Background - why bother?

Quite simply, my mother is a McKinley and knows little as to the origins of her family beyond who her grandparents were. She knew that the family had been in the Kilglass / Easky area ofCounty Sligo (Ireland) for various generations, where they had been tenant farmers; and that she thought they had come directly from Scotland. Some photographs taken by a cousin of family tombstones at Kilglass Church piqued my interest and a few years later I find myself with a couple of notebooks jammed full of McKinleys in New Zealand, in Australia, in America and Canada, in the UK;...and pitifully few still in Sligo.

What to do with all the knowledge gained? The genealogy websites are ferociously complicated and tend to be US centric, so why not a humble blog, tracing my own voyage of discovery?

To tempt the patient reader: the first Governor of Delaware; the first pilot to circumnavigate the globe; various revolutionaries and plain tear-aways; and by dubious footwork, maybe even a President of the USA. And that is just the menfolk. Women get treated miserably in genealogy: for a start they change their name upon marriage and also the mortality rate for young mothers was dreadful; but despite all that there are various matriarchs that shine through (..and more than a few that eloped). And if there are any of you called Elinor, or Eleanor,...you have a straight line back to the time that King Charles fellow had his head chopped off.

So here goes