Joe and Lucy

Joe and Lucy met in the 1930s; they lived with their families on the same street in the City of Newark in Essex County, New Jersey. They were married in 1943, just before my father went overseas to Italy as a member of the Army Air Force. When he returned at the end of the war, they briefly settled in northern New Jersey, but in 1950, my father decided to reenlist in the newly established U.S. Air Force. After a 23-year career in the service that involved various U.S. and overseas deployments, my parents returned to New Jersey to be near family.

Like many retirees, my father decided to dig into genealogy research in his spare time. His father James Garde grew up in Connecticut; he was the son of an Irish immigrant family with roots in County Cork, County Leitrim, and County Antrim, Ireland. His mother Wilhelmina Maas was the child of more recent German immigrants who settled in New Jersey; she was the first member of her family to be born in the United States. He also spent time documenting my mother’s ancestors, all of whom were proudly “100 percent Irish,” from County Roscommon, County Tipperary, and elsewhere across Ireland. My mother’s immigrant ancestors settled in western Massachusetts (the Rodger Gavin side of her family) and Essex County, New Jersey (the Lucy Wade side of her family).

My father began his research in the late 1960s, long before sites like Ancestry.com facilitated access to genealogy resources. He visited libraries, archives, and cemeteries in New Jersey and the northeast, gathering information and copies of original documents. He also wrote letters to more distant libraries and resources in the U.S. and Ireland. In his in-person visits to libraries, he consulted phonebooks from around the country and even internationally, copying the entries for “Garde” or “Gard,” his paternal surname. He then sent form letters asking for information on the addressees’ Garde family origins; he got quite a few interesting replies.

My father’s family genealogy research turned into a general interest in Irish history. By his own account, nothing about Irish history or much in the way of tradition had been transmitted through his family, except for the fact of being baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. He expressed shock and dismay when he learned for the first time of the political and social oppression of the Irish people, and the poverty and starvation that was behind the massive migration from Ireland in the nineteenth century.

My father’s research accelerated when online resources gradually became available. When he passed away in 2000, he had amassed a significant collection of information and documents on his and my mother’s families. In time I took up where he left off, intermittently at first, but more intensively in the years since I retired myself.

Over the years, I have compiled my research in two public trees on Ancestry.com, Garde-Scannell married 1812 (containing the Garde/Maas family research) and Henry Wade and Ann Casey (containing the Wade/Higgins family research). Both trees are ongoing projects; as more resources become available online, more lines of research have opened up, and the trees are updated. I expect that they will never truly be done.

A particular source of new information has been retail DNA testing, which has provided many new clues and ideas for additional research. I am pleased to say that so far, the DNA matches that I have discovered have validated the results of paper and online research that my father started. And some of the frustrating gaps in available documentation have begun to be filled in. But there is a long way to go to connect all of the dots that I would like to connect.

The purpose of this web site is to supplement the Ancestry public trees with additional information such as family stories, accounts of how research was conducted, and interesting rabbit holes that I followed in the course of my research. The right sidebar leads to an introductory section, and four topics representing the surnames of my four grandparents. The left sidebar contains links to blog posts where I document some of the more interesting rabbit holes and topics that I have pursued in the course of my research.

If you are a family member (close or distant) or otherwise have a question or information that you would like to share with me, please use the form on this contact page.