Overview

Above the quiet lakelands of Lough Oughter, where the ruined tower of Cloughoughter Castle still rises from a solitary island, the story of the O'Reillys began. One of Ireland's great Gaelic lineages, the Ó Raghallaigh trace their descent to Raghallach mac Cathalán, founder of the East Bréifne dynasty in the ninth century. Their motto, Fortitudine et Prudentia, or ""fortitude and prudence,"" reflects a lineage that ruled under Brehon law and shaped the lakeland landscape through a network of strongholds. Cloughoughter, Tullymongan, Belturbet, and Killeshandra stood at the centre of this Gaelic world before it began to fracture. The advance of Cromwell's forces into Ulster disrupted that order. The O'Reillys were divided by conflict and displacement. Some remained on ancestral ground. Others were driven into exile across Europe. In 1644, Myles ""the Slasher"" O'Reilly led resistance at a bridge crossing against General Munro's Scottish Covenanters and was killed at the river. His death entered a long tradition of remembered defiance. The upheaval deepened during the Great Famine. Entire families left Cavan as emigration accelerated and townlands emptied. Catherine O'Reilly of Knockbride was eighteen when she arrived in New York's South Street piers in October 1849, carrying a folded address sewn into her coat. In America, Bishop Bernard O'Reilly helped establish famine-era parishes in Hartford for arrivals just like her. Sean Kelly's latest volume in the Irish Genealogy Series traces this journey from Lough Oughter to Irish communities across America. Drawing on annals, archives, and family records, it follows those who remained, those who left, and those who rebuilt abroad. For O'Reilly descendants in America and worldwide, this book is a record of origins shaped by land and loss and of lives remade far from home. Your heritage awaits.

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