Family History Association of North Queensland Inc.

07/09/2026

Does this help
Explain why siblings don’t share the same DNA?

🧬 Two brothers take the very same DNA test, get noticeably different results, and one of them rings the company to complain. Nothing has gone wrong anywhere. That is simply how it works.

You get half your DNA from each parent, but not the same half your brother got. When a parent's DNA is passed on it is shuffled first, in a process called recombination, and the deck is cut differently every single time. So full siblings share about fifty per cent of their DNA on average, and the real figure ranges roughly from the low forties to the high fifties. Average is not the same thing as always. 🔀

Which means the pieces you inherited from any one grandparent are not the pieces your sister inherited. You might carry a long stretch from your father's mother and your brother might carry almost none of it. Go back four or five generations and it is entirely normal for a distant ancestor to have handed measurable DNA to you and none at all to your sibling. They are still your ancestor. The DNA just did not come down your particular road. 🌿

That is why the ethnicity percentages come out different between brothers and sisters, sometimes by ten points or more, and why one sibling can match a cousin on a testing site while another does not match that same cousin at all.

The use of knowing it is real. If you are working on a family line, test your siblings as well as yourself. Between the lot of you, you are holding a good deal more of your grandparents' DNA than any one of you holds alone. ☘️

06/09/2026

Now don’t say you are losing the plot when you see the same names constantly repeated in your families.

👶 If your Irish family tree is full of the same six names repeating for two hundred years, that is not a failure of imagination. There was a system, and it can be run backwards.

The traditional pattern went like this. The first son took his father's father's name. The second son took his mother's father's name. The third son took his father's own name. On the other side, the first daughter took her mother's mother's name, the second daughter her father's mother's name, and the third daughter her mother's own. 📜

What that means in practice is remarkable, because it works in reverse. If you know the children of a couple and the order they were born in, you can make a reasonable guess at the names of all four grandparents without holding a single record for that generation. In a country that lost so much of its paper, a naming pattern is sometimes the only bridge back to people who were never written down at all.

Now the honest part, because this gets oversold badly. It was never a law and it was never followed everywhere. Adherence varied by region and by period, families broke it constantly for a favourite uncle or a godparent or a landlord worth flattering, and it faded through the later nineteenth century. Treat what it hands you as a hypothesis to test, never as an answer.

One more thing worth knowing, because it catches people badly. When a child died young, the very same name was very often given to the next child born. Two John Sullivans in the one family is not a transcription error, and finding the burial for the first one is usually what unlocks the whole household. ☘️

19/06/2026

Don’t forget we have a workshop tomorrow, Saturday 20 June at 10am in our Library at 5 Baker Street.
Come along and discover how to use Microsoft word in your genealogy research.
Basic skills will be shown and then you will have the opportunity to create templates for your research, manipulate documents and tables to your preferences and extract information from online sources
Cost is $8 for members and $20 for non members. Two hour duration.
Bring along your laptop so you can practice and save your work during the hands on section.

17/06/2026

Learning about the social history of a country can help one to understand the decisions that ancestors had to make.
Technology as we know it today was not available so use of natural materials was the go to.

🪵🇮🇪 The Shillelagh

Today it is one of Ireland's most recognisable symbols. Historically, it was something much more practical.

The shillelagh was a stout walking stick, often crafted from blackthorn, a tough wood common in Irish hedgerows. Many were shaped so that the natural root formed the knobbed handle, then carefully dried and hardened over time.

The name is traditionally linked to Shillelagh in County Wicklow, a region once known for its woodland. Over the centuries, the word became associated with a distinctive style of Irish stick rather than every walking stick in Ireland.

While shillelaghs are connected with bataireacht, the Irish tradition of stick fighting, their primary role was usually far less dramatic. They served as walking aids, travelling companions, and practical tools in everyday rural life.

What survives today is more than a stick. It is a reminder of a time when useful objects were made to last, shaped by local materials, skilled hands, and the demands of the landscape.



📸 Irish Roots

13/06/2026

For those who knew Paul here are his funeral details.
Paul joined FHANQ in 2002 and held the positions of President, Auditor, Computer Officer and Legacy Family Tree Special Interest Group Facilitator for a number of years.
In 2015 he was awarded Life Membership.
Paul’s last major job for us was trying to salvage our computers and servers after the February 2019 floods.
He took everything home and tried to dry them out. Unfortunately this was not successful but as usual that did not stop Paul.
Paul was able to obtain replacement computers, new laptops and over a period of several weeks painstakingly learnt how to set up our new servers and locate them within our data cabinet.
It was not unusual to see Paul coming in at night time to fix up our computer problems.
Over a decade or more Paul installed software and programs onto our servers to enhance our members’ ability to digitally research using our resources.
Not only did Paul work tirelessly during the 5-6 months recovery period but he also couldn’t stay idle during our enforced 6 week shutdown during Co-vid the next year. With another late Life Member, John Johnson, they scanned all of our magazines then loaded them onto our servers for ease of retrieval.
Paul provided us with other resources over time.
Most of our older members would have learnt how to use the Legacy program during his twice a month meetings.
Since my becoming a Committee member in 2009, Paul had me helping him prepare databases for the computers, facilitate workshops, provided sound legal and accounting advice while I was Treasurer and President as well as providing many a joke to lighten the atmosphere when the going got tough.
If you are unable to attend Paul’s funeral the service will be Live Streamed.

