Hi There:
My name is Jim Hagarty. I am a retired newspaper reporter and editor, a musician and songwriter, and a former college journalism professor. For the purposes of this blog, I am also an amateur genealogist who has dabbled in the dark arts of family history research. Only very brave souls go down that path, lured there by some demented elf from the distant past who enjoys seeing people hunkered down in libraries and archives for years on end, trying to piece together their past. This endeavour seems to be like few others. You can’t be half way in it. If you are not willing to go bungee jumping without the benefit of being tied to a bungee, then it’s pretty much a hopeless venture.
I picked up the family history bug when I was a teenager growing up in southern Canada. I was intrigued to know that my ancestors had come from that faraway paradise called Ireland. I was about 14 when I first started quizzing my elders about our origins. Oddly, very little information was available from the adults. We were farmers in Ireland, on land somewhere in County Cork. We left in stages during the Famine years from 1845 to 1852. Twenty years after I first started getting nosy about our life in Ireland, I was standing on our actual farm and I was able to enter the stone cottage they had lived in. In 2019, it is still standing, though pressed into use as a shed now.
So grandiose soul that I have always been, I sat down and wrote a book about the whole adventure. That was in 1999 and now, in 2019, when I hold that thing in my hand, I can hardly believe it was me who put it all together.
Now here is a website about that book but I think it will be about much more as time goes on. I don’t expect it to develop quickly. I have two other blogs at lifetimesentences.com and jimhagarty.com, so I am like the proverbial one-armed paperhanger right now. (Actually, I know a one-armed paperhanger. He can hang wallpaper better and faster than a whole village of paperhangers, all of them blessed with two arms.) I will try to put a thing or three on here every day if I can.
I hope something here interests you as time goes by.
Jim Hagarty
Home Again: An Emigrant Family Returns to Ireland