Irish roots
Irish roots
2008
Amy’s unclesent he r a book he published on the Healy roots, on Amy’s mother’s side. It was meticulously researched by this retired professor, and she read her copy carefully placing colored tags on sections she wanted to refer to in planning our trip. Our general goal was Counties Sligo and Mayo, in the north central part of Ireland.
Most places we stopped the innkeepers asked us of we were tracing our roots, which is very common among visitors. There has been large volume emigration before and especially at the time of the Potato Famine, and since. The relatively small population of Ireland hosts the greater number of those on the globe with family ties to the island. The tragedy of the famine led to reduction in the population by 20-25% and to an indelible mark in the history and culture of the Irish people. Since that time, other waves of emigration and return have occurred.
We drove from Dublin to explore County Donegal in the northwest, The coast is striking as shown in the upper right. We drove south to County Sligo and based ourselves at a rather luxurious inn overlooking the region called Ballyhealy, loosely translated as the land of the Healy. The next morning we visited neolithic graves shown above, which were very likely early relatives of the Healy’s but this is of course impossible to know. From these gravesites, however, you can easily see the location of known 18th century farms of the Healy family shown at right, so the connection isn’t far-fetched.
We then spent the morning in neighboring County Mayo following a rough map in the book to the farm continuously owned by members of the Healy family. The map was very rough and hard to follow, so after hours driving on the narrow dirt lanes, we finally stopped to knock on the door of a house which seemed like it would be close to the farm. An elderly lady answered, but she didn’t know of any Healys nor could she recognize the picture of the farm in Amy’s book. She did know someone who likely would, however, and pointed to a house not far from hers. We drove 15 mintues to the adjacent house, knocked on that door, and met a woman who not only knew where the farm was, but whose daughter volunteered to lead us there. It was another 15 minute drive but at last we found what we were after--the farm shown in the picture at lower left and more imporantly a wonderful man who is Amy’s relative. He was kind, generous in giving us a tour of the stone building where he and his mother was born and in giving us a link to her past. It was an amazing moment. I took lots of pictures, but lost that camera on a train in Scotland on our way back so we have the memories and this one souvenir shot.
This was one of the highlights of our trip. We saw many more villages and historical sites--the Kennedy pub in Galway where JKF stopped on his tour for example--then returned to Dublin, then Glasgow, Edinburgh, and returned home.
Tracing Amy’s family roots in Ireland
8/13/11
Amy’s uncle self-published a book on the Healy family, Amy’s grandmother’s family. As so many others Americans have done, we traveled to Ireland to follow those roots.