When Kit was in college, her paternal grandmother and namesake, Kitty Callahan, sent her a Civil War picture of her Irish ancestor standing with Abraham Lincoln at Antietam. Setting out to prove this was actually a picture of her grandmother’s Uncle Neil started Kit on a genealogical journey that has lasted over thirty years, investigating German brothers who joined the California Gold Rush, Revolutionary War colonels whose land in Kentucky was surveyed by Daniel Boone, a direct line to Patrick Henry’s sister, Annie, and a maternal grandfather who was the thirteenth in a family of Irish immigrants.
Education and Training
Kit’s formal training is in research, writing, and editing, having graduated from Stanford in Journalism and International Relations (a combination of political science, history, languages, and economics), and from Harvard with a master’s degree in Education. She was an intelligence specialist teaching Soviet submarine recognition in the U.S. Navy (think Hunt for Red October) and worked in international admissions at both Harvard and University of San Diego.
Specialties
Her areas of specialty include: Colonial American, the California and Alaska gold rushes, Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states in the nineteen and twentieth centuries, immigration, military, and Ireland, but any other U.S. research is fair game as well.
Experience
Living in New Zealand as a foreign exchange student and later living in Damascus, Syria, and Islamabad, Pakistan, and conducting college fairs all over Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, sparked her genealogical interests even further. She also knows much of the country, having lived from San Diego to Seattle, Albuquerque to West Yellowstone, and Boston to Virginia Beach.
After many years writing and editing for a variety of companies, Kit had the opportunity to join Legacy Tree Genealogists to bring all that experience together. There’s nothing like loving your work and working in a field you love! When she is not digging up buried family history, she collects camels, buys and sells antiques, debates World War II battles with her 10-year-old grandson, and goes kayaking with her family.
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