Now that's a conundrum! >Truth, as always, "lies" somewhere in the middle. > >Hope that's helpful. Le gach dea-ghuí / Best, - Jerry > Thank you for the way you explained it, it has been very helpful and has made things very clear. The thing about (recorded) history, is that many "truths" that we grow up believing happened ... are really, in fact, oral legends that have been passed down from generation to generation in the days before written records. Then along comes writing and these stories get written down. As such they have the tendency to grow larger than life, better than really occurred, or the opposite ... worse than really happened ... etc. So we have to turn to other things like archaelogy, and other cultures that did have written records at the time, to help us along. Even drawings on steles and pillars, rocks, and gravesites, etc can help us determine events. So in the end, we just read all we can, learn all we can, and draw our best educated conclusions. Now DNA ... that seems to be pretty definitive, for genealogical history, as far as evidence goes. I have re-assessed the way I think of what it means to be Irish. I can see that being Irish is to be the product of a number of ethnicities. And here in America, we look upon "Irish" as our ethnicity, or "Italian", or "German", when in reality we are just extensions of all those migrations into Ireland, Germany, Italy, and so on. Maybe one day, (if we last that long) "American" will become an ethnicity too. Fascinating stuff !! Aint genealogy grand. Peace Phyllis