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My dad would say things like,
"You can always be proud of being Irish."
Who are my people?
Where is my homeland?
Why do our ancestors' stories matter today?
How am I supposed to grow up and have a picture of who I am,
if I don't know who I come from?
Well, Rita, as you know, we're here in Galway today,
we're on a very special mission
because if you just look over the way across,
across the river there,
we're headed to the Galway City Museum.
And in there, they've got a very special,
the newest exhibition called Keepers of the Gael,
and that has a lot to do with us and our ancestry
because it talks about the learned families of the areas,
the people who kept the Irish culture alive.
And as we know, the O'Davorens of Cahermacnaughten,
the Brehon Law School are our ancestors
and they're talked about in there also.
Awesome.
So what'd you think about that?
- I'm excited, I can hardly wait.
The timing is great.
Great, so am I, let's go.
Sheila is my distant cousin and friend
and a keeper of family and local history.
She has taught me a lot about Irish culture and customs.
We don't know exactly how we're related,
but we know we are.
Local history tells us that this family
is likely descended from Donall O'Davoren,
a Brehon judge of the 16th century.
Who were those Brehons?
Is their story mine too?
Sometimes I feel a loss, an emptiness,
a longing for people unknown,
for traditions never experienced, for stories untold.
It's like a kind of amnesia for all that has been lost
in 150 years since my ancestors left Ireland.
I wonder do other Irish Americans feel this way?
Do you know anything about your Irish history?
Not really.
Well, my mom's side of the family is Irish
and I've been Irish dancing for about three years now.
On my mum's side, her dad died early,
so we didn't really know him.
We didn't really know much of the history there
because we didn't have a link through him.
I was very close with one of my grandmothers
who really inculturated me into like Irish pride.
I definitely am Irish.
I don't know much about specifics.
I'm not alone after all.
Many of us from the US don't know our stories
for a whole number of reasons.
Some came here escaping economic
and other kinds of oppression.
They were strongly pressured to assimilate
and to leave their language and culture behind.
Stories passed down for generations were lost or forgotten.
I think collective historical amnesia
is endemic in this country.
My students, one of the,
actually their favorite project in the end
was researching their family history.
But they would go home and I can't tell you
how many students would go home and talk to their parents
and their parents had no idea
anything about their family history.
We are a forward facing nation.
We have always been a forward facing nation,
and it's only if you go to the historical society,
it's old people who pay attention to the past.
And once we're old,
it isn't as important as it is to understand the past
when you're young and making decisions for the future.
My grandma Anne Davern grew up on a small farm
in the hills of County Clare and she left behind home
and country to come to America at the age of 19.
Like tens of thousands of Irish,
Anne and her sisters came to build a new life
and send money home to support their family.
Because she died before I was born,
I never got to ask Anne about her life in Ireland
or her journey to Minnesota.
Two generations later, much of her story was forgotten.
I had 19 years of education
and not one day of Irish history,
not one hour of Irish history was taught.
Well, what's that about?
You know.
So I had to just dive in and see
what I could figure out on my own.
I began a search for the place and people
my grandma left behind.
I hoped that by learning about her life,
I could understand something important about mine.
My search landed me in the Burren,
a wild, beautiful, wind swept place,
where my clan, the O'Davorens lived and farmed
for over 1200 years.
My first kind of experience of the Burren,
I remember coming to the Burren, brought by a friend
and coming over from Kinvarra,
just as you kind of come over to the Corcomroe area
and suddenly there is the Burren.
And you can see Mullaghmore
off to the left of the mountains.
And there was something kind of that just struck a chord
with me.
- I was born here in Rahone and I went away for a long time
and like the salmon, I came back to where I started from.
So here I am.
If you want to understand
the Irish landscape and geology,
this is the place to do it.
And as a result of this geological wonder,
it's a UNESCO geo-park, for instance.
All this beautiful rock has been assembled
and disassembled by people for 6,000 years,
building these big, huge, stone forts.
These megolithic tombs, where people died and were buried.
