Well, building a website surely ain’t what it used to be.  After a whole week’s work and lots of gnashing of teeth, I have finally managed to get the story of finding Our Irish Roots back to its August 2004 state— the state it was in when I lost my freebie site hosting support a few months back.  Seems like constructing the original website, using much simpler tools, took only a day or so to accomplish, but it probably didn’t come out looking quite as “purdy.”

The original purpose of the Our Irish Roots website was to bring together the many  discoveries a large group of people had made about our huge Keenan/McDonough  family during the years  2001-2004.  The sad thing is that the August 2004 story, which I have now restored  here on this new website, is about where I left off in publicizing  interesting new discoveries that some of us have made since that time.

Part of this is because I retired in 2007, and I thereby no longer had access to updating abilities for my FIU-based website.  And, part of it is just because I kept promising myself over and over that I would put up a new website and catch up with everything  “soon”..  regrettably,  that didn’t begin to happen until now.

And, there surely have been a number of fascinating developments over the years to catch up with:

For example, we found out my g- grandfather’s brother, attorney Leonidas Keenan, was one of America’s most famous war protesters.  He got tarred and feathered for his trouble in 1918 and ended up in the Atlanta Penitentiary for a spell.  Before that misfortune happened to him, he was part of a neat love story; we played detective and traced the courting of his spouse all the way from Auburn, NY to Wichita, KS.

And then there was this fantastic photo of my g-grandfather, Indian Commissioner Bruce L Keenan [seated on stool to the right], that turned up from the collection of my cousin Patrick Keenan. It was taken in the administrative office of Cherokee Nation, Tahlequah, Indian Territory in probably July 1905.  We spent hours using the photo’s wall calendars and posters to date the photo and we also did a lot of research to identify the several individuals depicted.

There are many other newsy things to talk about as we update Our Irish Roots, and we’ll surely keep you appraised in future posts.