Irish by Ancestry member shares her path to family homestead
By SHELAGH BRALEY STARR
RELATED ☘️ staff
The road home might be shorter than you think. And lined with people who want to help.
That’s what Lynne Driscoll Assad of Goffstown, NH, found out on her most recent trip to Ireland.
You might have seen her post on Irish by Ancestry, where she shared her excitement that she’d found her great-grandfather’s homestead in Ballythomas, Rathgormack, Co. Waterford. In fact, that one post garnered more than 1,600 responses, and almost 150 comments. So, we followed up with her to get more details.
She took the call from her car while she was still traveling around Ireland, seeking new clues. “I have read every comment,” she said of the response to her post, “and I can’t tell you the serendipity of it—going into a pub, finding someone who knows (the family name), being led, and then there are cousins, and now we’re connected. It’s a rush, it’s so fun.”
Driscoll Assad had done the depth of genealogy work from home base in the United States before planning and traveling to Ireland to put the pieces together. “I found the location of this house (from home research), and it wasn’t until I drove up to the house—it looked too private. So, we went to a nearby pub.”
Driscoll Assad and her husband, John, presented the people there at the pub with the map around the property they had.
“I said, ‘Do you know these people?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, that’s Tony, let me give him a ring.’ Tony is living on the property that was part of the Power property. The original homestead was bought by a Dublin guy to make it into an Airbnb. Tony lives adjacent and looks over it while the owner is away. They live right next door and they are potentially cousins.” She said she was trying to confirm that “to the enth degree.”
The relatives she has been seeking are from the Power and Driscoll lines. “I talked to them about who they know, then they have a brick wall, too. Those people lived in this house, and they had a son. They emigrated in 1870 to Boston. Mary Power and John Driscoll, with their son Dennis. My great-grandfather is Dennis.”
She said she confirmed, there was only one John Driscoll in Rathgormack, “and I found where he was baptized. So I don’t know how it’s not (the same John Driscoll). But Mary Power, the great-great-grandmother, she was baptized here in Co. Cork.”
That’s where Driscoll Assad waited as she spoke on our interview, outside that church. “I’m waiting for a man who is going to hook me up with the homestead of Mary.”
The perfect serendipities continued. “We went to the church where (Mary) was baptized, and outside was the woman who does the laundry for the priest. We spent the next two hours walking the streets with her. She pointed us up the hill to the pub. She said, ‘They’ll have the last name you’re looking for.’”
It’s magical, it’s enchanting,” Driscoll Assad said, the thrill audible in her voice from across the sea. “We went looking for the owner of the pub, and the person said, ‘That’s my dad. And that’s a cousin, that’s what we think we’re chasing here. The name that I’m looking for is Power and there are so many different families of Power, but we’re on the track.”
It’s very much like unraveling a mystery, connecting one person to another, to a place. “We keep trying to figure out the next steps, where are we going next? And another guy walks up and says, ‘How can I help you?’”
Driscoll Assad said it was important to do her own research as far as she could from home before taking the trip. “It definitely was important for me to find the property. IF I had shown up here without that information, without that address, I wouldn’t have been able to talk to people and get what I have gotten. There are so many Power—it’s like Smith in the United States—so I narrowed it down before I came.”
And it paid off. “Then here, I end up having these one-to-one conversations with people. It’s amazing,” she said. She recalled going to the church where Mary and John were married in Portlaw. “We hung around after, we talked to people. This woman’s husband was the main heritage guy. He gave us an hour and a half, opened up the heritage center for us. We could see what life was like at the time when they lived here. We got the history of the town, what happened then. We could understand why Portlaw did well during the Famine and other places didn’t, because they had industry there. There was cotton at the mill and a tannery. They were more than just farmers.”
When you have information ahead of time, names, places, parishes, she said it gives you time to think about more than just the research.
“You have an essence of the life with the name. You can almost visualize what it was like (when her ancestors were there). Now, my family were farmers, they weren’t part of the industry. But seeing the church that they went to—it all just adds a sense of where we come from, you know, who we are,” she said.
Her curiosity was far from fully satisfied, even with such great discoveries in hand. “The Famine had ended when they emigrated but my great great grandparents lived through it. Why they emigrated after, it is still a mystery. Maybe they were following other Power and Driscolls, I don’t know that yet. I haven’t been able to find the ship’s registers or their passenger lists. I want to find out why they left. The people I met can’t tell me why they left.”
That lingering sense of missing information will keep Driscoll Assad on the case, that and the fragments of stories she has heard. There was a different Mary Driscoll, not Mary Power Driscoll who it was said “just got up and left” and she had a two-year-old. “How many times have they said, ‘We just don’t know what happened to them.’ ”
“What I learned so far from a few different sources is that people who left Ireland for the US, they just plain left. Very little happened after they left in the way of communication. Tony even said, ‘I have been wondering when someone from America would come here and try to find us.’ ”
Do you have a story to share about finding your ancestral lines, homes, even cousins in Ireland? Reach out to us any time to be featured in a future issue of RELATED ☘️. Contact stories@byancestry.com
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