Chapter 1 — Ireland
June 17–30, 2026 — Mark, Jim, and Andrew
Why Ireland, why now
This June I went to Ireland for the first time in my life, and I went with family: my brother Jim and his son Andrew (who had been there once before, but only very briefly). Andrew was just weeks past his Rice University graduation. The premise was simple and powerful. Our great-grandfather P.J. Conroy left County Tyrone for America around 1880; our great-grandmother Mary Ann Farrell had left County Kildare as a small child. They met and married in Kansas, and their American story — the farm, the six children, the Beloit dairy — is the half our family knew. What we didn't know was the Irish half. So the three of us spent two weeks driving the island with a folder of parish records, a booklet of gravestone inscriptions, and ten copies of a two-page handout about P.J. and Mary Ann — to give to relative. We found the graves. We found the townlands. And we found the living: cousins, mostly third cousins, who fed us, walked us to family plots, and talked with us about the ancestors we share and the lives we don't. Ireland turned out to be the right country for this kind of trip — gorgeous in a way that keeps interrupting conversation, and soaked in history at every scale, national to familial, so that every day handed us another chapter to learn or imagine.
Arrival — June 17–18
Jim and I flew separate routings aimed at the same Dublin morning; his connections collapsed en route and cost him a full day. I landed on the eighteenth and settled into The Wilder hotel, a Dublin townhouse — and before the trip had properly begun, the research surged ahead on its own. A Tyrone relative named Joseph Mullin sent me the Conroy parish records over WhatsApp: our great-great-grandparents' marriage at Beragh in 1853, P.J. there in the register, born 1861, and an infant sister no one alive had known about. The same evening, a librarian in Kansas found P.J.'s passport application: "Six Mile Cross, County Tyrone." Five foot eight. Blue eyes. I had carried our family's story across the ocean that morning; by nightfall it had already grown.
JIM: The lost day — tell it. ANDREW: Weeks past graduation, what did the start of this feel like?
Dublin, the three of us — June 19–21
Jim and Andrew landed together the next morning, and we began by having a large Irish breakfast at the Wilder Townhouse Hotel.
The Wilder Townhouse Hotel
The Wilder Townhouse hotel has a story of its own: built in 1839 by the Church of Ireland as a residence for retired governesses, each with a small apartment and a fireplace of her own — a house for women who had spent their working lives inside other families' stories. The right lodging, it turned out, for a trip like ours.
After breakfast we went to EPIC — Dublin's museum of Irish emigration, the story of everyone who ever left, toured by three descendants of leavers. (A looping clip of the comedian Spike Milligan singing "Water Boy" until a bucket of water hits him became the road trip's running joke.) That same day the other great thread of our ancestry announced itself: word came that an Italian court had approved our claim to Italian citizenship. Minutes after we heard, we took a selfie of the three of us with a rainbow behind us — rather than “the luck of the Irish”, we decided it was “the luck of the Italians” that day — and our celebratory dinner was at I Monelli, an Italian restaurant in Dublin within easy walking distance along the canal from our hotel.
I Monelli Italian Restaurant (above)
EPIC Museum (above)
Kilmainham Gaol (above)
Howth
Stag’s Head Pub (above)
The Old Spot, Sunday Roast, with the Sturmans (above)
Trinity College (above)
Taipei Representative Office in Dublin
The Jeanie Johnston Famine Ship (above)
The next days were Dublin at its best: the Jeanie Johnston famine ship, Kilmainham Gaol, and a surprise from the Italian side — a picnic in St. Anne's Park with Alessandro and Alexandra De Stefano, a cousin living in Dublin, met in person for the first time: falafel from a festival food truck, the rose garden at peak bloom, the family's two threads crossing in one park. On the solstice we did the classics — Trinity College and the Book of Kells, a first Guinness at the Stag's Head (mine the 0.0, which tastes amazingly like the real thing) — and ended with a Sunday roast at The Old Spot with old friends over from Paris. My note from that night survives in full: "Lovely experience. Great waiter." The walk home along the Grand Canal sealed it: Metallica was playing the Aviva Stadium a few streets away, and the sidewalks were full of families in black band t-shirts, young kids in tow. Dublin's street buskers, meanwhile, had already sold me a CD — a group called Key West.