They've built fulact fiadhs,
where food was cooked back in the Bronze Age 3000 years ago,
everything like a book written in stone,
it's amazing.
My sister and I first traveled
to the Burren in 1977
and I visit every other year if possible.
I cherish the friends I've made there.
Now I met Rita many years ago, was it,
when I was working at the Burren Center
and all of a sudden this lady came in
and said, "Is there a Davoren here?"
I said, "That's me, hello."
And that's how we met.
I can't imagine finding you here.
Do you know what Rita,
I can still remember the day
that you arrived at the door here.
And with a look of astonishment on your face
because you expected a ruin.
And you had come in and you realized
that somebody had bought the ruin
and it was well in the way to being restored
and the look on your face was amazing
and you said 'coz you've been coming for years
and your great grandfather was born here.
That was amazing.
I remember I would come here
and you would always feed me.
Like I'd be next door, and you'd say,
"We're putting your name in the pot."
I always love when you come over, Rita,
and you'd be back again and I'd be here.
- Good. - - Every time
she leaves, I feel so sad when she leaves,
but I'm always here the next time you call.
That's right.
This is the place my grandma left behind in 1887.
Her childhood home is now in ruins.
But over the years,
I've become friends with the O'Gorman family
who live there now.
So you were born in that house, right?
- Well actually - 14.
I wasn't born in that house now.
- Okay. - I was born down the road,
a couple of miles down the road.
We owned a house about two miles down the road there,
and this place came up for sale and they bought this farm
and that house up there.
It was the early sixties, yeah.
The early sixties.
Country living, farming
and I was going to school at the time,
so I was coming and going every day.
We had a field stove and there was plenty of heat in there
in the wintertime, nice and warm.
My mom had chickens and hens, ducks and geese
and the whole lot at the time.
My father used to be working and used to be cutting hay
with horses and plowing gardens and.
It's not an easy.
Tough life, yeah,
tough life.
Anne's distant cousin, William Quinn Davoren
was one generation older.
He immigrated in 1849,
making a claim on land in Minnesota just one year later.
William Q's childhood home in the Burren
has been restored and its current occupant,
a virtuoso named Archie has brought special kind
of musical magic to his community.
This is the house itself here.
You know all about this house, how much it means to you,
it means a lot to me too.
You're here 400 years old, I believe.
Do you wanna see a picture of the house?
- Sure. - - In those days?
- Yeah. - - I'll just get one.
Oh my goodness.
That was Lismorahaun's house,
do you remember that?
Wow.
It's impossible to separate the Burren landscape
from the people who live there.
There is such a wealth of archeology
going back 5,000 years.
All of those archeological sites
were built by farmers to keep their cattle,
to bury their dead, to cook their food.
The flora, that wouldn't be here,
were it not for the winter grazing up by cattle.
So when the flowers are asleep by winter,
the cattle come in.
The ancient custom of herding cattle
up onto mountains to their seasonal grazing lands
called winterages is one such practice.
These traditional ways developed over millennia
are increasingly being revived across Europe
to make farming more sustainable.
Farmers like Michael Davoren
manage those cattle.
They harvest off all the dead grass
without damaging the flowers.
Then in springtime and summertime,
these flowers can prosper without being damaged by cattle.
And so it's that combination of grazing and transhumance
that gives us this really rich biodiversity in the Burren.
And the rock itself,
people think this is a natural feature.
Well, it's not, the Burren was completely covered with trees
until farmers came, chopped those trees down
and eventually like it or loath it,
created this bear rocky landscape.
That's also as a result of farming,
so in every sense, people have shaped the landscape here.
People have farmed those landscapes through generations
and that why they look like they do.
If we want to maintain them for future generations,
we need to support those farming communities within them.
As generations of farmers shaped
this rugged landscape, so did the landscape shape them.
You see when you were in the Ireland
of the horse and cart,
which has gone on for many centuries,
nothing really changed.
There were handheld tools
and you produced what the land
was naturally able to produce.
There was no such as luxury or anything at all.
Whatever you ate was grown in your own garden.
