Riobard O’Dwyer, a retired National School teacher, of Eyeries, County Cork, Ireland, was born on 30 May 1932 and died on 22 January 2020. He was a genealogist and social historian who studied the families of the Beara Peninsula. The Beara Peninsula is located in southwest Ireland between Kenmare Bay and Bantry Bay. The peninsula is divided into four civil parishes (Kilcaskan, Kilcatherine, Killaconenagh, and Kilnamanagh) and six Catholic parishes (Adrigole, Allihies, Castletown, Eyeries, Glengarriff, and Kilcatherine). Common surnames include Blake, (O')Brien, Connolly, O'Connor, Cronin, Crowley, O'Driscoll, Goggin, Harrington, (O')Leary, Lynch, McCarthy, (O')Sullivan, (O')Shea, and Twomey. Families from the Beara Peninsula immigrated to the United States and Great Britain with lesser amounts going to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and a few other countries. The families who immigrated to the United States went primarily to New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island but also Illinois, Montana, New Jersey, California, Iowa, Arizona, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.

For more than fifty years, Riobard travelled the highways and byways, interviewed all those of the living and the several old people long since dead and gathered their stories, studied the Church records of every Parish in the Beara Peninsula and went through many overgrown cemeteries studying the headstones. He published the four volume Who were my ancestors between 1976 and 1989 and he published the three volume Annals of Beara in 2009.

Riobard lectured in Boston, Salt Lake City, etc., on his work, and in fact he entertained both crew and passengers with a selection of Irish traditional music on his accordion on the flight between Butte and Salt Lake City (he is an accomplished musician and performed for several broadcasts of Irish traditional music on the accordion). Riobard took part in Butte, Montana, in the making of the Film "From Beara to Butte", which was based on his work about the copper miners who emigrated there from the Allihies copper mines in Beara.

Although not reflected in this collection, Riobard O’Dwyer was also known for winning seven All-Ireland triple jump championships including five championships in a row (still an Irish Record). He also won Cork, Kerry, Wexford, Munster, and Leinster Championships. He still holds the County Wexford triple jump Championship by jumping two feet out over the end of the pit on one occasion and he was also Irish Chief Coach for the triple jump. He won Cork, Munster, and Colleges medals in football, and wrote a history of football in the Beara Peninsula.