By Jim Hagarty
In 1999, I published a book of family/Irish history called Home Again: An Emigrant Family Returns to Ireland.
My Hegarty family started leaving Ireland in 1845. More came to North America in 1848 and by 1852, the entire family was resettled.
The history of the family and its origins was mostly lost to descendants as the decades past. By the time I was a teenager, more than a hundred years after their exodus, there was little knowledge among family members about our Irish roots. We knew from what county we came (Cork) and eventually, the town of Fermoy and the village of Conna were mentioned.
In the sixties and seventies, there was a surge of interest in genealogy among North Americans. Some family members started doing what digging they could.
I eventually became interested too, and made some research trips to Ireland. Meanwhile, my older brother Bill caught the bug and spent hours in the National Library in Dublin and on car trips across Canada and the U.S. to interview long-lost relatives.
In 1994, my wife and I discovered the 26-acre farm the Hegartys had left. The stone cottage they had lived in was and is still standing, though out of use. When I opened the door to the farmhouse, I was the first Hegarty to see inside the building in almost 150 years.
That was the genesis of my book but it grew into a much bigger story as I decided to compile biographies on the eight Hegarty kids who were raised in the cottage you see on the front cover of the book above.
I have registered a new domain – emigrantfamilyhomeagain.com – and took it live this week. It is in its infancy but eventually, I will publish excerpts from the book along with details about purchasing copies of it.
Please stay tuned.
