About the Irish part, and the roots part. It’s really nice to find out where you came from originally and imagine who those people were. I always wish I knew the stories, but it’s hard enough to even trace the lines. I’ve been to Ireland once and it’s the most beautiful place full of cottages and misty fields, old castles and a slow pace of life.

There are a large contingent of Scots and some Irish in the first European settlers of Nova Scotia and the musical heritage is wonderful. Lots of great fiddle music.

Since I’m going back to Canada next week, I’ll say “good-bye” now, though I plan to keep blogging from there and want to follow your steps toward creative independence. Hope the future will be full of great adventures for you, in the mountains and the studio, and the great wide world.

I find it more useful to include a dynamic blogroll of latest-post links using Google Reader. On the one hand, it probably frustrates readers who want a complete list of the blogs I like, but on the other hand, I never have to worry about outdated links! I did have an annotated Links page for a while, but it was work to maintain; I’m not sure many people ever clicked on it; and Google and Technorati tend not to count links from other than the index page, so bloggers I linked to that way got little benefit from it in terms of increased traffic, PageRank, or Technorati Authority (metrics I personally don’t care about, but I know other people do).

I like the sketch at the bottom of your sidebar – a visual reminder of the blog you had when I first started reading four or five years ago.

Both of my family’s sides were rather local for the longest time around my hometown, so you would think that tracing the generations would be easy, but as it turns out most of them were farmers who seemed to be not much into writing. So there is surprisingly little information about anybody beyond three generations back and even there it’s already pretty fuzzy. Add to that a couple of family feuds that left some branches “never talking to each other again”, and there is not much of a family tree left!

I love the new logo/drawing in the header and the overall theme you are using for the site is really nice and pleasant. It feels like spring has arrived! :)

Nice new theme you got here. I really like the header – author photo combo. Your blogroll, though – man, you have URLs that changed or disappeared three years ago (including via neg). You’re even worse than Beth!

My mother’s family are Irish, the Culkins. We’re really sorry about Macaulay…