About Us and A Letter from Ireland.
Welcome to A Letter from Ireland.
Let me guess - you’ve been interested in tracing your Irish Heritage and Family History for some time now.
Maybe you've already travelled to Ireland? Perhaps you wonder if you will ever get here?
What you DO know is that your ancestors left Ireland for a better life - bringing with them their values and beliefs, many of which were passed to you and your own family.
Since 2013, we've shared our weekly "Letter from Ireland" and it has attracted over Two Million people of Irish descent around the world. They find that our Letters, Blog posts, Videos, books and Podcasts help them to understand what life was like for their Irish Ancestors.
For some, this information provides a rich backdrop to help with research on Ancestry Record sites. For others, the Letter connects them with their Irish roots in a very real and visceral way.
Here are just some reasons why some of our readers keep coming back to "A Letter from Ireland" for more:
“Trace your surname, discover where your ancestors may have lived and step into this fascinating and beautiful land that we love”. Sandy Laferriere.
“If you have Irish blood running through your veins, or even if you are just interested in Ireland, this site is essential.” Patty McCoy.
“You and Carina are melding a very important aspect of Irish history and heritage to our personal genealogical endeavors. Thanks for bringing it all to life for us!” Jack Healy.
Now, I think it’s time to introduce ourselves! We are Mike and Carina Collins - a husband and wife team based in County Cork, Ireland.
Our Irish Heritage adventure started when we noticed many people asking questions on Facebook about Irish surnames and the homelands of their Irish Ancestors.
We started to answer with our local knowledge - and those answers took the form of a weekly email called “A Letter from Ireland”.
In each Letter, we share stories of counties, surnames and heroic Irish individuals who made new lives for themselves across the world - often in the harshest of circumstances. Sound like any of your Irish ancestors?
Today, we travel around Ireland - gathering stories and sharing them with you through our weekly letters, blog posts, videos and podcasts.
Would you like to see the Letter and Podcast survive and thrive for the future - and receive some personal benefits along the way?
Recent Posts
Todays letter is a little different – it features an imagined ancestral letter written by one of our readers as well as their imagined response. We start with a letter received in Ireland back in the mid 1800s from Nova Scotia in what was to become Canada: “Hello, My name is Lawrence Cavanagh and I…
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A few weeks back, we headed north from Cork to the city of Galway and nearby Connemara. What a beautiful part of the world—maybe you have been there? One of the first things you notice on approaching Galway city is the series of traffic roundabouts that dot its’ periphery. These fourteen roundabouts have a family…
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A few weeks back, I sent a Letter from Ireland out to all of our subscribers around the word and asked “Which of these do you want more than anything?” I then gave a list of hopes, wishes and dreams that our readers have been sending to me over the last two years. As I said in…
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What do the Great Wall of China, the Sydney Opera House, the great Pyramid in Egypt, the Niagara Falls and the London Eye all have in common? They are all, of course, world icons—but for one day this year, these and many other similar icons will turn green. For one full night in the year…
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Belfast, which is known the world over for The Troubles, tragedies like the Titanic, and hard times… yet such a place raised a resilient woman who overcame adversity and brought joy and a different picture of Belfast to a small community a world away. The poor daughter of John Johnston and – her children never…
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