Your bucket of spuds, your heads of cabbage,
your carrots, parsnips, whatever, t'was all there.
Working this land is not easy,
but its rewards are great.
The Burren is uniquely suited to raising sheep and cattle
and people here have done so for several thousand years.
Now, the dog has to be trained to the voice
before she's trained to the whistle.
She has four basic commands,
she has to sit down, walk up, go left and go right.
Each dog has a different sound for the whistle.
There's that great quote from Cromwell,
"Of this land, there is not enough water to drown man,
not enough timber to hang him in
and not enough clay to bury him."
But the quote went on,
"The tufts of grass that grow in little bunches,
two to three foot square is very nourishing indeed
and the cattle are the fattest in the kingdom.
So even 400 years ago, it was recognized as a great place
to produce livestock.
And it's a really interesting time in the Burren
'coz right now the old traditional practices of farming
are starting to decline 'coz there's not really an income
to be made from farming this place anymore.
At the same time, the value of all these things
like biodiversity and archeology is increasing
because it's becoming more rare.
So what I think is that as farming declines in importance
and as this biodiversity and heritage
becomes more important,
I think we need to bring farming back up
by supporting farming to look after this biodiversity.
The word road here in Ireland
comes from an old Gaelic ward called Bothar.
The first tracks when cattle were being moved across Ireland
were the cattle tracks, so they were the first pathways.
Bothar is the way of the cow
and the way of the cow is the road.
All over the world, we have similar situations.
We have these beautiful landscapes
and in a lot of the cases,
they kind of depend on farming practices.
So if we lose those farmers because they move to cities
or whatever and get jobs,
we also lose a lot of our landscape values,
we lose a lot of our heritage.
My father and mother of course were farmers.
When I was young,
we didn't have any fridges or anything like that.
And to keep the milk cool,
we had a running river by the house,
just little away from the house.
And the creamery cans and cows were milked in the evening,
operating two or three creamery cans, milk,
and they were put down at the river to keep them cold.
But of course that's when milk was really milk
and the cream was solid clotted cream,
about five or six inches thick on top of this milk.
I got into the habit,
I went down one evening and it was like nightfall,
it was almost kind of almost dark.
I was sitting down by the river with my feet in the water,
watching the world go by,
I'd say I was about eight or nine.
And then I decided I have a cup of cream of milk after
and I had a cup with me, so I took out this clotted cream
and I drank down the cup of cream.
I've never tasted anything so amazing in my life.
I immediately was like a drug addict,
I was addicted, I loved that cream.
And I used to sit there, in heaven,
drinking my cups of cream.
Of course, shortly afterwards, I start eating,
my mother had a dinner for me coming home from school.
I didn't want it, all I wanted was my drug of the night,
which was the cream.
My mother had to gather up a few bob together
and bring me to the doctor.
He couldn't find nothing wrong with me.
He gave me a tonic.
Oh, I took the tonic,
that meant I could drink more cream
when I was down there at the river.
So eventually anyhow, my mother said to me,
"How are you always going down to that river every evening?"
And I said, "Well, I like having my feet in the water."
And she went, "Yeah."
And one night, she followed me down.
I was in the bank drinking my cream, life was wonderful.
She went, "My God! Gotcha!"
I was dragged up from the river and she called
everybody at the house attacked me like,
"How could you do this?
Number one, now we're losing out on the amount of cream
you're drinking.
Number two, the visit to the doctor
which we could never afford and now we know why."
I had a longing for that cream which was something terrible,
but then I was cut off just like that.
Cold Turkey is what it's called.
But life in the Burren is not just about farming.
It has also long served as a nexus for art and creativity.
What happened was it became a center of learning,
a center of music and more specifically,
a center where people could explore their voices,
so I became a vocal coach.
It was only after I got a chance to know
Sheila's extended family,
that I got a clear look at what I missed growing up
in the US.
I come from Rahone.
We own a small farm,
three miles from Kilfenora village,
the home of top-class music.
Our house was always music.
Since we were children, music was our God.
We loved it.
