Unearthing My Irish Roots

Through AncestryDNA I was able to trace my family lineage to 1710, County Mayo Ireland. The only way I could write Using this book was by taking some poetic license. I am 90% sure of the dates, surnames and historical events. To make the story line flow smooth, I resorted to my imagination. From 1710 to the 1990's, the lives of my ancestors are written solely by my creativity and flights of fancy. I spent hours envisioning what their lives may have been like. That is why this work is listed as a semifictional historical manuscript.

For the vast majority of people in County Mayo the eighteenth century was a period of unrelieved misery, with some minor famines. Because of the operation of what were called 'the penal laws', Catholics had no hope of social advancement while they remained in their native land. However, emigration could and did lead to new opportunities and challenges for many like William Brown (1777-1857), who left Foxford at the age of nine and thirty years later was an admiral in the fledgling Argentine Navy. Today he is revered as 'the father of the Argentine Navy', and as a national hero in that country.

Nevertheless, when the United Irishmen were forced by government repression to move from working openly for reform to secretly plotting revolution, and when Leinster and east Ulster blazed into rebellion in June of 1798, no one expected Mayo to play a memorable role in the bloody drama about to commence. The man who dragged Mayo onto the stage of Irish history in 1798 was a French general from Lorraine, a former dealer in goat and rabbit skins named Joseph Amable Humbert.

Historical facts like these and anecdotal stories are included in this book.