Returning to Place: Rematriation After Migration Part 1
A conversation on family, history, and returning to Ireland
I recently spent two weeks on what I’ve come to understand as personal rematriation work that began 20 years ago. To me, personal rematriation means returning to the lands, cultures and connections of my ancestors.
The first half of my 2026 trip was spent in the unceded territory of Mi’kma’ki, the land of my Mi’kmaq and my Acadian ancestors, and what is now also known as Nova Scotia. The second half of my trip was spent in Massachusetts.
This journey was the second phase of my personal rematriation travels, which kicked off with my first and only trip to Ireland in 2017.
The following conversation with my cousin Katie took place earlier this July as we drove together to Ipswich, Massachusetts, to visit the graves of our Acadian and Mi’kmaq ancestors. It was at the midpoint of this journey, in between places and family histories, that we both learned more about how these two paths (Irish and Acadian/Mi’kmaq) came together to make us.
This time around, Katie had just returned from Ireland, where she studied generational trauma and visited the places our family once lived.
This is Part 1 of Rematriation after Migration, and it begins, fittingly, with place.
Brittany: All right. The first question I have for you is if you could explain how this Ireland trip came about and how it relates to trauma.
Katie: Okay. So, I’m in school right now for behavioral health, and I’m taking Generational Healing. It’s an intergenerational trauma class with a healing aspect to it.
At first, we went over how generational trauma develops, what it does to people, and what it does to future generations. Then we went over how you would go about healing from it.
When we went to Ireland for the class, it was based around the Troubles and the Great Famine, and what the people throughout Ireland, particularly in Belfast, had gone through.
Brittany: Now, you had said there’s a whole facility dedicated to trauma.
Katie: Yes. There is a trauma center in Belfast. We didn’t go there, though. We spoke to one of the women who works at the center. She gave us a presentation and lecture while we were in Belfast.
Brittany: Is there anything that really stuck with you from your trip? Any significant takeaways?
Katie: Honestly, every day was a learning experience.
There was also a weird familiarity to it, almost like I had been there before.
I keep saying this to people: it felt like I was home. It felt like I was going to see what I had already seen before, if that makes sense.
A lot of it was really emotional. A lot of it was very spiritual, and I’m not a religious person.
People who know me know I talk a lot. So, for me to be speechless throughout the trip, through all of the tours and everything we saw, was really out of character for me.
Brittany: That’s actually a really good segue because I’ve done a lot of ancestry work relating to our Irish heritage. I wanted to touch on that foundation and what you knew going into this, before the research I’d done, and what you’ve learned on your own.
Katie: Sure. I really didn’t know much about it before you started digging into it as much as you have. I knew we had some Irish in us, as they say, but I wasn’t really sure how far back it went or how connected it still was to our family.
Going into the trip, I knew what I’d learned from you. I knew we had relatives there, and I knew they had lived in Fermoy, but I only learned that about a week before I went.
I really didn’t know much before that.
When we went to Nora’s gravesite, that’s when I learned more about where our family came from.
Brittany: A little backstory for people who aren’t familiar: I started doing genealogy research several years ago because I wanted to learn more about our Irish ancestry.
In 2017, I traveled to Ireland to connect more with the land and try to learn where our ancestors had come from before they immigrated to America in the 1890s/early 1900s.
A lot of that research started with Ancestry.com, but it only got me so far.
By the time I got to County Cork, it was getting dark and I was running out of time, so I literally started knocking on strangers’ doors, hoping someone knew what I was looking for.
One of those doors belonged to Oliver Slattery, who turned out to be a distant cousin.
He helped me understand where our family had lived, what the area looked like generations ago, and where many of our ancestors are buried.
Over the last decade, Oliver continued helping fill in gaps in our family’s history and even connected us with other relatives.
And so, before your trip, I basically handed all of that over to you. I connected you with Oliver, we made sure you had a car. I’ve honestly heard almost nothing about what happened after that.
So, this conversation is the first time we’re really talking about your experience, and I’m so interested in hearing what it was like.
Katie: Yeah. We got in the car early that morning, around 7:00. A girl I’d met on the trip the day before came with me on my little adventure.
She stayed back and let me wander, but she also pointed things out if I wasn’t noticing them. It was nice getting to connect with her on a different emotional level, too.
It was about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Dublin.
(Thank you to Anam Croí Ireland Tours for getting them around Ireland safely!)
The drive was beautiful. When you’re in Dublin, it feels very much like a city. But once you get into the countryside, that’s the Ireland people picture. You see the sheep, the rolling hills, all of those things you think of when you think about Ireland.
