Mom decided to phone her cousin Eilish O’Hanlon in Ireland’s County Kerry for Christmas yesterday.  Eilish sounded very happy to hear from us… she said the call made her day!

Mom also dug out the family tree that her Aunt Jo researched in the 1980s.  What do you know — Eilsih and her husband Con are on it!

Speaking of Aunt Jo, Mom phoned her yesterday as well.  She lives in Ocala, Florida and raises race horses.  There’s a race horse somewhere out in the world that Aunt Jo named for my mom.  (Aunt Jo is my Grandma Zeliff’s sister.  Of course, Mom also phoned her two Zeliff siblings, Carolyn and Harry yesterday. She’s a chatty one, my mom.)

So now I know: Eilish is mom’s second cousin. They share two great-grandparents.

And Eilish says that Tom Mulligan (the proprietor of the Cobblestone pub in Dublin) is her husband’s first cousin.

The family tree is starting to make more sense to me now.  (As is the nearby Mulligan tree that is, apparently, in the same grove!)

I’ve posted some photos other people have taken of Ballybunion, near where Con and Eilish live.  It’s the town where my great-grandmother’s birth is recorded and where some members of our family tree are buried.