An accidental find - and a new book

I haven't been working on genealogy for the past two weeks as I've been working on the final edit of my book, a memoir spanning the 18 months of my mother's battle against leukemia, and my father's struggles with a degenerative neurological disease. As I was re-reading a passage of the book, however, I realized I had the chronology of events wrong, so I began to search for a small diary of my mother's that would help me correct the mistake.  Of course, I couldn't find it.

Tony and I searched in the garage, where I'm storing many of my parents' books and mementos, and couldn't find it there.  Then I searched inside the house: in closets, boxes, bookshelves, and drawers.  No luck.  Finally, several hours later, I found it in a box underneath my bed.  Inside was another box with papers that had belonged to my father. I had never gone through these papers and for some reason decided to look inside the box.  It was a copy of a diary written by a third cousin who was a priest (Father Bob), and it had some amazing information that will be quite helpful in my genealogy quest, including information on places and people who are crucial to my research.  Of particular interest were two letters written by the priest's father to his relatives in Ireland.  In the letter he is introducing himself to the cousins he had never met, and he lists all of his brothers and sisters as well as his children.

Another crucial piece of information was something Fr. Bob wrote in an early entry in his diary.  He said that Ned Brennan (Fr. Bob's grandfather and my great great grandfather) came over to America first, and his wife Mary followed later.  I hadn't known this before, so I had been searching in immigration records for a passenger list that contained both of them.  Now I will be able to search for them separately. 

Now that I've completed the book, I will be back to the ancestor quest and reporting my finds on the blog.  I'll also be reporting progress on the book's publication, and making an announcement about a new website where I hope to post a few of the book's chapters.  Stay tuned!