From Victoria to Ballysorrell Lane

Sometimes it’s hard for us living in Ireland to appreciate what finding your ancestors really means to those living on the other side of the world.

When you’ve grown up in relative proximity to your forefathers, it’s easy to take ancestry for granted. We recently had an American lady from Iowa who was very emotional when, with great help from Jim Martin, she found her way to the tiny townland of Clockisle in Clonmore, where her family emigrated from in the 1840s.

When you consider that people of very little means would not have travelled very far in those days, can you imagine what it was like for them to undertake a journey to America or Australia? What did they think when they saw the sea for the first time? Or what crossed their mind as Manhattan or Melbourne came into view?

So when Thomas Carroll, living in a house in Ballysorrell Lane in 1853, which was valued at just 12 shillings, decided to emigrate to Victoria in Australia with his wife and four of his children, leaving his 17-year-old son behind, he couldn’t possibly have imagined that 171 years later his great-great grandchildren would walk that lane once again and stand in the very spot where he left all those years ago.

We can sometimes dismiss overseas visitors looking for their ancestors, but when they tell you that they’ve travelled over 17,000km to stand outside Thomas Carroll’s former hovel, then it really brings it home. So when someone reaches out for a little bit of help, please do what you can to help them. It means so much.