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St. Patrick’s day is a day for everyone to celebrate Ireland, drink beer, and wear green—even if they’re not Irish. Boston College launches a new searchable database on all the "missing friends" from the Boston Pilot. They are holding an event today at 1 p.m. to announce the official launch, with a reception to follow. The missing friends ads were a bit like missed connections ads on craigslist before telephones made their true mark on society. Friends and relatives advertised in the Pilot looking for others who had traveled from Ireland and they hadn’t yet found. Information Wanted, according to the Boston College website, listed nearly 32,000 ads looking for people of Irish decent. This kind of thing makes Bostonist feel pretty silly when we’re calling the cell-phone of someone else who got separated from us watching the Patriots’ victory parade down Boylston.
Information wanted is more of an academic resource for finding out more about who and how people got separated from other family members while emigrating from Ireland. If you want to answer the question "Am I Irish?" Bostonist has a couple suggestions for web accessible resources: The Boston College Irish Studies genealogy research guide, this guide has links to all sorts of other spots to find your roots; The Irish Ancestral Research Association, if you know your clan you might just be in luck tracing their path; Irish Ancestor search will give you some basic information, including a listing of derivations of your last name and how frequent they are in Ireland; and of course our very own Irish Immigration Center, they know (and are) lots of Irish folks...if you’re not Irish and really want to have a connection go there and find a new friend who can really teach you how to act Irish.
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is st patty's day a state holiday in boston? 5/6 posts in the last 2 days have been nothing but st patty's day. if notre dame made it into the big dance, i bet it would have been 6/6. i'm not trying to be facetious, but is there anything else going on in boston, the city neighboring my alma mater?
Actually, the official holiday here in Suffolk County is "Evacuation Day" going back to the revolutionary war...kids get the day off from school (for the most part) and governing bodies get to take a day of r&r (or heavy drinking), see http://www.doe.mass.edu/resources/holidays.html for a list, and http://www-tech.mit.edu/V118/N14/ring.14c.html for some more information on the confluence of St. Patty's day and Evacuation day.
Why 5/6 of our posts have been about St. Patty's day...well, we've all been a little too drunk to type in preparation for the holiday.
wow. the mit article is actually really interesting...thanks.