I’d been visiting Ireland off and on for 10 years and I was fascinated by the place. “The Cradle of Kings,” my dad only half-jokingly called the neighborhood that gave our city its mayors, beginning with his own cousin Ed Kelly, and continuing through Mayor Daley. We were Chicago Irish with roots in Bridgeport. But Ireland itself didn’t really come into it. He’d been skeptical about “this whole roots thing” anyway. “Along with two million others,” the clerk said. Dates? Only that our ancestors left Ireland in the 1840s or ’50s. What details did we have about our Kellys? Townland? No. Wasn’t Kelly the second most common name in Ireland, right there next to Murphy, and wasn’t Galway “Kelly Country”? “We’ve a county full of Michael Kellys,” the man replied. I didn’t even know her name on that October morning in 1979 when my dad and I walked into the office of the Galway City Clerk-two more Irish-Americans looking for their ancestors.
“My name is Michael Kelly,” my father said. Though it’s a novel, Galway Bay is based on the life of my great-great-grandmother, a story I only discovered after years of research.
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