When I mentioned in a recent post that it was a fateful cup of coffee that led me to uncover the secret of where my Aherns were from in Ireland, Susan Daily <cullivans@gmail.com> said: >I would love to read about the coffee - Cork connection! Have you >already typed that one up somewhere online? I will answer this here as it has relevance to Middlesex County research, but it is also a good story. I had no idea where my Aherns were from, other than County Cork, and that only from naturalization records. I had been doing a lot of research on my Lanes, my grandmother was a Lane born in Innishannon, so I knew where to look for info. She was born in 1864, so her birth showed up in the civil registrations. It said under place of residence of father "America" so I assumed he had gone over ahead of his family to get established. At some point in my research I talked to a woman who had married a brother of my grandmother and she told me the story that she got from her mother-in-law. It seems my great-grandfather did indeed emigrate to the States, but he didn't tell his wife. He went off to the pub one night and never came back, leaving his wife at home with my grandmother on the way and another one on her knee. He did as most immigrants did. When he got off the boat in Boston he moved in with his two brothers in Somerville, who of course wrote home to say what's Michael doing over here without his wife and as soon as my grandmother was born she got on the boat and came after him with her two babies. They had a couple more children before moving all the way from Somerville to Arlington, where they had several more kids before celebrating their golden wedding anniversary, which was written up in the local paper. [see http://www.rootsweb.com/~mamidnws/1914/MAR.html#7 ] Michael Lane was frequently mentioned in the local paper, mostly for running illicit distillery and drinking establishments in the Irish neighborhood. If you search http://www.rootsweb.com/~mamidnws/ looking for "Lane" and "Police" in Arlington, you'll see what I mean. In the course of my research on Lanes I looked up all the civil records on his brothers' families in Somerville. I found several burials in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, and sent them the dates of burials asking for the location of their graves. They wrote back that none of these people were buried in Mount Auburn. That left me stymied until one night at a TIARA meeting over the punch and cookies, I mentioned this puzzlement and Marie Daly, who overheard me spoke up and said that I wanted what was often called "Catholic Mt. Auburn" and was just over the line into Watertown. The name of it was Sand Banks Cemetery and the records were at Calvary Cemetery in Waltham. I called them up and they gave me the locations of the Lane graves in the far back corner on the right. I decided to stop by there on a Saturday morning on my way to the State Archives in Dorchester. There was no place to get any food out at the Archives so I stopped at the Dunkin Donuts at Fresh Pond rotary in Cambridge and got myself a big coffee half, no sugar, and two sugar crullers. When I found the cemetery it was at the end of a dead end street and there was no place to park but the gate was ajar and I drove in on the gravel path a few car lengths and shut off the engine. It was a lovely late spring day with the birds chirping and the sun shining. I read the paper as I nursed my coffee. At one point I glanced to my right and noticed a large marble obelisk with the name Fitzpatrick on it. Now my great-grandmother, Ellen Ahern, was a Fitzpatrick and when they got off the boat in 1857 they moved in with her brother in Arlington for a few years. So when I got out of the car I decided to look at the Fitzpatrick tombstone. It turned out to be the grave of her brother. I knew it was him becuase he had been run over by a carriage in Boston the same day as a brother of my grandfather was born. They had a wake and a christening at the same time in the house. But most important, on the stone it said "From the Parish of Mallow, in County Cork" and that is how everything began to come together. I knew if the Fitzpatricks were from Mallow, the Aherns must be also, or at least from nearby. Within the year I was back on the plane, train, and boat to Dublin where I looked at the Mallow parish records on microfilm at the National Library and from there everything has continued to fall into place. If I hadn't had that coffee, I would have gone right to the Lane graves and then continued on to the archives. If I hadn't bothered to track down everything I could on all of the Lanes, even those not in my direct line, I would not have been looking for their graves, and if I hadn't been bemoaning this puzzle at a TIARA meeting, I never would have been led to the right place. But then, I think someone is always up there pointing us in the right direction. I have no other explanation of my continued good fortune. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dennis Ahern | Middlesex County Massachusetts Newspaper Abstracts Acton, Massachusetts | http://www.rootsweb.com/~mamidnws/index.html - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -