Tracking down roots

They followed a paper trail looking for ancestral traces in Ulster

We were Foys on a mission. My sister had done years of genealogical groundwork in fee-based archives, obscure databases, and on creaky microfilm readers. Now, we hoped our visit to County Down in Northern Ireland would expose at least part of the root system of our family tree.

With only a thin trail of facts leading to our maternal and paternal great-grandparents, and to the towns they left behind, we sought to learn about the lives they had lived before coming to America: a house they had occupied, how they or their parents had made a living, some shred of their existence.

We thought if we were extremely lucky, we might locate a gravestone of our clan. And of course, meeting distant cousins would be the pot of gold.

So for a week, Mimi and I, middle-aged sisters 10 years apart, left our children and suburban households -- hers in Cleveland, mine in Boston -- and roamed the byways, churchyards, and pubs of a couple of patches of Ulster, talking to farmers and librarians and barkeeps, hunting for knowledge of our ancestral past. We found, instead, a different treasure: Ireland as it is today.

During a cold but sun-blessed week straddling February and March, snow was melting on the slopes of the Mourne Mountains ringing Kilkeel and Bright parishes, home of our forebears, the Sloans and Brennans, the Foys and McCartains.

We watched lambs springing around the same greening pastures where our families' livestock may once have grazed. We tramped and drove the same boreens our great-great-grandparents probably trod, and gazed down the same emerald slopes that hem the Irish Sea. We heard crows cawing from crumbling roofs and mossy walls that might once have marked our ancestors' farmlands, and we raised pints in a worn pub where a few folks who share our name, at least, are known.

Before those moments unfolded, though, we had to toil in several record rooms. Though our late mother's accounting of our ancestry had so far proven remarkably reliable, one of our great-grandfathers, to put it plainly, had a credibility problem. His purported exploits from years of military service with the British Navy were unverified. Another set of great-grandparents were said to have ''run away barefoot" to marry -- heaven knows where.

Two days of hunting, first in Dublin and later at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast, left us still without evidence of Edward Foy's claim to have received a Death and Glory Medal from Queen Victoria herself after the Battle of the Light Brigade. Too, the young lovers, both named Sloan, who eventually became respectable householders in Pennsylvania, seemed to have slipped through one of many holes in Ireland's record keeping.

We did, though, discover an amazing and fortuitous fact: A grand resource called the Griffith's Valuation, from 1863, showed our paternal great-great-grandmother's tenancy on 20 acres on Coniamstown Road in Bright parish. In a later year, Griffith's listed our maternal great-great-grandfather's cottage and garden just 35 miles south, on Glenloughan Upper Road in Kilkeel parish. The two families, not to be linked until our parents' marriage across the ocean 70 years later, were rooted in sites an hour's drive apart.

High time, we thought, to quit the desiccated urban record rooms and take the hunt to the countryside. We hired a car and sped north out of Dublin. (''Left!" the passenger would often remind the driver. ''Stay on the left!")

The next day, in a church graveyard outside Kilkeel, we spent hours studying headstones, some barely legible. I copied inscriptions that seemed vaguely relevant, but never quite fit: There were Patrick Sloans, but none the father of our Michael; there was a Hugh McCartain, not recorded as the father of our Rose. Just when the chill wind wafting down from the Mournes' purple slopes was about to send us back to the car, a white-haired man in a threadbare sweater approached from a nearby house. In a glorious serendipity, his name turned out to be Seamus Sloan.

He was no known relation, yet was as warm as if he were.

''Turn around an' throw a rock, you'll probably hit a Sloan or a Brennan," he said. He walked us for another hour around the cemetery, pointing out graves of interest (''Yer Brennans are up in that corner, there"), telling of his own life (a childhood removed to England, years as a milkman, his family's market that gave ''tic," or credit, and got in return more grief and ill will than payment), and occasionally stopping at this or that headstone to say a Hail Mary or Our Father, a few times in Gaelic. When we parted, with lingering handshakes and heartfelt best wishes, we felt we had connected with something of the past we'd been hunting.

We advanced on our targets in County Down using detailed ordinance survey maps we purchased at the Northern Ireland Tourist Office in Dublin. They were amazingly accurate, but we sometimes erred (already disoriented by driving on the left) and got lost. On a couple of occasions, we encountered the odd cultural telescoping that can occur in Ireland in 2004.

Stopped at a spot where our tiny thread of muddy road unexpectedly poured onto a two-lane thoroughfare, we made room for a shiny BMW to zip by. The young man at the wheel, with a porcelain-skinned toddler strapped into a rear car seat, leaned over to ask the obviously clueless tourists if he could help. Coniamstown Road? Wait a bit, he said, and snatched a cellphone from his dash and tapped a key. ''My mam lives just back the road," he said. ''She'll know it."

She did, indeed, know it, and we soon were redirected to its start, about a mile away. The one-car-wide tar ribbon unrolled between hedgerows, with mostly empty pastures yawning away green on either side. It seemed to be a virtually uninhabited area, which enhanced our sense of stumbling upon the place our great-grandfather had left. Ancient, collapsing buildings dotted many properties, and we thought, Here! Maybe this was once the Foy house! No, there! That could have been their barn!

Then, behind a hill on our right, we saw hats, then heads and shoulders, of men walking. Farmers? Landholders? Cousins?! They crested the hill and the jarring truth was clear: They were golfers, heading to several gleaming cars parked off the way. The farm plots of our forebears had apparently been subsumed into a links.

As our notions deflated, however, the little road dead-ended into a wider one, and there rose the spire of a church. Unlike most of the other structures in the area, it appeared to be in current use, though by age and design it dated to the 19th century. Could it be a repository for those elusive Foy baptismal records?

It was late Sunday afternoon, and the doors of the Church of Killough were locked. No rectory was nearby, no caretaker around to show us to an archive. The only records available were scores of gravestones behind the church, and although they were surpassingly beautiful in the waning light, most were so scoured by the elements as to be unreadable.

The words we did eventually make out, however, suggested this was not the site of our fond hopes: They were British-sounding names, Brooks and Thomas and Andrews.

''These are Church of Ireland people," Mimi said, not Roman Catholics. ''Our family isn't here."

Still, we felt we were close to something of our own. Driving back out the dark lane toward Downpatrick, the nearest town, we shared a satisfying sense that despite the golf course, despite the church denomination, this was Foy territory. At Brendan's Pub & Restaurant in town, we found confirmation.

From behind the glowing wooden bar, a silver-haired man served us Guinness and fried fish, then a broad smile to our queries.

''Oh yes, Foys are ya? Sure they're here. There's a Foye chemist's just in town, though he'll not be there tonight," the barkeep said, raising a dog-eared phone directory from the shelf beside the tap. ''Here's some numbers. I'll just give you the indigenous ones."

Gleeful, we scribbled the list of three names, their street addresses scattered in nearby towns. But after more gabbing and another pint, we saw the pub was closing for the evening, and fatigue, shyness, and a shortage of sterling coins combined to keep us from hunting a phone and ringing up those Foys. We were to fly over the Atlantic in another day, and now that we had names and addresses, we hoped that letters could reach across the gulf of kinship more graciously than a ringing phone.

And besides, we needed a mission for the next trip.

Adele Foy can be reached at a_foy@globe.com.