So this is the grave of my mam's grandparents,
Patrick and Alice Davoren.
This is where kind of all mam's stories came from
from these people inside in here.
Since I was a small child,
I'd been privileged to my grandparents with me.
Everything I know is stemmed from them.
The love I have for the area, for the history,
for the geology, for everything to do with this place.
And especially of course, the family tree,
all stemmed from my grandparents.
My grandfather, Patrick Davoren, known as "Pappy"
and my grandmother, Alice Galvin, who married him.
They were actually neighbors,
literally here to the kitchen sort of neighbors.
And they grew up together and they eventually eloped.
They started their family,
they built their own house right between the two houses.
Davorens here, Galvins here
and there's their house right in the middle.
And from then on, I suppose,
I guess really always those houses had a reputation
for being places you went to and you heard stories.
In fact, my grandmother's house was, I suppose,
the equivalent of a "ceili house."
And there used to be dances there on the weekend.
Matches were made, prices of cattle were discussed,
newspaper was read for the benefit of people
who maybe couldn't read.
People came from all over.
I remember my grandmother bragging that they came
from as far away as Moher,
which when you think about it, no cars
and all the rest of it was a fair hike.
And I grew up with all those stories.
It's really cool to think that the stories came
from people inside these graves.
Sheila's father is a true, shanaki, a storyteller,
spinning tales of all kinds that were passed down
through generations, parent to child.
We'd sit down by the fire
and my grandfather was a great storyteller.
And we were all young, some of them would go to bed,
but jays, I'd always stay by the fire.
He'd be telling the haunted stories
and we'd be going like that.
And he'd imitate the witch, " Oh, oh, oh."
And my mother would say, "Oh God's sake, don't tell them.
They'll be raving tonight in the bed."
"They will not," he said, "They will not."
And to hear all those stories
to be told to him with his father.
Michael even pulls out the tin whistle
from time to time,
a traditional instrument that carries with it
the sound of Davorens, past and present.
There's so much history, it's amazing.
It's so important to have them to know their background.
I don't know anything if mam didn't tell me
or granddad told me.
I love it so much, just listening to all the stories.
Is it possible to find out
what my ancestors' lives were like even earlier?
To do that, I need to look further back in time.
We like our ancestors developed
the main roadways of pathways which let people,
communities join easily.
In order to develop our winterages
and bring it into the 21st century,
we made what we call trackways.
And it was in the course of making that trackway,
that we came across a cist
and there was a bit of a bone unearthed
and we didn't think anything of it,
we thought it was an animal's bone.
Well, a geologist who happened to be around
walking one day and saw the bone
and recognized it to be human bone.
And it was he came to me and asked would we mind
if there was an archeological dig done.
The dig was done and subsequently the cist was unveiled
as a two and a half thousand, 3000 year old burial ground
and maybe older.
And the bone was carbon dated back to I think
it was around 5,000 years ago.
I was absolutely gobsmacked.
There are people around here in the Burren
and throughout Ireland for 7,000 years,
8,000 years, at least and they're not all buried
in our local cemetery.
The rocky landscape of the Burren has preserved
many mysteries of the past.
Uncovering stories hidden beneath the stones
adds to our understanding of how people here lived long ago.
Caherconnell farmer, John Davoren hosts
an annual archeology dig at a stone fort
located on his farm.
Caherconnell Castle, where we are right now
is a very fine example of an Irish ring fort.
Now a ring fort was an enclosed farmstead,
mostly built and used during our early medieval period
from about the fifth, sixth century AD
to about the 11th or 12th century AD.
This is a very large example and even without excavation
is very impressive and would suggest
that it was an important place, an impressive place,
maybe a high status settlement.
And of course the Davoren family have a long tradition
in the Burren of teaching,
of presenting and preserving heritage.
This is a map of Caherconnell town lot,
a map that we met of the archeological remains.
Now, we are standing just here,
the monument of Caherconnell is this one just behind us.
It's a large drystone enclosure,
but there are four of them in the town lot, not just one.