ANDREW: The minutes after the citizenship news — and why did "Water Boy" stick? JIM: The Sunday roast, Trinity, and Temple Bar district.
Into the homelands — June 22–23
Then the trip turned toward its reason — and I turned left-side driver: eight days of inscrutable signage and stone-walled lanes barely a car wide, with me at the wheel for most of it. An hour southwest of Dublin lies Rathangan, County Kildare — Mary Ann Farrell's home parish, which she left as a small child and, as far as anyone knows, never saw again. Alerted by weeks of correspondence, the parish had organized itself around us: Mary Wright, the parish secretary; Jack O'Connell, the sacristan, who showed us the former church he had boxed and hurled in as a boy (his daughters teach Irish, though — like everywhere we went — the language seemed a cultural pursuit now, not a kitchen-table one); and Fr. Bill Kemmy, the parish priest, who worked the old cemetery with me using a booklet that indexes every legible stone — call a number, count the rows, kneel and read. The Farrell and Flood stones surfaced one by one with famine dates on them: a son dead at twenty-six in 1845, a husband in 1848. Standing at a stone from 1861, it occurred to me that this is just about when Mary Ann's people left — and that maybe these deaths are part of why. Lunch with Fr. Bill ran long and wide: the village's brushes with fame (an Emily Blunt film had just shot there; Bruce Springsteen's great-great-grandmother left this parish for New Jersey), and his own family's emigration story, which mirrored ours from the other side.
Rathangan, County Kildare (above)
The next day was the one the whole trip had been built around. County Tyrone: the townlands our Conroys farmed — Foremass, Sixmilecross, names off a passport application — and then Beragh churchyard at 11:30, where the family was waiting. Hugh Conroy, eighty-four, my second cousin once removed, walked us to the family plot with its big marble headstone — a stone he himself had once shored up with concrete to keep it from falling. (Between his Tyrone accent and a voice built for privacy, we caught maybe half of what Hugh said — his daughters assured us we weren't the first. It didn't matter; standing there with him was the communication.) Joseph Mullin was there, and Martin McCrory, a third cousin whose unread Ancestry messages from me got answered at the graveside instead. And here the trip revealed what it was actually for: Hugh had never even known P.J. existed. The brother who went to America had simply fallen out of the family's telling. We hadn't only come to find them — we were returning a lost chapter of their own story. When I asked Martin why anyone would leave a country this beautiful, his answer was the whole history of Irish America in five words: "You can't eat beauty."
Foremass, County Tyrone, PJ’s home
Beragh and Omagh (above)
The afternoon carried the theme to the Ulster American Folk Park — an open-air museum of Ulster emigration, toured by the American descendants with cousins Joseph and Martin ("LARP'ers," Andrew called the park’s costumed re-enactors) — and the day ended in Derry, walking the city walls and the Bogside murals in solstice light that held until ten.
BOTH: What were you thinking at the Beragh graveyard — and what did Hugh say that you could understand? ANDREW: Your Folk Park impressions.
Belfast — June 24
In Belfast we met Claire Sullivan — a third cousin, Hugh's daughter — and her husband Paul, and a planned lunch ran four hours. This is what the trip kept doing: turning strangers who share a great-great-grandparent into people you can't stop talking to. Family stories crossed the table in both directions — an infant brother of Hugh's discovered only through a death notice; the cattle-dealer brother of P.J.'s whose money raised that marble headstone; P.J.'s passport description, no photograph, one clerk's verdict: "Face: fat." And grief too, only weeks old in their family, which gave the trip its motto, in Claire's words: you live life to the full, because you really don't know. We're doing it right now, I said. I'm glad we didn't put this off until our seventies.
Belfast then performed its party trick — everybody knows everybody — and a chance sidewalk meeting with a councillor Claire knew got us a private tour of the City Hall council chamber, robes on, posing on two thrones that turn out to be Portuguese royal furniture. At four came the counterweight: the Black Cab tour of the peace walls, with a driver who grew up in the Troubles and told his own story without flinching — the gates that still close every night at 8:30, the plastic bullets passed around the cab, a childhood on the Falls Road. His line I can't shake: "There's two dividing walls left in the world: Palestine and Belfast." Ireland inspires thoughts about history; Belfast insists on them.
