Tim Walz’s Irish Great-Great-Grandparents Were Just Like Him

This Apple Didn’t Fall Far from the Tree

Governor and VP Candidate Tim Walz

Whenever someone notable first grabs my attention, I can’t resist climbing the branches of their family tree to see — among other things — whether they might have a bit of Irish ancestry. Such was the case with Tim Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate — as well as governor, teacher, coach, veteran, animal lover, and the dad everyone wishes they had.

It didn’t take long to discover that one of Gov. Walz’s great-grandmothers was named Laura Ellen Sullivan. A surname like Sullivan is a clear signal that you’re Irish-adjacent, and sure enough, her parents, James and Anna (Lacy) Sullivan were immigrants. This translates into Tim Walz’s heritage being 1/8th Irish.

Thanks to the explosion of records the Irish government has made available online over the last decade or so, I swiftly found the baptism record for James Sullivan.

Baptism of James Sullivan, 12 Nov 1840 (Published under the National Library of Ireland’s Terms of Use of Material made available on registers.nli.ie)

The location? County Wexford. It’s somewhere in the vicinity of Kilmore that can claim Tim Walz¹ (please see the footnote below for the previous text and more clarification), and those with Doyle…