maybe someone here knows- passports

[Irish_Dem]

25. The second male child is named after his mother's father.

The child's maternal grandfather.

From what I have seen Irish naming tradition usually ends with the second generation Irish here in the US. My father followed it with his children, he was first generation Irish male and he called the shots.

Did you know that our first generation Irish American parents were Irish citizens?

If you do the DNA testing at Ancestry you might be able to find out the truth about grandpa's siblings.
Once you start seeing second cousins pop up on that line, you have your answer.

I am not buying an Irish family with just one kid. Seems very unlikely.

My Irish grandparents didn't talk about their sibs either. It is like when the left Ireland, it was all behind them. I did find grandpa's siblings in the Irish census which surprised me. And a long lost second cousin popped up on Ancestry that had to be from a male sibling to grandpa. Apparently the sibling slightly changed his name. But he is on the Irish census with my grandfather as kids. And of course I have the DNA proof he existed via a second cousin on grandpa's line.

So now you have a second research question which might be answered with DNA testing at Ancestry.

If you do the testing, I will show you how to organize the data to get meaningful results. Basically you are going to divide the match list in half according to mom or dad matches. Then divide it again into 4 categories, one for each grandparent. And then identify all your matches as belonging to one of the 4 groups. You do this by triangulating with known relatives and in common matching tools on Ancestry.

Once we know the DNA matches who belong to specific grandparents, we can look for surnames, locations, etc for finding their grandparent names etc from the match family trees. So you can identify the one grandfather's line you are looking for. Birth location, possible immigration data etc.

Ancestry now has very sophisticated norm groups and can actually tell you which Irish counties your DNA is from! Amazing, this is fairly new.

If you start getting second cousin matches that come from the grandfather who was supposed to be an only kid, well we know that is not true any longer.

All of that said, researching recent immigrant families in the US doesn't give much information compared to long time US residents.

I do adoption searches and it is just DNA science, genealogy and a bit of detective work.