Mary-Alice Wildasin (56) spent many days helping her grandparents sift through historical archives as a child as they searched for more information about her family’s Irish heritage.
“I remember being nine years old at the Maine State Archives with my grandparents while they were doing research, you know, shuffling books back and forth for them.”
They had little information to go on – just an old family story that a Patrick Doran had come over from Ireland with his father and a few siblings during the Famine in the 1840s.
They knew that the Doran family had first moved from Ireland to Canada before eventually settling in Maine in the US, where generations of the family stayed for more than 100 years and where Wildasin grew up.
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“My grandfather really wanted to know where in Ireland his family were from,” she says.
In 1979 her grandparents first visited Ireland to try to find more information. Two years later, in 1981, her grandparents made another trip to Ireland, this time bringing Wildasin and her mother, Danielle Doran, along with them.
“I remember my mother saying when we had landed but were not even off the plane yet, something to the effect of ‘I’m home’.”
Though Wildasin and her family spent hours trawling through microfiche in the reading room of the National Library in Dublin, they came away from that trip without learning anything new about their family history as “every family called Doran has a Patrick in it. I’m sure all Irish families were like that, and we didn’t know which county he was from”. They could not be sure that any of the Patrick Dorans they came across was their ancestor.
While Wildasin and her family kept visiting Ireland throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, it would not be until a 2008 that the family got the answers they were looking for. At the time Danielle Doran was part of a group called The Irish Ancestral Research Association (Tiara), and the group went on a genealogy trip to Salt Lake City in Utah.
The city has extensive genealogy resources as it is the global headquarters for the Mormon church, which sponsors the world’s largest genealogical library and database, FamilySearch.
Wildasin went on the trip with her mother and half an hour before the library closed on their last day in the city, they found records for Patrick Doran, and his parents Peg Walsh and Tim Doran that matched with the dates they already had. The family were from Callan in Co Kilkenny. When they returned from Salt Lake City, Wildasin hired a genealogist who confirmed what they had found.
“Within six weeks of the genealogist coming back to us we were visiting Callan. My grandfather got there twice before he passed away at age 93.”
Wildasin and her family even managed to track down the exact piece of land where the family’s house had stood, though nothing remains of it now. In 2009 she spotted a house on that land for sale.
“I said: hey, wouldn’t that be great? We could buy that house and come back and live in the same town that our ancestors lived in. That kind of started the whole idea of coming here. After my grandfather passed my mother and I were coming back to Callan two or three times a year and we made some very good friends.”
She says, “people here are so much friendlier. I’m on a lot of ‘Americans living in Ireland’ Facebook pages and people are always talking about how difficult it is to make friends here. And I’ve just not found that.”
[ From LA to Dublin: ‘When people see my name, they expect a granny from Tipperary’Opens in new window ]
A few years later, on another visit to Ireland, Wildasin met John Mulqueen, who is now her partner.
“John is a tour guide out on a small island of the coast off Kilrush in west Clare. My mother and I had booked to go on one of his tours, and we were the only two on the tour that day.”
While mother and daughter really wanted to move to Ireland full-time, they struggled to find a visa that would enable them to do so. In 2019 Wildasin decided to do a master’s in the history of family at the University of Limerick, which meant that she could move here full-time on a student visa.
“Getting a degree was not my primary concern; my primary concern was moving here.”
However, over the course of her degree Wildasin found that she really enjoyed doing family history research and studying social history. After a career spent firstly as a real estate paralegal, then as a finance director in politics, she now writes for academic journals and lectures on her research.
“So 8½ years after meeting John, here I am living in Kilrush, a place that I didn’t know the first thing about.”
After Wildasin had moved to Ireland her mother managed to relocate on a Stamp 0 retiree visa. However, her mother decided to move to Callan.
“That’s where we know people. We had a lot better friends than we ever had in Florida,” which is where she and her mother had been living, having moved there from Maine before coming to Ireland.
“We still have a home in a place called The Villages, which is the largest retirement community in the world. We go back and forth a lot for medical reasons as we have long-established doctors in Florida.”
We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland. To get involved, email newtotheparish@irishtimes.com or tweet @newtotheparish
