Irish Emigrant Online (News for the Global Irish Community)
This is the story of one woman's search for her Irish roots, a search which is coloured by a feeling inherent since childhood that her Irish ancestry harboured a secret.

Far from recounting a sterile search through records, parish registers and the National Archive, Ms Shea Bossard has involved the reader in her quest. This she has achieved through her descriptive powers and through the introduction of a range of diverse characters encountered. Travelling with her husband through Kerry and Roscommon in what appears to have been almost constant rain, she brings the reader each step of the way. Her encounters with locals vary wildly from the helpfulness of Patrick O'Leary near Ballinskelligs in Co. Kerry to the extraordinary Liam McCarthy in Roscommon who requested a rather unusual photograph.

In the second part of her journey of discovery the author has taken the stories of her two sets of grandparents, Michael Shea and Bridget Murphy from Kerry and Michael Healy and Sarah Burns from Roscommon, and woven them into a fictionalised narrative, a narrative which reveals the harsh truth behind a number of family relationships. Recording the cruelty of her Roscommon grandmother she begins to understand why everybody in the family seemed wary of Sarah Burns; and knowing the childhood experienced by her own mother, Sarah's daughter Helen, brings the author to a new understanding of her character.

"Finding My Irish" is a cautionary tale for those anxious to find their ancestors. It is also a fascinating tale written with complete honesty that isn't afraid to include the "bad wood" to be found in most family trees. As the author herself has said, "Writing this book began as a family history for our children but culminated into a true account of lives lost in transition, of families hurting each other in order to survive".