I finally updated and restored the web page for the Thomas and Annie Meagher family. Twelve years ago I started researching Thomas and Annie. One thing led to another, and the branches on the family tree increased. Over the years, as new details emerged about Thomas and Annie, I updated family members with mailings. Yet the information about Thomas and Annie on the old (att) web pages had never been updated, except for a few feeble improvements to the citations. Now all of the information is available and organized on the new web page. There are also some new links and attachments that may be of interest.
Looking at their history side-by-side on the web page, the most interesting question for me is still what brought each of them to Mt. Pleasant. Did the teenaged Annie travel there with her childhood family, or did her mother Ellen and/or her twin sister Mollie remain behind in Maryland. It seems that Thomas left his childhood family behind in Ohio and never looked back. Obviously when you look at stories of immigrants from Europe, there were hundreds of teenagers who left their childhood families behind and traveled on their own (maybe tagging along with friends or relatives) to the coalfields of western Pennsylvania. My Hungarian grandparents did that. It was something that many of their friends and relatives in the old country were doing. The streets of America were paved with gold, etc. But I doubt that teenagers growing up in the coalfields of Maryland or Ohio would have any illusions about the streets of Mt. Pleasant. What did they hear about Mt. Pleasant in the mid-1880's that attracted them there? Did organizations in the Irish community provide support for traveling and getting settled in the new town?
I have not been satisfied with any of the genealogy software that I've tried. Initially it's fun to enter all of the links and create expansive charts. But the static links don't tell the whole story. Families grow and shrink as individuals join and leave. Traditional families become extended families. Individuals migrate from one family to another. I've taken to entering information directly into web pages, with each page attempting to tell the story of a family.