So there's a cluster of three here
quite close to only about 100 meters between them
and a fourth one back to the West.
- I was excavating near part of an inner wall
on the southern aspect of this divider and the castle
and I came across this.
It's a little iron shear.
It's been the adventure
I've been needing honestly.
We've concentrated on excavating, cutting gee.
And as I was trolling,
I'm even start picking at it in the dirt
and I see a little spec of a thing like it's a little bead,
it's red, white and blue.
And hey, is this glass bead modern or antique?
I can't tell.
And next day, lo and behold,
they tell me it's a 15th century, Venetian bead.
I was flabbergasted out of excitement.
I was like, "I didn't know, I didn't know this."
Which means they were trading.
They trading, yes, that is evidence for trade,
mhm, all the way to here.
The monument that we're sitting in
is a high status home built in the late 10th century
and built by a local ruling family.
When they came here and chose this site to construct
their new settlement,
there was a particular element
that they decided deliberately to incorporate
into their new home
and we're sitting right beside it here today.
And this is an earlier burial mound.
Small, low mound made of earth and stone
that covered some stone boxes that held human remains.
The burials date to the late sixth,
early seventh century AD.
They're part of the earliest Christian tradition
here in the Burren.
The people who lived here continued to live
like their ancestors had before them,
despite all of the new influences in Ireland,
particularly the Anglo-Normans.
The occupants here who were wealthy and if they wanted to,
could have built castles or towns or villages
like their Anglo-Norman counterparts,
they had the money or the wealth to do that.
They didn't, they deliberately decided not to,
they had no need to.
This was their ancestral home,
this was their important place.
They had no need of a large castle
or to build a village around around their settlement.
Their traditional way of life was perfectly suitable
for what they needed and what they wanted to do here.
What were our ancestors up to back then?
The first recorded evidence of the O'Davoren clan
was in 800 AD.
In medieval times, some served as judges of Brehon law,
an ancient legal system focused on justice,
restitution and the common good.
Six law schools, seven.
So this idea of learning communities, I like this.
Very much.
- They really did share and they came together
to write things down, share ideas.
It was more vibrant activity than I imagined.
Well yeah, it's great to think
that there was that connection between all of them.
You know, you didn't travel around to the other law schools
unless there was a welcome there for you,
unless it was a genuine thing, I would imagine.
So there was obviously, no,
"This is my information, I'm holding it."
So there's obviously a big sharing going on.
They were the keepers of history
and particularly they were the law keepers
and the history keepers for the O'Loughlins,
who were chiefs in the Burren at the time.
I think they were described in at one stage
as the yellow garbed Brehons.
So apparently when it came to issues of law, particularly,
they dawned a yellow gown.
I suppose, what made the Davoren name stand out
was the fact of the law school.
My father used to tell me about the Brehon laws.
We'd just go for a walk and he used to say,
"Well, you know, under Brehon law,
somebody who is handicapped,
there would be an injunction against making a mock of him."
If he was invaguled into committing some sort of crime,
then those who were sharp witted enough
to know what was happening,
they were the ones that were responsible.
I can remember he used to end up nearly everything
telling me all these very interesting things,
including the fact that there was even women lawyers,
women doctors.
The most famous, I suppose, document
that would be their legacy would be a collection
of a very early Irish laws in a text called Egerton 88.
It was originally individual sheets of valum
with Brehon laws, which were written by Donall Davoren
in the mid 1500s.
This one wonderful man who's my hero,
Donall O'Davoren,
actually martialled all these young students
to copy as many of the laws of Ireland as they could.
These students used to put little comments in the margin,
which are marvelous.
One of them was, it's all right for him,
he's out making the hay and we are indoors writing
and complaining about how thick the ink was.
We've almost been steeped in the history
of it over here.
Human beings are deeply connected
to their homelands.
This connection has been exploited by forces of oppression
throughout history.
- Farming was everything and property owning was everything.
And back then nobody owned property,
it was all rented from the British empire,
who were the ruling classes at the time
of the landlord system.
For over 800 years,
Ireland was colonized by Norman and then British rulers.