04/06/2026

Something big is coming to GEDmatch — and you're invited to the reveal. 🧬

📅 Friday June 19, 10AM PST — Join us live for the first public preview of the all-new GEDmatch. Rebuilt, redesigned, and faster across the board. This is the platform we've always wanted to put in your hands, and you'll be among the first to see it. Open to everyone, with the recording going up on our YouTube channel afterward.

Then join us again on Friday, June 26 at 12PM PST for Reconstructing Ancestors with GEDmatch: Lazarus, My Evil Twin & Phasing. Learn how to reconstruct an ancestor's DNA without a fresh test, separate maternal and paternal lines, and understand what these powerful tools can (and can't) do. (Recording wil be posted in the Tier 1 forum for members.)

Both webinars are free and open to all users. Registration links below 👇

GEDmatch preview: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5563744796617411927

Reconstructing Ancestors & More: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2346933314047086940

04/06/2026

Want something different to research ?
This blog from John Grenham may be the instigator of many hours of searching to the detriment of my other activities.

A massive upgrade to our Birth, Marriage and Death maps. (Pictured: Our death records)

Visit the blog to see our animated death records.
https://www.johngrenham.com/blog/2026/05/27/the-walking-dead-come-again/

04/06/2026

Are you of Irish ancestry?
Were you lucky enough to inherit these genes?

Your Irish Skin Ages Differently

☘️ You have probably been told your whole life that you look younger than you are. That your skin has a quality other people cannot quite name. That something about the way you age does not follow the same timeline as everyone around you.

That is not luck. That is MC1R.

Researchers studying skin aging in populations with high rates of the MC1R gene variant have found that fair Irish skin, despite its well-documented sensitivity to sun damage, shows measurably different collagen structure than darker skin types. The dermis of MC1R-variant skin contains a higher ratio of type one collagen, the collagen responsible for skin firmness and elasticity, and retains that ratio longer into middle age than populations without the variant. The same gene that makes Irish skin burn easily also builds it differently at a structural level.

Your grandmother had remarkable skin for her age. You probably remember it. The particular quality of it. The way it held its structure long after it should have started to show the years. She probably never thought about it. It was simply how her skin was, the way Irish skin has always been, built for an Atlantic climate and aging on its own timeline.

You have her skin. And the gene that built it has been running in your bloodline for thousands of years longer than any cream or treatment has existed.

Tag someone whose Irish skin has always aged on its own terms, and follow The Irish Remembered. ☘️

17/05/2026

With Mother’s Day just gone this might help to explain a tradition that most of us would have grown up with.

Why Irish Women Feed You Before They Ask What's Wrong

☘️ If you grew up with an Irish woman who put food in front of you before she asked a single question, who had something on the stove before you finished telling her what happened, who fed you as the first act of taking care of you and the last resort when nothing else was working, you did not grow up with someone who liked to cook. You grew up with someone who spoke a language older than words.

The Irish tradition of feeding as care is not cultural habit. It has a history that goes all the way to the floor of what Irish women survived.

During the Famine, Irish mothers made decisions about food that no mother should ever have to make. Who ate today. Who waited. How to divide what almost nothing into portions that kept the most people alive the longest. Food was not sustenance during those years. It was power, love, grief, and survival compressed into whatever could be found and stretched and placed in front of the people who needed it most.

When the Famine ended the Irish women who survived carried that relationship with food forward in a way that never fully resolved back into ordinary cooking. Feeding someone became the most direct expression of love available because for a generation of Irish women it had been the only one. The only way to say I want you to live. The only way to say you matter enough to feed. The only way to say I am here and while I am here you will not go hungry.

Your grandmother did not ask if you were hungry. She already knew the answer and she had already decided what it meant that you were in her kitchen. The food was never about the food. It was always about the fact that you were there and she wanted to keep you.

Tag the Irish woman who always fed you before she asked what was wrong, and follow The Irish Remembered. ☘️

17/05/2026

Ever wondered why relatives spend time with their recently deceased before their burial?