I've visited the small town of Miltown Malbay in the West of County Clare many times over the years. It's the town in which my paternal grandmother, Bridget (Meade) Quealy, was born and lived before emigrating to Boston in her early adulthood. My paternal grandfather, John Quealy, is from another small Clare town quite nearby. Many cousins --Quealy's and Meades--still live in Miltown Malbay and I always truly feel as if I have, indeed, come home when visiting.

I recounted one such visit, in June 2022, in my new book. I think you'll understand why it feels like home. William Butler Yeats once wrote "My children may find here deep-rooted things." I know he was right.

EXCERPT FROM MY BOOK: "We walked along a short distance, the older gentleman telling me that he was born in this town “…in that blue house”, pointing ahead. I introduced myself and told him that I was here this morning to meet with my cousin, Pat Meade. Astonished, he stopped walking, looking at me directly now with an air of excited discovery. “Well, I’m your cousin too, I’m Chrissy Curtin.” Pat Meade’s mother is Mary (Curtin) Meade. I remembered then Peter Meade’s instruction to me of a few months earlier as he’d insisted that it’s only necessary to “…get to town and ask for Pat.” So it is in Miltown Malbay.

It is both remarkable and of some curious comfort to me that a Quealy or a Meade can travel from Boston to this little town on the West Coast of Ireland in the year 2022 and still encounter residents who are immediately able to identify you as a cousin. Deep-rooted things, indeed. "

I hope that the story told in my book will recall for readers a bit of their own family history, whether it's an Irish story or a story from anywhere else that people have fled oppression, hunger, bigotry and conflict.