Skip to main content

Contact Us

The author of these posts is Pat Quaid, a software guy from Arizona now living in Norwalk, Connecticut. I can be reached at pquaid@gmail.com, or as Patrick Quaid on Ancestry.com, if you prefer. I'm not very active on Facebook or LinkedIn, but you can get to me through those sites as well.

Fair warning, if you contact me I'll definitely ask you for any old family photos you may have, but in exchange I'll send you everything I've collected so far!

For the avoidance of confusion:

In fact if you Google my name I hardly show up at all, which is a little ironic.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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. 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 planted a seed when he introduced me to the bo

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

Ralph Shelton and Mary Daniel

While Ralph Shelton Senior lived his whole life in Middlesex County, Ralph Shelton Junior was constantly on the move. He was born in Middlesex County, Virginia , next to the Atlantic, and died in Patrick County, Virginia , further west and down on the border with North Carolina. I don’t know what drove that relentless movement, but it passed down into subsequent generations. It seems to me that if you had a comfortable life you wouldn’t keep moving, so the going may have been tough for this line of Sheltons, constantly seeking better prospects. What’s Happening? What was going on when Ralph and Mary Shelton started their adult life around 1730? War broke out between Maryland and Pennsylvania . Philadelphia was found to be in Maryland, leading to much embarrassment and ultimately the Mason-Dixon survey. Benjamin Franklin co-founded Library Company of Philadelphia (in Maryland, I guess) Robert Walpole became the first real Prime Minister of Great Britain. James Bradley calculated the