Mary-Alice Wildasin (56) spent many days helping her grandparents sift through historical archives as a child as they searched for more information about her family’s Irish heritage.
“I remember being nine years old at the Maine State Archives with my grandparents while they were doing research, you know, shuffling books back and forth for them.”
They had little information to go on – just an old family story that a Patrick Doran had come over from Ireland with his father and a few siblings during the Famine in the 1840s.
They knew that the Doran family had first moved from Ireland to Canada before eventually settling in Maine in the US, where generations of the family stayed for more than 100 years and where Wildasin grew up.
“My grandfather really wanted to know where in Ireland his family were from,”
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