Land confiscation was rampant.
1566, Lord deputy Sydney proclaimed
no one was to maintain or keep any rhymer, bards or harp.
Stamp out Gaelic Ireland.
Yep, that's it.
When Cromwell came in the 17th century,
he destroyed every single thing he came apart.
And all the Davorens were scattered all over the place.
It wasn't only the Irish people
that were displaced, but their cultural treasures as well.
In 1832, the British library bought 93 folios
of O'Davoren law school documents.
This medieval legacy of Brehon law was then archived
in the Egerton collection, number 88.
Most of this document is not here in Ireland.
So now the Egerton document is in three locations,
London, Copenhagen, and Dublin.
And I believe number one, it should be in one location
and number two, that location is County Clare,
where it originated.
This is where this document should be.
Are we only living for today?
Do we not look back on who we were, where we came from?
And that's why I think that's a very important document
that we just open up that part of our history
of who we were as people
and in particular in relation to the O'Davorens.
It's a huge contribution on the part of that one family
to that particular time in history
and I don't think it should be lost.
Then came a brutal landlord system,
which caused the Gaelic Irish terrible hardship.
One result from this takeover of land and resources
was severe poverty.
Generations of subsistence farming
was followed by a series of potato crop failures.
The worst occurred in the 1840s.
- It wasn't a famine in the sense that we understand famine,
a lack of food because there wasn't a lack of food
in Ireland.
The potato crop failed and yes,
that was the staple of the masses
because it was easy to grow and you could put it anywhere
and people had it for breakfast, dinner and supper,
and it was nutritious and that was it.
That failed but Ireland as a country had so much
resource wise.
There were grains and there was livestock,
but that was taken out of the country during the famine,
when it was most desperately needed.
That resulted in over a million deaths
and a million people leaving the country.
20 years later, during the 1870s and 80s,
there was a period known as the land wars.
There's actually a story from Kilvosh
about a family called O'Donnell.
They had bought some grain from the local land agent.
They sold it and when it was ready to be harvested,
the land agent sent in his men to harvest it for them.
And then the men that came in decided
they would store it for the family,
but it ended up going to market and being sold,
not by the family or for the family
and the family were evicted
because they had no money to pay the rent.
It's a brutally documented situation
where a lot of the family died,
kids died because of the eviction.
And the eviction itself was a horrendous situation
where the mother of the family pregnant
with their youngest child was too unwell
to get out of the house
and she had to be taken out by neighbors
because the wreckers began to knock the house
in on top of her, regardless, whether she was dead or alive.
That baby died as well.
So we've put it in those terms
and I'm putting it just very basically here,
it was bloody horrendous, absolutely.
At this time, Charles Stewart Parnell
and others fought for land rights with the slogan,
"The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland."
My grandma Anne came of age
during this revolutionary period
and it may be what caused her to emigrate.
No individual lives in a vacuum.
They live in a political, economic and social know you,
that shapes who they are and the decisions that they make.
Most people are not gonna leave behind everything
that they know and love,
unless there's a really good reason behind it.
It's important to know what the circumstances are
of the country that your ancestors are leaving.
All those things are really important in understanding
the kind of decisions that drive people
to make a big move like that.
My grandma Ann, 19 years old at the time,
with her two sisters and a cousin,
left Ireland on the steam ship, SS Germanic,
arriving in New York at Castle Garden in 1887.
From there, it was three days by train to Minnesota,
where a horse and buggy took her to a farm 3,200 miles
from the one she left.
It was the farm settled by her cousin,
William Q Davoren in 1850 on Dakota Homeland.
The Dakota are an indigenous people who have lived
near the confluence of two great rivers
for many generations.
US policy and westward expansion turned billions of acres
of native land into property,
all at the expense of indigenous peoples.
When Anne arrived, 30 years later,
she found a prosperous farm and boom times for settlers.
William Q Davoren was a true pioneer.
I mean, he was settled his land in 1850.
We only became a territory in 1849.
Where his land was was basically just across the river
from Fort Snowing.
