Rivard, Haley, Welch and Sweeney?

Question

I am involved in the geneology sites. Please no referrals to the top ten (like Genweb, Roots and Ancestry)

I need personal knowledge of these people. I have come to an obstacle that these sites are unable to help me overcome. I am looking for the line of Sweeneys who immigrated from Ireland to Canada, first documented in the mid to late 1800s, then some came to the US, in the New England area, around 1900 (give or take).
Other family names, related to the Sweeneys by blood, are Welch, Rivard and Haley. I have a line at 1850, and it picks up again in 1910. I need to fill in the 60 year gap.
Thank you.

Thank you Genevieve.

My Rivard is:

Joseph A Rivard, born approx 1993 in Massachusettes, father born in Illinois, mother born in Canada, spoke french. Joseph was married to Lydia Welch, born Mass approx 1887.

Please let me know.

Answer 1

Rivard is a pretty straight-forward name to research. I've taken it back to the founding of Montreal without any hassle once you can link into either the Loiselle Marriage Index or the PRDH.

You don't mention where your ancestors lived when you found your roadblock. Rivard is one of the oldest names in North America, so you have a rich heritage and one relatively easy to trace. If your family was in Michigan, they were probably here since the founding of Detroit 300 years ago (that's when my line hit the states). If they were in upstate New York, they probably appeared in the US in the 1820s-50s when there was a great economic downturn in Quebec.

The tricky part is that neither the US nor Canada was keeping birth or death records in the mid 1800s. Canada kept marriage records, but they're not all online. The Rivard family was heavily Catholic, so the records you need should be in a Catholic parish somewhere. That's where you'll find the birth, marriage and death records, and where you should find the name(s) of the parish(es) of the parents.

The Loiselle Marriage Index is invaluable between 1780 and 1880 when the gap occurs...but with the caveat that it's mostly for Quebec and upstate NY/Vermont marriages and not so much for the rest of the lands where the family may have settled. It was created by a very bored priest who wanted to preserve records in case the British ever decided to destroy churches. The drawback is that they're on microfilm and not on the internet.

The PRDH at the Universite de Montreal is a fabulous database site (not free, but not expensive). The drawback is that the records end at 1799. So you need to get back to that date to make use of it. But then once you do, everything is there for you in a very pretty package with a big red bow on it.

Let me know if you have more info on the line. We may be able to solve it in a day or 2.

Answer 2

Sweeney flew the Nagasaki challenge, no longer the Hiroshima run. yet neither Tibbitts nor Sweeney ever expressed sense sorry about for what they did. As military adult men, they believed that they had performed what mandatory to be performed. provided that bombing missions utilizing wide-spread bombs had and were able to doing as a lot harm because the nuclear drops(notwithstanding such bombings required dozens, if no longer thousands of planes), it truly would not make experience for them to sense guilt about utilizing atomic guns at the same time as no longer regretting utilizing wide-spread bombs.