Your county, where the story is rooted.

That is the part we can give you. You found the county. Now you can follow the century your family left behind, in your county's own edition of the story.

How the county editions work

Every county has its own edition: its own fictional family and its own hundred years, shaped by how history actually passed through that county. The Famine, the Land War, the emigrant road and the fight for a nation fell differently on each county, and each county's letters are written from its own ground.

What every edition shares is the eight Books and their eras, Book One in the Famine years through to Book Eight in the Emergency. That is on purpose: it means you can set two counties side by side and see how the same century landed differently in each. If your roots run to two counties, many readers take both editions for exactly that.

The O'Donnells of Ballycastle are the Mayo edition, the first one written and the sample shown on this site. We research and write the editions one county at a time, Mayo first, and founding readers' counties lead the order, so the county you give when you sign up helps decide what is written next.

The family in every edition is our own fiction, always labelled as fiction. You are choosing a county, not a family: we do not write your own ancestors or your surname into the story, and we never sell you a story as if it were your genealogy.

The thirty-two counties, honoured honestly

Every county on the island will have its own edition. We will not pretend all thirty-two are written yet, because they are not: they are researched and written county by county, Mayo first, and the people these letters are for would see through anything less honest.

Within your county's edition, detail helps. Where you can tell us a townland or a parish, we set the real placenames and the texture of that place into the letters: the fair day, the nearest market town, the road most people took when they left. The closer the detail you give us, the more your own ground shows up. Honest personalisation, not a mail-merge.

What we ask when you join

Very little, and only what sets the story on your ground.

• Your ancestral county. The one thing we need to set the letters in your place.
• A townland or parish, if you know it. Optional, and this is where the real placenames come from.

That is all. No long forms, no account to manage. One choice at the start, and a year of letters follows.

If you are giving this to a parent or grandparent and you are the one who did the genealogy, you already have everything we need. Turn the county you found into a story they can hold. See how to give it as a gift.