Photo Album Archive
family album | The Road to Bright City
My grandfather John Bernard “Barney” Hynes and his brother, Thomas J. Hynes emigrated in their…
Chicken Today, Feathers Tomorrow
Chicken today, feathers tomorrow. That’s how my mother described life with my father, James McQuilan…
Dorothea Lange’s Ireland
When photographer Dorothea Lange, best known for her haunting series of images from the Depression…
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Roger Goes to Medical School
I was born at home in Emmetsburg, Iowa in 1928. The doctor said, “You have a son!” My mother didn’t know what to name me and the doctor said, “How […]
Great-aunt Mary O’Toole’s Amazing, Trailblazing Life
Her first seal of office needed to have the word “his” crossed out and replaced by “hers” in pen as she was the first female to hold a municipal court […]
Photo Album: The Wealth of the World
At rest, this picture belongs to a wedding album from 1966. Plain, awkward even, it was composed by the photographer whose job it was to snap the parents of the […]
Photo Album My Great-Grandmother Discovered
It was the accidental discovery of a vintage photograph, which enabled me to meet my first Irish-American relative, my great grandmother, Ellen Whelan Lyons of Co Waterford, Ireland. At a family reunion in […]
Photo Album:4th of July Picnic
After the Civil War, Philip Cummins, a coal miner from Loon, Clogh, Co. Kilkenny, took his wife Mary Smith (Rakenny, Co. Cavan) and family from the troubling times of the […]
Photo Album: An Ocean Away
My paternal great-grandmother Violet May Carroll McHale was born in 1906 in Castlebar, Mayo, and raised as a farmer’s daughter. She and her sisters (Delia, Lucy, and Jane) did much […]