Beginnings

Back in 2011, I took my family on a vacation to Ireland.  Both of my children -- Daniel and Anastasia -- had been born in Russia -- the country of their Mother, Natasha, my wife -- where we had lived for nine years.  They had returned to Russia several times after we had moved to the States.  I wanted them to have some sense of the other side of their heritage.

We spent some time hitting all the touristy spots:

Dublin

Newgrange

Blarney Castle

The Cliffs of Moher

The Aran Islands

 

and The Burren

 

We spent much of our time, however, in County Cork, the ancestral home of the O'Mahony Clan.

Now, it seems the O'Mahony's were a quarrelsome lot.  When they weren't fighting -- and usually losing -- with neighboring clans, they were fighting among themselves over who was in charge.  Finally, the clan split in two between the Kerrymen and the Corkmen, and the power and influence of the O'Mahony Clan had pretty much waned by the end of the thirteenth century.

There are several O'Mahony castle ruins in Cork, and we managed to visit two of them.  The first was Dunmanus Castle:

And the second was Dunlough Castle out at the very end of the Mizen peninsula:

All this immersion in Irish and O'Mahony culture inevitably raised the question from my children: "So, Dad, where are we from in Ireland?"

And I didn't have an answer for them.

I knew nothing past my grandfather, other than some vague references to a relative who was a police inspector in Brooklyn in the late 1880s, and that my ancestors probably came over from Ireland in the late 1840s during the Great Potato Famine emigration. 

I had nothing to go on, but I was determined that I would answer my children's question, and that the next time we visited Ireland, we would visit the village where our ancestors were born.