So my entire life I’d always been attracted to all things Irish. The music . . . the dancing . . . green, and when I was old enough, liquor. My mother never knew her father. And when I say never knew, I don’t mean, she never met him. I mean my grandmother never told anyone who he was. Over the years my family and I developed theories about where he might have been from.
I’d always believed that my fair skin, green eyes, and the red in my hair could only mean one thing (especially since none of those traits can be found on my father’s side) that my maternal grandfather MUST have been Irish.
In January 2014 my mother took an AncestryDNA test that . . . drum roll please . . . told us that . . . YES WE ARE IRISH! I remember logging into the account and seeing that HUGE chunk labeled Ireland (the results pie chart). It was a pretty huge chunk and the results pretty conclusively (we had other AncestryDNA results from my grandmother) proved my grandfather was mostly Irish & Scottish, with a chunk of Swede. OK, so it didn’t exactly say Swedish, it said Scandinavian, but I’ve always had an affinity for the Swedish and so, since my internal genetic compass is apparently so spot on, I divined that he was Swedish. Not from Norway, not from Finland–the guy was Swedish.
I’ve spent time in Ireland and am as in love with the people, the country, the culture as I have ever been. Writing The Irish Cottage was so much fun because, at least for a time, I got to live in Ireland. Taking readers to some of my old haunts and thinking up new ones was such a pleasure. While the sequel is called The London Flat, I hope to revisit Ireland in another book soon.
If you enjoy women’s fiction romance, travel romance, and/or modern royal romance (the royal part isn’t the main focus FYI–but it sure is fun) give The Irish Cottage a go =).
The picture above is one I took on the grounds of Blarney Castle, home of the Blarney Stone.
And in case you were wondering, I had my Guinness cake & sported my (finally) appropriate “Kiss Me I’m Feckin’ Irish” t-shirt on St. Patrick’s Day.
