Notes on Our Genealogy

My great-grandmother Bertha Lee Simons was born in the Wild West. Her parents William and Alice Morris Simons had migrated from Kentucky to Texas, most likely to the Fort Worth area, somewhere around 1881. In those days western legends like Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp could occasionally be found gambling in Hell's Half-Acre, the fun part of town. Bertha Simons Jackson and her second husband Charles Henry Jackson There And Back Again The Simons hadn't come alone, though -- the whole extended family, on both the Morris and Simons sides, had made the same trip. They all settled in Texas, and then later a few of them branched into Oklahoma and Arkansas. Their descendants live there today. But not William and Alice. Life in Texas didn't suit them. A few years after moving there, they said goodbye to their parents, their brothers and their sisters, packed their young girls in a covered wagon, and returned to Kentucky. So it was that Bertha grew up on a farm in Ballard County, K...

About 15 miles southwest of Limerick, midway between the villages of Ballingarry and Croom , sits a little collection of farms known as Ballymacamore . In Irish it would be Baile Mhic Aodha Mór , "Place of Big Aodha's Son". Ordnance Survey of Ireland, revised 1898-1899 The area is farmland today, just as it was almost 200 years ago when my third-great-grandparents Patrick and Ellen Dundon Quaid lived there, surrounded by extended family. Quaids in the Ballymacamore House Book, circa 1852 Land records from the 1850s show Patrick living in Ballymacamore, next door to Timothy Quaid. A couple of doors down was the home of Michael Quaid, and further down the road lived John Quaid. Godparents I don't really know the relationship between these Quaids; it's possible that one of them is the father of the others, or perhaps they have more distant relationships. But in addition to living near one another, they show up as Baptism sponsors (i.e. Godparents) for each others...