Genealogy

The Thirteenth Century illustration at the top of this page is from Decret de Gratien
and shows Time, personified as a hoary king, holding a consanguinity table.
Such tables were designed to help determine degrees of kinship
in order that marriages, particularly among the nobility,
might not conflict with the Old Testament prohibitions still upheld by the Church.
The general rule was that a man and a woman were forbidden to marry if they had a common ancestor
within the seven previous generations.
The original manuscript is now Ms. 34, fol. 185,
in the Bibliothèque Municipale of Grenoble, France.
__________

In late June 1955, when I was between 7th and 8th grades and almost 14 years old, the husband of a first cousin of my mother was shot while driving home from work by a mentally unstable, and probably drunk, off-duty Chicago Police detective. For days the Chicago newspapers ran articles about the shooting. My mother's cousin died on July 1, 1955, after a week in Little Company of Mary Hospital, where I myself had been born in 1941.

Throughout this event I avidly read and collected all the newspapers articles on it. They reported that my relative had been a Chicago public school teacher (as was his mother-in-law, who was then the oldest living sister of my grandmother). The newspapers also revealed that the dead man's wife was pregnant with their third child. Some articles even quoted the principal of the school where he had worked as describing him being mild-mannered and hard-working. I soon learned that that principal was a first cousin of my grandmother, therefore, I soon found out, a "first cousin once removed" both of my mother and of the dead school teacher's widow.

All this terminolgy intrigued the 7th-grader: "mother-in-law," "first cousins once and twice removed." Thus began a decades-long hobby of researching my family's history. For almost 35 years I kept my family history data simply on paper and, in the process, filled up several file cabinets, boxes, and albums with letters, notes, photographs, etc. Then, in 1991, David M. Williams, a distant cousin (a third cousin, to be exact) on my mother's side, equally interested in genealogy, told me that he was in the process of writing his autobiography and - as part of the project - had computerized all his family history data. He strongly urged me to acquire from the Mormons in Utah the genealogy database software called "Personal Ancestry File." This I quickly did; and for years afterwards I was working several hours a day, digitizing my room-full of family history data.

And now, after all that effort, I set out to publish my genealogical reasearch on the world wide web, which means that once again I have to re-formulate all my data: this time from the ASCII language of both my word-processing and my database software to the HTML language used for web sites. This second conversion process will also, of necessity, take quite some time (less time, I hope, than the 4 years of the first effort). One good thing, though, about having to go over all this material yet one more time is that all this reviewing will remind me of forgotten areas needing more research and will afford me the opportunity to proof-read all my data.

Summarized below are separate listings for each of my eight pairs of great-great-grandparents. I shall post on this web site whatever data that I have on these ancestors and on their descendants right down to my own generation. The data will be posted seriatim, as I complete the conversion to HTML of each family line's data. I also plan on posting photographs and other illustrations.  Readers interested in what information I so far have on any family line listed below should e-mail me.

And please, if you should see on this site anything incorrect, or if you know of any information I am lacking, e-mail me the good word.

Here I am,
Terrence J. Boyle,
in December 1960,
sitting next to my grandmother Catherine F. Khym
and my mother Helen K. Boyle
.

John Boyle and his wife Mary Dunn, whose youngest son
.....Peter Boyle married Mary Keeley and was the father of
.....John Francis Boyle, who married Alice Ethel McGrath and whose son
.....John Joseph Boyle married Helen Mary Khym and is my father.

Daniel Keeley and his wife Margaret McAuley, whose oldest daughter
.....Mary Keeley married Peter Boyle and was the mother of
.....John Francis Boyle, who married Alice Ethel McGrath and whose son
.....John Joseph Boyle married Helen Mary Khym and is my father.

Dennis McGrath and his wife Bridget Murphy, whose oldest son
.....John McGrath married Johanna Daly and was the father of
.....Alice Ethel McGrath, who married John Francis Boyle and whose son
.....John Joseph Boyle married Helen Mary Khym and is my father.

Patrick Daly and his wife Catherine Swift, whose oldest surviving daughter
.....Johanna Daly married John McGrath and was the mother of
.....Alice Ethel McGrath, who married John Francis Boyle and whose son
.....John Joseph Boyle married Helen Mary Khym and is my father.

Edmund Ernst Khym and his wife Karolina Katharina Siegel, whose only son
.....Gustav Adolf Khym married Mary Jane Lee and was the father of
.....John Adams Khym, who married Catherine Mary Fyanes and whose daughter
.....Helen Mary Khym married John Joseph Boyle and was my mother.

John Lee and his as yet unknown wife, whose only known daughter
.....Mary Jane Lee married Gustav Adolf Khym and was the mother of
.....John Adams Khym, who married Catherine Mary Fyanes and whose daughter
.....Helen Mary Khym married John Joseph Boyle and was my mother.

Daniel Fyanes and his first wife Jane McCann, whose youngest son
.....Andrew Fyanes married Mary Jane McNeill and was the father of
.....Catherine Mary Fyanes, who married John Adams Khym and whose daughter
.....Helen Mary Khym married John Joseph Boyle and was my mother.

Kearn McNeill and his wife Catherine Dargan, whose oldest daughter
.....Mary Jane McNeill married Andrew Fyanes and was the mother of
.....Catherine Mary Fyanes, who married John Adams Khym and whose daughter
.....Helen Mary Khym married John Joseph Boyle and was my mother.

Here is my father, John Joseph Boyle,
on Easter Sunday 2001,
then aged 92,
holding the "Boyle Cane".