A family history of Ireland
How One Irish Bloodline Mirrored a Thousand Years of Conflict, Famine, and Survival
Rick Dutton
Thirty generations. One family tree. The entire, untamed story of Ireland.
What happens when your lineage doesn’t belong to just one side of history?
In Look What I Found In My Soup, Rick Dutton explores the beautiful and bitter contradictions of a bloodline tangled up with both Gaelic royalty and Anglo-Irish power. Moving from the halls of Dromoland Castle to the brutal realities of a proselytising settlement on Achill Island, this book reveals the human texture behind historical legends.
Meet the ancestors who broke the rules: the medieval kings, the Cromwellian tactical brides, the booksellers, and the Famine-era teachers who sacrificed everything for an adopted faith.
This is narrative non-fiction at its best: a gripping, beautifully written journey through a thousand years of soil, secrets, and survival.
From the Prologue
A woman, standing on the headland above Dugort, recently spoke the only sentence that truly matters in this book and had no idea of the impact it had. I had brought my oldest son, Ciarán, to walk the historic lanes of the old colony, tracing the very soil where our ancestors lived under the shadow of the Achill Mission. Falling into conversation with a local resident, a casual remark about a shared surname led her to gesture flatly over the bay.
“I don’t really care about religion,” she said.
She couldn’t have known that her throwaway comment settled a question I had spent a decade chasing through overgrown graveyards and dusty parish ledgers to answer.
From the records
Every line below comes from an annal, a register, a census return or a newspaper the book draws on.
The family’s O’Brien line runs back through the Annals of the Four Masters to the high king.
His widow, Máire Rua, secures Leamaneh for her son by marrying a Cromwellian officer.
Within three years his Protestant Mission colony is rising at Dugort.
Daniel Clarke and his brothers leave the Catholic Church and join the Mission’s congregation.
The Mission’s Irish teacher, “a convert from popery”, is buried in the worst year of the Famine.
The Ballina Chronicle reports Maria Fair’s house “maliciously set on fire and reduced to ashes”.
A son of the landed Fairs of Creggagh describes himself this way on the census form.
Frederick Clarke, grandson of a convert, marries Adelaide Fair in Westport, ninety-three years after the recantation.
Inside the book