Now in William Q Davoren's day, there was no bridge,
there was no bridge across the Mississippi at all.
If you wanted to cross the river from Fort Snowing
to get to the St. Paul side, you went by ferry.
If you look at St. Paul in 1850, very limited,
nice little sleepy river town.
By 1887, it exploded into a city, it was a major city.
It had horse drawn street cars,
didn't have the electric street cars yet.
It had incredible ray of commercial buildings.
The 1880s was a decade where there's just an abundance
of buildings going on.
Neighborhoods just radiating from all over the city.
And so if she was riding in a carriage
from the Union depot going to the Davoren house,
she would be going through an urban setting.
To an Irish farm girl,
that journey and this Midwestern US landscape and culture
must have seemed strange, but Anne adjusted.
She worked as a seamstress and in three years,
married William Austin,
the oldest son from that Minnesota Davoren family.
My grandpa's construction business prospered
and he built a large house on Summit Avenue
with his new bride.
As was customary in large Irish families at that time,
several members boarded with them.
A few years later, that business went under
in the panic of 1893.
The big house was lost.
William and Anne moved above a shop on West 7th Street,
where they sold groceries.
Eventually, they bought a house in that neighborhood,
which still stands today.
A few years later, Anne gave birth to her youngest son,
William Joseph, my dad.
Over the years,
Anne received letters from her siblings in Ireland,
sharing the details of their lives.
I wonder what did Anne's letters home to Ireland
have to say about her new life in Minnesota?
Sometimes I imagine conversations we could have had
about Ireland and my grandma's younger days.
Anne Davoren died in 1948, just one year before I was born.
Over years of visiting the Burren,
I've made friends and have learned much about my heritage.
I love this place and it's people.
I learned so much from who they are
and their lives and the way their minds work,
about myself that I wasn't ever able to put a finger on here
and about my family too here.
There's characteristics about us that are so directly tied
to being Irish and the whole Irish experience.
These patterns, you know, they came from somewhere,
they're not just quirks about individuals.
They really are tied to a much bigger piece
of what happened to human beings along the way.
It was a shock for me to learn that many of my Irish friends
don't know much about their family trees either.
So much history was lost or destroyed
during traumatic events of the 19th and 20th centuries.
So myself I've been tracing alone
and my particular branch of the O'Davoren family,
whilst there's a lot of us still around.
We more or less call ourselves
sort of neighbors or acquaintances, more so than family now.
What I'm desperately trying to do is to link our line
into the Brehon law school line,
because really and truly
there is an amount of documentation.
Unfortunately, most of the documentation
that had we headed now that would've told us the story
was destroyed during the Irish war of independence.
And there's a little glitch,
there's a little bit of information
that I just can't tie up.
I've got, I think, four generations, five generations back
and then it kind of stops.
Where we live, my family live,
Rahone is only like half a mile from Newville church
and we know that the O'Davoren chapel was there
and O'Davorens were carops, in other words,
that they collected tithes for the church
and they looked after that side of things.
That particular branch of O'Davoren was traced back
to the law school.
So it would be just a little bit too coincidental
if we were, you know,
we have to be connected there somewhere
and I'm just desperate to find out
where exactly we're connected.
In order to reconnect the scattered branches
of this family, we have to collaborate.
Together, we can complete this puzzle.
Michael Davoren in Kilcorney,
remember the history center at Corofin?
He went there and the old guy there
that knows everything about the Davorens,
he made him write down for two or three days.
He wrote down everything,
all the history of the O'Davorens going back forever.
Over in Ireland, there's branches of the Davorens
that they don't know much beyond their grandparents
and we know some about our branch,
and I had this idea that if we hooked each other up,
we could all be connected all the way back
to the law school, so I've been trying to figure that out.
And then we've got our chart that goes back,
Michael and Jane, William and Catherine.
Right?
And we've got it going back
to their parents and their parents.
Last night, I found a sheet from dad
that I think is the missing key to everything.
It's the Kilcorney Davorens, it says Davorens of Kilcorney,
so I think dad got this from one of them
and that's my friend Michael here, Michael and Liz.
