My Ancestors
My father started investigating our family origins in the 1990s after he retired. My brothers and I have spent time in our retirement adding to the investigation, albiet with a bit more casual approach than he had. Regardless, I feel very confident it is accurate after our ancestors immigrated to the United States.
Arrival in America
Both of my parent’s ancestors immigrated from Europe and settled in either Pennsylvania or Virginia.
On my Dad’s side, the Hortons arrived first from England very early in America’s formative days. They are connected on Ancestry.com to several sites in 13th-century England. They immigrated in the early 1600s and settled in the Richmond area south of Washington DC.
In the early 1800s, they moved to the southwestern part of Virginia and settled in the area around Big Stone Gap and then Gate City. This was the route to the west through Cumberland Gap of Daniel Boone’s fame.
The Tubridy family came during the height of the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1850s. They came from the west coast of Ireland in the area around Doonberg in County Clare. They quickly settled in Pennsylvania, several hundred miles west of New York City.
Mom’s family, the Kovachs, came in the early 1900s as part of a mass immigration from central Europe to work the coal mines near Pittsburg. They were undoubtedly both looking for a better life. They came from the Carpathian Mountian ranges of the Ural Mountains in a town near the easternmost part of modern-day Ukraine.
They eventually had one thing in common. Coal.
The Tubridy family settled in Snow Shoe outside of State College. It was on the edge of the northeastern part of the coal fields. The area opened when a railroad was built.
They lived at one of the stops on the rail line. Not too much is happening in the present day except for a mail processing facility outside of town.
The Kovachs settled on a homestead in the Vanderbilt township southeast of Pittsburg. I grew up always hearing the name of the nearby town, Connellsville, where some settled. It was deep in the coal fields that dominated the area around Pittsburg.
My Dad’s father ended up getting a degree in Engineering from Penn State and started working in the coal mines. He wound up in the same area as Dad’s Mom in southwestern Virginia. This was the scene of the coal boom at the turn of the 1900s that eventually brought my parents together.
Genealogy
My father started working on the family genealogy after he retired in the 1990s. He was able to compile a documented history of his ancestors back through Thomas Tubridy’s immigration in 1850. He was able to document his mother’s ancestors from their arrival in the Americas in the early 1600s. He was not able to find out anything about my mother’s family prior to their immigrating from eastern Europe at the turn of the 1900s.
He used an early version of Ancestral Quest to record the data. I started from there and used Ancestry.com to develop a more comprehensive view. I am now using MacFamily Tree, which has very nice features and integrates with online sources.
The PDF files have the descendants for all three families, starting when the ancestors immigrated to the Americas. There is a considerable number of ancestors on my grandmother’s side – the Hortons. Their history goes back to the early 1600s. The other two families came in the mid-1800s to early 1900s.
Ireland
Mom and Dad went to Ireland in the 1990s. I am unsure exactly where they went, but here are the shots of Tubridy-named businesses they frequented. Tubridy House is located in Cooraclare Village, Kilrush. I think these are all in the same location.
