Summer Visitors to Annaghdown

The Annaghdown IrelandXO team were pleased to meet and greet three sets of visitors in recent weeks.

Sisters Anne and Michelle Greaney came to Galway for a week, to visit the homeplaces of their grandparents Patrick Greaney and Delia Coen. Patrick was born in Cahermorris, Corrandulla, and Delia was from Ballygar. They met and married in New York after emigrating in the 1890s. Although they had visited Galway and met with cousins before, this trip was the first time they stood on the family farm where Patrick worked during his youth. They also visited again the house where Delia Coen was born in Ballygar.

For Deborah Forde-Barchard, finding her grandfather's house was straightforward once she arrived. Having thoroughly researched her Irish ancestry before arriving, she knew the townland he had come from, and it from there it was a matter of asking member of the local community to point out the house.

Steve Luttrell & Krista Heatley arrived in late May for a brief stay in Galway before a wider tour of Ireland. This was Steve's second visit, having travelled to Galway in 2016, to give a poetry reading and to visit his ancestral homeplace in Annaghdown. Krista, who was visiting for the first time, also has Annaghdown ancestry, and was thrilled to collect some DNA samples from Burke and Greally descendants, in the hope of finally pinning down that elusive townland where her ancestors originated. Both Steve and Krista's ancestors were part of a huge exodus of Annaghdown natives to the city of Portland, Maine, from the mid 1800s onwards. This migration pattern was the subject of a talk given by Krista to the Annaghdown Heritage Society on 26 May, entitled Portland Irish: Emigration and the Railroad Industry.