So that's that line and then Dominic.
Dad wrote our ancestors, so I think that's our line.
I think our great, great, great grandfathers were brothers.
And the common ancestor is this Patrick
and who had three sons.
And I think Dominic or Patrick,
I think it's Patrick that ties William Q with Anne.
Anne is where we come together there.
Gotcha.
That's really the key place.
Here's Dominic, Patrick.
And then it goes up to these guys,
all the way back to the law school.
I think we got it.
Thank you for coming.
It's a great honor for me.
Like some of you in this room, I've had this bug,
I think that came from growing up and knowing nothing
about Ireland or the Burren or my family.
None of it got passed down and it was like being given
a puzzle with maybe two pieces
and you didn't even have enough pieces
to see what the picture looked like
and it just didn't work for me.
And I sort of set out with my dad and his cousin
and my siblings and we set out in the 1960s and 70s and on
to reconnect with this place and people
and the stories and the family.
This is my grandmother Ann Davoren's house
that she was born in in 1868 and I was there last night.
We've stayed connected,
there's been actually letters going back from that farm
to my house in St. Paul for 130 years.
And they're still going back and forth
and we're connected to the people who live there now,
even though they're not relatives.
It became clear to me early on that the real prize
in all of this isn't the gravestones
and it isn't the finding the lost, dead relatives,
it's really the living people that I really love
and get a kick out of and this place means a lot to me
and these people.
I'd like to know how all of our families are connected,
who we're connected to way back
and now with new science and DNA,
we can find that out if enough of us get involved
and do some research.
How do we create a family tree for our own branch
of the family and then how do we connect those trees?
And it's all possible.
- I believe we can overcome and find a way
around these things and there has to be a way to reconnect.
There just has to be.
When people experience oppression,
one thing that gets erased
is the memories of that group's past.
The Irish people endured 1,000 years
of colonization and brutal occupation,
a lot got lost.
Davorens who have lived near each other
for hundreds of years, no longer know how they are related.
Thankfully, that is changing.
It's vitally important that you always know
where you've come from
and it doesn't matter what your history has been,
whether it's it's shadowy or bright and sparkling,
you should always know where you've come from.
And I think that should be passed on
and passed on and passed on to generations.
- There's been an explosion of interest in the Burren
because of archeologists, writers and everyday people
doing family history research,
we are rediscovering the stories of this clan
and its history.
Recently, something amazing happened in that regard,
the return of Egerton 88 to Ireland,
for the first time in over 200 years.
For a few weeks at the Galway City Museum,
descendants of Donall O'Davoren were able to see
this piece of their family legacy
intertwined not just with the history of the Burren,
but Ireland itself.
And it has a new name, O'Davoren's book.
Genealogy, without context to me is pointless.
Individual stories are incredibly important
because they are a window into the bigger story.
- We're the legacy of the past.
If it wasn't for our ancestors, we wouldn't be here.
That's the wonderful thing about the Burren,
I think as well, is that it's attracted like-minded,
like spirited people I think, don't you think?
It could be anything from botany to geology,
to archeology here,
music,
art,
writing,
poetry.
And it's just filled with people who have explored
all these artistic endeavors
almost as if there's something inspirational
in the very landscape of the place itself.
Getting to know the place and people
from whom I come has added immeasurable meaning
and joy to my life.
Rita has been coming back over time
and we've gone out a few times
and we've climbed Mullaghmore,
which I shall never forget as long as I live.
I nearly died on the way up.
But why bother with the past?
Why are winterages, ancient legal texts, old stone forts,
and people long dead so important?
The O'Davorens were but one small clan
on the west coast of an island halfway across the world
from where I was born.
But by reclaiming this family story
and sharing it with upcoming generations,
we are doing what Donall O'Davoren did in the 16th century,
finding, preserving and presenting a heritage
that could easily have been lost forever.
That's a triumph for all of us.
Every one of us has an important story to tell.
Who are your people?
Where do they come from?
I can't wait to hear.