Belfast City Hall (above)
BOTH: First impressions of Claire and Paul? What did you think of City Hall? What did you think of Kevin and his Trouble’s Tour?
The Causeway Coast — June 25
The next morning we were on the Giant's Causeway stones by nine, ahead of the tour buses — forty thousand basalt columns and three Texans in the early light. Then a morning of Game of Thrones geography for the fans among us — Ballintoy Harbour and Larrybane Quarry, two filming sites in an hour — and Mussenden Temple on its clifftop. By evening we were at Harvey's Point on Lough Eske in Donegal for the set-piece dinner of the road trip.
The Giant’s Causeway (above)
BOTH: What did you think of the stones? What did you think of Harvey's Point?
West in the rain — June 26–27
A rainy travel day took us west — this is Ireland; the rain is part of the contract — with a lunch stop in Westport, one of the country's few planned Georgian towns, where we walked the tree-lined canal past a wedding in progress and had gelato on the Octagon. Then two nights at the Leenane Hotel on Killary Harbour, often called Ireland's only fjord, in a hamlet of about fifty people. We rested properly: a quiet morning, an hour at Kylemore Abbey — the Benedictine abbey on its lake — and dinner at the hotel both nights, the water out the window.
BOTH: Westport photos? And how did our rainy days with a fjord out the window feel at this point in the tour?
Galway, the Cliffs, and the Quinlivans — June 28
Sunday brought Galway's buskers and bookshops, then the Cliffs of Moher and an hour's walk along the cliff path — and then the trip's happiest table: dinner in Ennis with the Quinlivans of Quin — my third cousin Bronagh, Claire's sister; her husband Gerard; and their children Nora and James, fourteen and ten. Ten days earlier these people were names in a parish register; now there were children at the dinner table, and the cousins wouldn't let us pick up the check.
BOTH: What did we talk about with the Quinlavans?
Cashel and Waterford — June 29
Our last full day bracketed the story. The Rock of Cashel first — the great ecclesiastical ruin in Tipperary, the county where family memory starts the patriarch Patrick Conroy around 1812 — then Waterford, where Sabrina Birner, an old MIT colleague of mine, gave us a long lunch, a walk through the Viking Triangle, and an evening visit at our cottage in the gardens at Mount Congreve. A farewell dinner at the Bianconi closed the Irish table: the three of us, last night on the island.
Mark, Jim, and Andrew with Sabrina (Astrid not in photo, she had to go back to Galway)
[PHOTO: with Sabrina at The Reg and in the Viking Triangle]
JIM: The cottage evening is yours to tell — at whatever length, including not at all.
Leaving — June 30
We left the cottage at 6:41 in the rain to get Andrew to his flight home — the three of us together one last time — and then Jim and I did something neither of us would have planned: four hours of nothing at all in an airport hotel, which after twelve days at road-trip tempo was exactly right. That evening we flew to Munich, where Dana was waiting and the summer's second act began.
ANDREW: Peeling off alone at Dublin Airport — what was that like?
What it meant
What I want to say about these two weeks is simple. I had never been to Ireland, and I got to see it for the first time with my brother and my nephew — three generations of one American family, driving a gorgeous country in search of the people we came from, and finding them alive: cousins who walked us to graves, told us stories we had never heard, corrected the ones we had, and set tables for us. Sharing our life experiences while standing on our common ground was the most powerful premise a trip could have. And Ireland kept its side of the bargain — a country that inspires thoughts about history at every turn, with more chapters than we could read in a lifetime. We learned some. We imagined more. We'll be back for the rest.
For all three of us — Mark included
The moment you never photographed but can still see?
A sound, a smell, or a taste that will forever mean Ireland?
Was there a low point? It belongs in here too.
One thing you'd tell P.J. about the trip we took to find him?
— end — send everything to Mark —
James is Seamus in Irish
Musseunden Temple and Downhill House (above)
Creepy
Conroy Coat of Arms