Just like our genes, family names can be tags to our past and can provide a wealth of information about our forebears.  For the Avey clan that I married into, it wasn’t clear what the origin was of their surname.  Many immigrants changed their last names—or their names were modified by record-keepers—when they arrived on American soil.  My husband’s family speculated that ‘Avey’ might have been McAvey or the like…were they Irish?  St. Patrick’s day took on new meaning!  Maybe it’s my science background, but I wasn’t satisfied with these speculations.  I wanted proof that my children had Irish genes coursing through their DNA.

There began my journey into Ancestry.com, which swallowed me whole (at least during my “spare” time!) for about a two week stretch in 2006.  It’s actually quite simple.  Just go to the site, www.ancestry.com, type in the name of a dead relative, and, bingo, up pop potential matches to that person and links to an amazing set of public records, all scanned and viewable.  It helps if you know the approximate birth date/location of that person, and soon you’re perusing everything from census records, draft cards, marriage licenses, to death notices, pretty much any public document pertaining to him or her.  Because the company has uploaded so many records (going back to 1790!), it’s great if you have an unusual name, which dramatically cuts down on how many hits you have to wade through.  (And I should mention that viewing these records isn’t free…there’s a reasonable subscription fee.)

Having been an Avey for over 20 years, and not having run into too many others with the name, I was amazed at how many Aveys were showing up all over in US history.  Who knew?  I typed in my husband’s grandfather, Joseph Avey, who had lived his whole life in Cincinnati, Ohio.  There he was, in 1930, living with his wife and young son (my father-in-law, now 86!).  To see the hand-written document made me feel like I was touching the past in a way I’d never experienced.  But this was only the start.  I was about to zoom straight back into the 1700’s, hot on the trail of the first Avey in my husband’s line to hit America.  Question was, would the thread ultimately take me back to Ireland, or not?

After finding Joseph’s father, Fred, in the system, I found Fred’s father, another Joseph, who was the son of yet another Joseph.  This was where things got interesting.  No one knew how our Aveys got to Ohio.  Did they come straight from Ireland?  Turns out they didn’t—there was a third Joseph, who appeared in a census record from the 1800s, who had died in Clermont County, Ohio, but who had been born in…Maryland!  He and his wife, Kezia Garland, were the Aveys who had continued the journey west, leaving the Maryland homestead established by Joseph’s grandfather, Henry Avey, aka Heinrich Aebi (Ebby, Eby?), who had sailed to America on the ship Samuel in 1747 and who hailed from…Switzerland!  So much for Guinness—bring on the fondue!

The other exciting aspect of Ancestry.com is how you can see other people’s trees (if they’ve made them publicly viewable).  This is how I’ve come to meet other Aveys in the U.S. who share my interest in tracing the family line.  Some are 6th or 7th cousins of my husband…now the question is, do they all still have DNA in common?  Stay tuned, as we hope to soon find out!

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