Many of you will remember Alex Haley’s Roots, the blockbuster novel and TV series of the late 1970s that followed seven generations of his family back through American slavery to a village in West Africa.
Less well known now is the follow-up, in which Haley traced five generations of another branch of his ancestry back to Ireland and a town in Co Monaghan.
Despite being born in the same town myself, this astounding fact had somehow escaped me until as recently as Wednesday. Then I met an old schoolfriend who a while ago visited a museum in Florence, Alabama, where the link is mentioned. And being astounded himself, he enlightened me.
As I now know, the founding patriarch in this line of the Haley family was one James Jackson (1782-1840), who had to leave Monaghan in a hurr
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