Otago's links to Ireland may be strong, but the trail is patchy at best, writes Seán Brosnahan.
The pigeon landed confidently on the road in front of us. Fair play to the pigeon - this was his country after all and I was just a tourist. But when he didn't take off again, I had no option but to plough straight on through. There was a dull thwack and a sudden explosion of feathers that drifted up over the bonnet and on to the windscreen. We were travelling at speed along the main highway from County Tyrone in the north of Ireland southwards to the Republic. I pulled over to check the damage.
Our Vauxhall was a hire car and fortunately we had taken the comprehensive insurance option. Even so, we didn't want to face the hassle of a claim. The good news - the pigeon had done nothing more than crack a strand of plastic in the car's grille. The bad news - his corpse was now wedged firmly in behind.
The unexpected passenger provided a bizarre mascot for our week-long circumnavigation of Ireland. It was otherwise a family affair. I had linked up in Belfast with my son Hugh, now living in Germany, and my daughter Lorna, freshly arrived in Europe for her OE. The plan was to see how many ancestral spots we could pin down across the island.
It is more than 150 years since the first of my Irish forebears emigrated to New Zealand. This puts them into the difficult era before civil registration of births, marriages and deaths began in Ireland in 1864. Establishing firm places of origin in records before this is problematic. There is a large measure of luck involved. Some Catholic parishes have sacramental records stretching back as far as the 1820s. Many do not. Often there is simply a yawning void with no data and no leads to follow.
In Tyrone, I had the good fortune of a marriage record for great-great-grandparents in 1860 that identified a ''townland''. This distinctive Irish unit for subdividing the rural landscape is the Holy Grail of Irish genealogical research. It pins the search area down to a matter of five to a dozen contiguous farm holdings. When linked to ''Griffith's Valuation'' - the first systematic record of land-holding across Ireland - it can give you the real ''X marks the spot'' sort of certainty we required. Felix Donnelly had married Elizabeth McClusky. Within three years, they would be in Central Otago raising a family of 12 and making a successful go of gold mining and hotel-keeping. In 1860, however, both were from Feegarran townland in Derryloran parish.
This townland had been valued just the previous year (the famous Griffith's Valuation), fixing exactly the farm steadings occupied by the Donnelly and McClusky families. Griffith's Valuation can now be consulted online and I had searched it thoroughly in preparation for the trip [www.askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/]. This website provides the added bonus of linking the property details to maps. It has a brilliant tool in a ''slider'' that enables you to switch between the original ordnance survey maps of the 1850s and a modern satellite image of the same spot. The ordnance survey mappers of the 1850s recorded even modest farm buildings on their plans. The modern satellite image is equally detailed. It showed a large house near the spot where Felix's father had farmed in 1855. Elizabeth's place was just up the road. The trick was to turn the bird's-eye view of the satellite into practical navigation on the twisty rural lanes of modern Feegarran. A few circles were driven as we tried to work out where we were. Suddenly, however, everything came into alignment. There was the house; this was the spot.
We marched in to reclaim our ancestral land. Well, not really. I did assert this claim to the rather startled young Irish farmer who we surprised in his front yard. He took the joke in good heart and was more than happy for us to commune with whatever ancestral presence we could feel. In truth, there wasn't much and neither Donnellys nor McCluskys still in the district to link up with. But at least Feegarran had become more real to us by our brief visit and we had established a starting point for that epic journey to Otago in 1863. No such possibility existed with my great-great-grandmother from County Cavan. She also emigrated to Otago in 1863 but her origins before that are lost in the mists of time.
With nothing more than a county name to work with, we had nowhere to look and drove through Cavan with scarcely a glance. Next stop on the ancestral tour was County Galway. This county has a special place in Otago's early history. Starting in the mid-1850s, southern New Zealand's first Irish Catholic immigrants came from here.
There are probably thousands of modern New Zealanders whose Irish roots are entwined with the migration chains that once stretched from Dunedin to Galway. Many southern families, in particular, trace their Irish ancestry back to Annaghdown, or its neighbouring parishes in a relatively small area of eastern Galway. I have four great-great-grandparents who hail from the district. I had done research on each of them but for our Irish tour I selected just one. It had to be Paddy.
My great-great-grandfather Patrick Ford left Galway for New Zealand at the end of 1860, taking ship at Greenock in Scotland as an assisted migrant for Otago. He reached Port Chalmers on St Patrick's Day 1861, an auspicious date for an Irishman to start a new life. Soon after, he was working as a wheelwright in Milton when a weatherbeaten Tasmanian called in to his workshop. It was Gabriel Read, fresh from his famous gold strike at Tuapeka. This is ''our'' Paddy's great claim to fame: the sluice-box he made for Read was the first one in Otago. This link with the Otago gold rush is much treasured by Paddy's descendants but it wasn't much use for tracing his Galway origins.
The Annaghdown baptismal records were a more secure foundation. There, in faded spidery lettering, was Patrick, born to Michael Ford and Maria Boyle in January 1837. Michael appears subsequently in Griffith's Valuation as a tenant in the townland of Annagh West. Starting at the Annaghdown church, directions from friendly locals led us in about four easy steps to Annagh West. Taking a punt on my trusty satellite photo, I headed up a likely-looking driveway toward a hay shed. A rather bemused farmer emerged, pitchfork in hand. It turned out that he was a Ford himself and we were just one farm away. People from there had gone to New Zealand, he said, and could even name a place called ''Invercargill''.
It felt pretty good to complete the circle and stand in the fields where Paddy Ford must once have laboured. But just like in Tyrone, I felt a stranger to the land of my forebears. I was no more than a visitor passing through. Two days later, in the Brosnahan heartland of County Kerry, I finally extracted the pigeon from our grille. We'd gone a long way together but it was time to part company. I laid him gently in a rubbish skip in Tralee and began my long journey home - to New Zealand.
If you go
Rental car hire
• There are plenty of firms to choose from but some charge extra if you cross the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland. Dan Dooley and Budget are two that don't make this charge.
• Make sure you check the car at the pick-up point for any dents or existing damage. You will be charged big time for them at the other end if you don't.
• It costs much more to drop a car off at a different centre from where you pick it up so plan a circumnavigation rather than a trip from A to B if possible.
Accommodation
• With an uncertain itinerary, we didn't want to book too far ahead.
• The Irish Tourist Authority/Bord Fáilte operates offices in most large towns that offer an excellent service booking accommodation across the island. They take a deposit but no fee. See www.discoverireland.ie.
• Expedia.com proved a reliable source of up-to-date information on hotels and we found their rates highly competitive (with no extra fees).
• We splashed out on our final weekend in Dublin, staying at the Clarion Hotel along the Quay. A suite for four people cost $NZ469 for two nights. It was four-star, nice and central, and operated a free shuttle to the airport.
