Heritage

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Being a part of the O'Toole family, I have always celebrated St. Patricks Day with gusto. My family is proud of our Irish heritage. And every year I want to help my girls appreciate their heritage, but it always makes me wonder how Irish am I? I have some great relatives who have done a lot of geneology and I can find names in each line that either go back to the time when my ancestors crossed the ocean or back to the colonial times in New England. There are alot more names to find, but I'm pretty blessed to have all this work done. It also makes it pretty easy to see where my ancestors came from. So on St. Patricks day I did some research. It turns out I am 1/2 English (no shocker there), 1/4 German, 3/16 Scottish, and 1/16 Irish.  The order of those last three numbers were surprising to me. Oktober Fest here I come! I was also pleased to find out that I have at least a 16th of Irish in me. It could be a lot smaller.
Seeing all those names and where they were born was fascinating! I'll figure out Michelangelo soon, because I want to figure out the percentage for my girls. But an interesting thing to me was the number of relatives the two of us have that were born in New London County Connecticut. Michelangelo even has a grandpa named Stonington born during colonial times. How cool is that? No wonder I felt so at home when we lived there. It makes me want to move back and search gravestones. Although my Dad showed me a cool website that can do that for me online it is www.namesinstone.com. Technology is pretty cool.
So if you want to have some fun try out the LDS church's geneology site https://new.familysearch.org. It's really neat. And if you don't have a recommend you can try http://www.ancestry.com/. That one costs money if you want to see records, but it'll give you names and dates found in their database.
Try it out, you might find something that surprises you.