Sidebar Button: Click here to read my rants. Or just skip it.
Okay, I need to vent about this because I can feel the bitterness in me starting to boil over. I was so excited about my early 30s: I finally had a stable job (after 5 years of unemployment, temp jobs, and horrible bosses) in a career I loved (working in international higher education) at one of the best universities in the world, I had paid off my student loans (all $77,700 of it), I was just married to the love of my life, I was feeling super confident, and I was making all these amazing travel plans (I spent 6 weeks in the Netherlands, France, and Greece in late 2020). Not even a pandemic was going to slow me down.
The only silver lining was that I fell in love with my husband even more because he totally passed the “in sickness and in health” part of marriage. He was there for me every time I could not control my tears, rocked me to sleep when I was hyperventilating, and was even my crutch to the bathroom when I was unable to physically walk there myself. It took me until April of 2023 to finally get a diagnosis.
Anyway, this is a family history blog, so I’ll stop my pity-party. Obviously, I’m still highly irritated that this happened to me as I feel completely robbed of my youth, but I’m thankfully ~90% back to my old self these days. I wouldn’t have been able to go to Ireland last month if this wasn’t the case. I may make a post about my diagnosis later at some point as it’s partially explained by genetics, but until that day comes, let’s continue with the original part of my story…
During the pandemic, I picked up my plastic canvas sewing hobby and combined it with my love of international studies. I now have a portfolio of over 200 flag patterns for various entities like countries, cities, and even some civil/human rights groups. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, you can check out my Instagram page for @flagcoasters. My hope is to eventually create a lesson plan involving fiber art and introducing presentation skills for middle school geography/world history teachers to use in their classrooms. We’ll see if I ever get there as I’m currently investing more time in this blog.
Similar to plastic canvas sewing, my love of family history first came when I was in elementary school. I can’t remember what exactly led me to this moment, but when I was 11 or 12 I must have asked my mother where her side of the family came from. Once I verbalized my curiosity, mom pulled out this old folderbook and handed it to me. “You can read all about our family history in here,” she said before leaving me to my own devices.
It had a brown cover with a taped-on tab that read “Synnott Genealogy Study.” The papers were yellowed and printed with the kind of font that indicated it had been produced on a type-writer. The pages were punched with three holes for those bendable metal stems to go through them that keep the contents together. I opened it and skipped the first couple of pages as they were too wordy for my 12-year-old eyes to appreciate (I was primarily a Dutch-speaker at this time so reading in English was more of a chore than a pleasure). Instead, my eyes landed on the Synnott coat of arms.
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I remember feeling impressed that our family was important enough to have their own crest and, on top of that, it was so pretty with all those swans. I flipped a couple of pages further and landed on Patrick Synnott.
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My eyes lingered on his birth year in amazement: 1792 was more than 200 years in the past. I couldn’t believe I could read the name of a man who lived so long ago and know that he was my ancestor. And from Ireland! Even though he was long dead, he felt alive in my mind because knowledge of him was still here on this earth. Even two decades later I look at this page and marvel that he left enough traces of his existence in a world pre-electricity for me to discover him through others' dedicated investigative work. I can’t speak to him. But, indirectly, he speaks to me 170+ years after his death. Did he mean to do that? Probably not quite in this way, but it’s what’s happened nonetheless.
This would not be my only experience with this priceless family treasure. When mom and I moved to the US in 2002, it was one of the few possessions we brought with us. Two years later I was a junior at Maryville High School in Tennessee, which meant I was going to be involved in a major project that all juniors at the school complete. Because I was enrolled in English and US History in the Fall, I had the opportunity to partake in the school’s Family History semester which consisted of, among other assignments, writing several essays and reflections on various family members and gathering photographs for an enormous scrapbook. However, my favorite section was the genealogy research portion.
We were given access to family tree software to record our direct ancestors’ date of birth, location of birth, date of death, and death location. Granted, I already had a professional book that gave me a huge advantage over my classmates. In addition to the family tree software, we were also provided with links to genealogy websites like Rootsweb and Ancestry.com. My mind exploded with possibilities. Questions I had from my last look into our family history (like “where did Patrick’s wife’s family come from?”) were finally able to be answered.
I ended up earning an A+ on my family scrapbook. Mom still has it at home in Texas. She once took it to the Netherlands with her to show the Dutch side of my family what I'd been working on. It’s amazing how a high school project had such an emotional impact on me that 20 years later I am continuing this homework as an alumna with my own blog. I think it goes to show my teachers (Dr. Penny Ferguson for Honors English and Mark White for Honors US History) were exceptional at engaging and inspiring their students, and I was incredibly fortunate to be their pupil.
In the years since that semester, I was kept busy with other pursuits (mostly academic, but the highs and heartaches from a boyfriend or two contributed also). Occasionally I would return and then become discouraged by the sheer amount of information to look through with the lack of time in my schedule. This blog is my latest attempt at starting my hobby again. This time, my hope is that by writing down my research journey, I will have an outlet for my frustrations that I did not have with previous endeavors. At the very least, I hope this blog will also serve as a motivating force by allowing me to share and celebrate my successes (of which I already have a few). While I haven’t shared my successes here just yet, I have written them down and I am excited to share them here in the coming months.
END NOTES
1 Chaney, Betty M. "Synnott Coat of Arms." Synnott Genealogical Study, 1960.
2 Chaney, Betty M. "Patrick Synnott, Sr." Synnott Genealogical Study, 1960.
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