My great-grandfather and his five brothers, among whom were three doctors, left Ireland for Argentina in the 1860’s when they were in their ‘twenties. The brothers were very close, having been orphaned when the youngest brother was fourteen, and they decided that where one would go the others would follow. (My great-grandfather returned to Ireland after just four years in Argentina to take over the family farm, maintaining contact with his brothers and their families in Argentina to the end of his life, contact which has remained to the present day.)

The first of my ancestors to go to Argentina was an older brother of my great-grandfather, Thomas Greene, who accompanied the Welsh settlers to Patagonia in 1865 as a doctor on the converted tea-clipper, Mimosa. The Mimosa has become the most famous ship in Welsh history and was the inspiration for my book, Mimosa, The Life and Times of the Ship that Sailed to Patagonia. Thomas Greene himself is mentioned in all histories of the Welsh colony in Patagonia.

My great-grandfather’s oldest brother bought land in the pampas when it cost more to fence land than to buy it and established an estancia on which he built a house. This estancia was the inspiration for the estancia in my novel, Sebastian’s Pride, translated into Spanish and published in Argentina as Don Sebastián.

Growing up in Ireland, I heard many stories about the Argentine branch of the family from both my grandparents’ generation and from uncles and aunts who had lived there for varying lengths of time, some having been born there. Those born there, even though of Irish parentage, had automatically been given Argentine nationality and were registered, by law, with Spanish names like Juan, Graciela, Ana, and Catalina. In their houses in Ireland, gathering dust over the years, were mementoes of their years in Argentina—coiled plaited hide lassos, hardened with age, called rebenques, attached to the walls on nails or wood pegs; tarnished, silver-embossed gourds once used for the drinking of mate (the tea universally imbibed in most parts of South America); framed faded photographs of men on horseback, sometimes with a blond-haired child seated on the saddle in front of them; baskets of ostrich eggs gathered on the pampas that had mercifully survived the ship journey to Ireland in the cargo hold.

I do know that with the passing of each generation part of the past dies with it. The men and women of past generations take their memories to the grave. I was fortunate in knowing my Argentine great-aunt who was the last owner of the old estancia house. She was the link between the past generations and the living ones. She could tell me about the original brothers who went to Argentina—her father and her uncles—whom she remembered as elderly men when she was a young girl. She gave me a home in Argentina. Over the years during my many visits, she told me of the scandals, quarrels and tragedies that beset various members of the family. She also gave me a copy of a journal, which one of her uncles had written of his early years in Argentina, which was of immense help to me in writing Sebastian’s Pride despite the fact that many pages and sections had been stitched together in a form of censorship by an unknown aunt. It is not known what the stitched pages contained since permission to cut the stitches has never been granted. Of less controversy, were the medical memoirs written by her father’s younger brother who had been a doctor in a rural town in Argentina, which formed the basis of my book, Recollections of an Irish Born Doctor in Nineteenth-Century Argentina, edited from his journals and privately published in England by The Memoir Club.

My great-aunt married the son of an Italian immigrant. The Italian connection to my family was the inspiration for the second novel of my trilogy of linked novels, entitled They Came From Italy.