Boarded-up bookstore highlight of Irish trip

As quests for roots go, it was a fairly pathetic effort. My wife and I were traveling to Ireland for a little more than four days, visiting our son during his study abroad in Galway. I wanted to see castles and pastures, but I also wanted to dig up some of my Irish roots.

I grew up in a pretty serious Irish-American family. The only one of my Irish ancestors I knew, however, was Mary Ellen (Nellie) Kerrigan, born in the resort town of Bundoran, on the northwestern coast of Ireland, in 1892.

Granny arrived at Ellis Island on Sept. 29, 1908, and never went back. Other than a few choice words in Gaelic, the only other thing I remembered of Granny was that the Kerrigans owned some properties in Bundoran, and she spoke often of a cousin who lived with them named "Josie Logue."

Bundoran would be a three-hour drive out of the way of our planned itinerary, but it seemed almost criminal to travel across the Atlantic Ocean and not see the place I'd grown up hearing about.

On the flight over, I read up on Bundoran in the guidebooks and found that, in 2002, the town had been described in a newspaper — quite nastily — as "like the back streets of Las Vegas, only with cheaper hookers." Once we set foot on the Emerald Isle, it was more of the same. I told one woman in a pub that we were making the trip up to Bundoran, and she looked as if she'd just bitten into a lemon peel. Once I told her it was my ancestral home, she quickly changed her tune, assuring us it was beautiful.

We arrived in Bundoran about 6 p.m. on a Saturday and, despite the negative reviews, found ourselves in a seaside village not all that different from Ocean City, N.J., where I'd gone as a child. It would be too late to check any official records, and almost all the stores were closing up as we passed, and I doubted seriously that anyone would remember a 16-year-old girl who skipped town 100 years ago.

We wandered down the street, and I tried to content myself with the idea that at least I was walking the same sidewalks Granny might have walked in her youth. We stopped at the traditional-looking Brennan's Criterion Bar, and decided to follow the Irish tradition of drowning our sorrows in Guinness.

The bar was almost deserted, but behind the counter we found Nan and Pat Brennan, sisters who owned and ran the bar. I mentioned I was looking for any trace of the Kerrigan family. They shook their heads sympathetically, and I realized they probably dealt with Americans like me 20 times a day.

The Criterion Bar, they explained, had been in their family for three generations. They'd been working behind the counter since the 1940s, and there were no Kerrigans they knew of in Bundoran.