In honor of the recent US senate approval of Claire Cronin’s appointment as Ambassador to Ireland, Ancestor Network took the liberty of tracing Claire’s Irish ancestry.
Claire Cronin was born Clare McLaughlin in Brockton, Massachusetts to parents, James Daniel McLaughlin and Phyllis Virginia Lucey who married in the early 1950s. James Daniel McLaughlin was the son of an Irish immigrant from the Inishowen Peninsula in Northern Co. Donegal and all four of Phyllis Lucey’s grandparents were Irish.
On both sides of her family, they experienced the terrifying ordeal of eviction as they were thrown out of their homes and off the land, leaving young and old without a place to go. Profiteering landlords saw a way of increasing their income by ridding themselves of these small holder tenants. It is not surprising that so many found other opportunities…
