They're also the last truly Irish couple in my family history. Even though they were married in Chicago. And even though she was, in fact, Canadian. Mary O'Day and Thomas Quaid, with oldest children Rose Marie and Charles. Probably taken in 1902. A long time ago I met an Irish woman, and when I said that I was Irish she gently drew a distinction between the phrase "I'm Irish" meaning that "I have some Irish ancestry", and meaning that "I am actually, you know, from Ireland." She was Irish; I just had an Irish name. I suppose Thomas and Mary embodied the transition between those two senses of the phrase for our family. Thomas in Limerick Thomas Quaid was born in Limerick on December 15th, 1865 to Charles Quaid and Mary Nealon. Charles grew up on a farm in nearby Ballymacamore and Charles and Mary's first child had been baptized there, but a few years before Thomas was born t...

The Sheltons

A man named Ralph Shelton showed up in the Virginia Colony around 1700. He had a lot of kids, and those kids had a lot of kids, and now 10 generations later untold thousands of modern Americans descend from ol’ Ralph. And that includes me; Ralph Shelton is my 8th great-grandfather. The descendents of Ralph Shelton were deeply entwined in colonial life, the American Revolution, and the westward expansion of the United States. Writing a history of the Sheltons in America would be the work of a proper historian, not me. This sketch is intended to help me organize my own understanding of this line of my ancestors, and where possible to provide some links to more complete and definitive information. Tracing the history of colonial and early Americans is a tedious business of piecing together property sales, spotty church records, handwritten wills and assorted other sources in hopes of making some semblance of sense of it all. One of the benefits of Ralph Shelton’s huge progeny is that...

Notes on Our Genealogy

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