The Road to Ireland

Though the date for the much-anticipated trip to Ireland will soon be upon us, the way leading up to that point still seems to be long and winding.

The plan is for my daughter, now a junior in college—at the only undergraduate School of International Studies on the west coast—to spend her upcoming fall semester studying abroad in Ireland. Her hoped-for study-abroad university assignment is University College Cork.

For anyone who has followed A Family Tapestry for any length of time, Cork is the city that is conveniently located just down the road from some of my husband’s Irish forebears. How could we not take advantage of such serendipitous situation?!

Yet, as much as I intended to stay on task and dutifully complete all the prerequisite research in preparation for arrival in our target cities, there have been many roadblocks to its completion. Admittedly, some of them were unavoidable—like serious injury and even death in the family—but nonetheless, it appears I’ve got to quickly get back to the business of preliminary research in order to be sufficiently prepared for the task ahead of us.

Yes, it was informative and entertaining, even, to take the detours in the past few months that led me to the Ukraine on behalf of my godmother’s Melnitchenko family, and to the old south of my mother’s maternal ancestors, but for the most part, the road ahead will be filled with all the details I can find on the Irish heritage claimed by my husband and his family.

Step one will be to review what I’ve already written on each branch of that family. So far, I’ve blogged about the Tully family and their roots in Ballina, County Tipperary. I’ve made some mention of the Malloy family—especially the mysterious Stephen Malloy whose disappearance to Boston led to the family’s ultimate immigration to Chicago—and the related Flanagan family of County Limerick (they who were just up the road from Cork). I’ve bemoaned my research fate in having to find the Kelly family from County Kerry, and even my discovery that the Falvey family from that county had a more common surname than I at first had suspected.

Following that, step two will be to see where the trail ends for each of the Irish family names I’m tracing—where, exactly, I’m stuck in retracing the family’s steps from the New World back to their ancestral home in Ireland.

Step three, of course, will be to work feverishly to connect the dots from where the trail goes dark in Chicago or New Orleans or even Ontario to where it began in the old country.

My hope is that this several-months’ hiatus from researching the Irish story will have not only provided a respite for the researcher (and, by proxy, the researcher’s followers) but a period of renewal for all those much-appreciated online services which are, daily, adding to their collections of digitized records.

Above: photograph of the Long Hall and Clock Tower of University College Cork by Bjorn Christian Torrissen via Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.