Never heard of it? Neither had I, till not long ago. So why this very rural county way up north, well off the tourist track? It turned out to be the most personally emotional of our stops for me, because it´s from here that my great grandmother Elizabeth Duffy hailed. I´m adopted, and first learned about her from my birth mother (the three of us lived together in Lizzie´s apartment in the New York City borough of the Bronx. I wasn´t able to learn much about the family tree, but the very little information I did have was enough, when I contacted the public library in the town of Carrickmacross (above, pop. 5,700), to track down a pair of second cousins once removed in a rural area north of town called Dooraa, which Lizzie left for NYC back around the turn of the 20th century.

And so it was that I found myself in the house of farmer Michael Duffy (left) and his English wife Lorraine, getting to know them, Michael´s brother Francis (right) and his wife Sandra, and their kids, in their teens or early 20s. We also visited the cottage behind their house where Lizzie grew up (pictured here); her parish church; her schoolhouse (beautifully turned into a residence by a local man who graciously let us come in for a look around), and attended one of Michael´s sons´ rugby game. The Duffys, we discovered, are lovely people, and even quite progressive, which is something we didn´t think we could take for granted in Irish farm country. But in that regard they´re quite typical of the country as a whole, which from a past under the stifling, obscurantist influence of the Roman Catholic Church has become one of Europe´s most progressive countries (for example, pro-LGBTQ, pro-Palestine, and highly supportive of women´s rights - in fact, they´ve had a gay taoiseach (prime minister) and in two weeks they´re about to elect their third  female president, since both candidates are women). And they were very moved by the black-and-white formal portrait photo my mother had given me of Lizzie, since the family had essentially lost track of her over the years. 

Read more in my post Our Wonderful Recent Tour of Ireland´s "Greatest Hits."