That was the moment it hit me. I thought, I feel like I’m going home, even though it was the farthest place from home I’d ever been in my life. I got a little emotional.
The girl I was with noticed, but kind of laughed it off because I was just staring out the window at the highway.
I’d never been there before. I’d obviously never seen any of it.
When we got there, Oliver was the sweetest man. Legitimately the sweetest man I’ve ever met in my entire life. He was very welcoming.
He walked us into a church in the middle of a First Communion, down to the front of the church, and introduced us to the priest.
It was a beautiful place. That was the church where our ancestors were married and baptized.
Brittany: Was that St. Patrick’s?
Katie: I believe it was, but we went through so much that day I can’t remember for certain. I have it all written down. We were there for probably eight hours, and it was a very long day.
Everything was amazing and very emotional. When I mentioned that the trip felt spiritual, this day was what I was talking about. I’ve never driven down a dirt road, walked into an empty church, and stood where my ancestors had their funerals.
That was really amazing. Oliver knew so much about when those churches were really active and what life was like during that time. He was really awesome.
We also went to a few cemeteries. We visited one where the church was in ruins. There wasn’t really any signage or anything like that. I took a lot of photos of the churches and cemeteries we visited. We also went to a place called the Holy Well.
Brittany: Oh, man.
Katie: It was one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. You walk through this small opening built into a stone wall, and it opens into this beautiful little spring. There were carvings there. I want to say one of them said 1830, but I have photos of it that we can check. It was just an amazing place.
Oliver brought us to where our great-great-great-grandparents actually lived. The man who lives there now came outside and talked with us.
Brittany: Oh my gosh. I was going to ask about that.
Katie: He was really nice. Someone was sleeping inside, so I wasn’t about to go in and look around, even though I really wanted to. Whoever owns the property now has done a beautiful job taking care of it.
That was another thing that amazed me about being there. Everything is so well preserved.
Everything still has the feel that it probably had all those years ago. Oliver actually pointed that out. He said a lot of it hasn’t really been touched or refurbished. You really feel it when you walk into those churches, especially when no one else is there.
Brittany: It’s interesting about that house because I had tried researching it.
From what I could find out, our ancestors were the first people who lived there. It was part of a few houses in that area built by the local government for families who were still struggling after the famine. The head of household worked some kind of labor job and died fairly young, I want to say in his forties, from lung disease.
Common at the time because of the famine effects, malnutrition, lack of proper housing. Many people had jobs that were very hard on their bodies. He didn’t live there very long before he passed away.
After he died, our family came to America because they weren’t able to survive there anymore.
Katie: Oliver mentioned that the man living there rents the house. I don’t know if he knows the owners, but he said they still take care of the property behind it.
Brittany: That’s interesting. A few years ago, I connected with the family who lived there. They told me they had immigrated there from another country and had bought the house.
Katie: Yeah, the man told me the owners had only owned it for four or five years. I believe the land behind the house is still part of the same property. There were sheep and cows back there.
Brittany: I’m glad you were able to see it. That was actually one of the things I had hoped to see when I was there in 2017. I didn’t know exactly where the house was, where the church was, where the workhouse had been.
Katie: We also went to the school. The school is still being used today. It looks amazing.
Oliver told us that our great-great cousins would walk there every day carrying a piece of firewood because every student had to bring wood to help heat the school. It wasn’t a short walk. It was uphill. People joke about walking uphill both ways to school, but they really did have to carry wood uphill with them every day.
The school is beautiful. It’s a small little school on top of the hill, tucked back behind the trees.
Brittany: While you were going around, you mentioned going to a couple cemeteries. There’s one cemetery, Kilcrumper, that has had a lot of restoration work done.
A lot of people say to just go around cemeteries and look for your ancestors, but that’s not easy. A lot of them are old and haven’t been well maintained. Were you able to find any Sweeneys or Powers?
Katie: I wasn’t able to see anything from those names. Oliver did show me some of his ancestors. In one of the places we went, he explained that a lot of people who didn’t have immediate family only got a stone, no name, no nothing. So, he said it’s a very big possibility that some of the stones we saw in the cemetery with the ruins could be part of our distant family.
He brought me to a couple different cemeteries, older ones and newer ones, but I wasn’t able to find anything with our names.
In the second half of my conversation with Katie, we turn toward generational trauma. As mothers of young children, Katie and I are both interested in how we can heal ourselves, our family lines and maybe even the world around us from the lasting effects of colonization and other causes of trauma.
Rematriation After Migration Part Two is coming soon!