The backbone of this history is on a comment of my father’s many years ago. He was speaking about some cousins of his own father’s who had left Ireland in the 1870s and 80s “and they were never heard from again”. It stuck in my mind as a child, and became a bigger question as I got older.

How could three grown men just disappear like that and no one know what happened to them? It would be many years before I understood the dynamics of the time - difficulties with travel, communication, literacy, lifespan, and the kind of daily struggle immigrants had to contend with in a new country.

My curiosity would not be appeased, however, and as Fate would have it, elements in my life allowed me to discover not only what happened to the three cousins, but to many other branches of our enormous extended family as well. Since my own immediate family had also emigrated to North America (and I knew what happened to them), I wondered if any of the others were nearby.

Join me on my journey. Meet some of those long-lost cousins and discover their stories. Perhaps you will find some of your own ‘lost ones’ among them.