The Bentley family visit southern Ireland in a bid to research the lives of Kate’s ancestors.

You always hope that your next holiday will be the trip of a lifetime. It’s rare that you know it before you even start out.

Our hop to Ireland had a purpose – to find out about relatives, the places they lived and grew up, and hopefully to meet people who knew them and could help fill in a part of our lives that had been unanswered for decades.

It would be an adventure, like TV’s Who Do You Think You Are? – only without a smug celebrity feigning surprise about their wayward great great aunts.

The father of my wife, Kate, died when Kate was a teenager. William Burke had often told stories of his younger days, but Kate never took much notice, as she was much too busy just being a kid. As a small child she met her grandmother Johanna, and the abiding memory of that occasion was of Johanna’s enormous leather handbag.

Kate Bentley on the road to Doon

Kate’s father was just one member of the huge Irish diaspora that has left many Irish descendants longing to re-connect with their roots. For Kate it would mean filling the black hole that has largely gone undiscussed since his death.

For our trip, organised by Tourism Ireland, we opted for fly-drive — it can work out as cheap, and if you have young kids whose chorus of “Are we nearly there yet?” begins before you have left your driveway at home, it’s certainly better for your sanity.

So we leave Birmingham Airport and 45 minutes later we’re in Dublin. The genealogy room at The National Library of Ireland is a must for anyone tracing family history. Here the accents of those looking for Irish ancestors range from American to Australian, but like ours, ­are mainly English.

The rise in popularity in genealogy is clear. Since Ireland’s online census was launched in 2007 a massive nine million people have logged on, and there have been 1.39 million new visits to the site since August alone.

Senior archivist Catriona Crowe says: “We’re collaborating with Tourism Ireland to try to encourage roots tourism, so that people will come to visit the country of their ancestors.”

The National Library is home to more than just census records and it is here that we formulate a plan and decide to focus on Kate’s grandparents. Our search for clues will begin at police stations where her grandfather Garda Thomas Burke had been stationed with his family.

Smoke inhalation

We know from the research that Garda Burke died aged 37, possibly as an indirect result of smoke inhalation while attending one of the biggest fire disasters in Ireland, at Dromcolough, Limerick in September 1926. A timber barn being used as a temporary cinema caught fire when a candle ignited a reel of film. Forty-eight people died.

Our paper trail leads us to Foynes, a village in County Limerick. We stop and ask at the post office where the police house was. The postmistress points us in the direction of a large stone house, now occupied by the last serving garda, before a new police station was built.

Seeing the house suddenly makes your history real. This is where grandparents Thomas and Johanna started their family and went about their lives, in these streets, up and down this small garden path.

We know Thomas was later stationed further down the coast at Glin, where Kate’s father, William, was born.

We stop at a pub. Now, if you want to know anything in Ireland, the pub is the place. It’s like an early form of Google, only powered by Guinness . . .

The landlord points us around the corner, to a garda house, brightly painted to fit in with the pretty village buildings.

He also gives us the name of the current garda, who by chance has been putting together a reunion. As a result we are now in contact with him for more information about Garda Burke.

Our next port of call is the village of Doon in County Laois where Kate’s father lived from the age of two. We find the police house where his younger brothers were born and the family grew up. Memories, lost moments, a need satiated — all felt at once standing there on that doorstep. Knowing that within these walls Kate’s father spent a childhood, lived a life, endured the loss of his father at the age of seven, and that it was from this house that he set out on a journey to England, like so many of his fellow Irishmen, never to return.

We ask after the Burke family at the village grocers over the road. A kind man in an apron beams at us as we explain our connection to the village. He remembers the widowed Johanna well and even has a story about Kate’s father from when they were very small.

Kate Bentley at the end of her search in Ireland

“You’ll be wanting Nancy,” he says, and promptly takes us around the corner to point out the house where Johanna spent her last days.

You quickly realise the beauty of tight-knit villages in finding people — ask one person and they point you to another, and eventually to the person or place you are looking for.

And they love it. Storytelling is the Irish way of saying hello. You walk into their story and they walk into yours.

Nancy was Johanna Burke’s next door neighbour and it’s like finding an old friend. We have tea and hear more stories about the family and how Johanna had brought up her children single-handedly, using her garden as a vegetable patch and keeping the fire burning using peat cut from the nearby bog.

Nancy leads us next door, to the very house, where the current occupier lets us in and shows us round, telling us: “I haven’t changed it much, apart from the upstairs loo next to the bedroom.”

We are given a grand tour. The convent where they went to school, the field where they had held celebration days and watched hare coursing, the little shop where the village queued for their first sight and taste of an ice cream cone. A bygone time brought lovingly to life for us, colouring in the sketchy notions Kate had of her father’s past.

But the best, as it should be, is saved for last. We set off in search a village called Garyduff where Johanna lived as a child, where we know she was married and buried, and where William came to visit the Cleere relatives and lend a hand on the farm.

Hospitality

Deep in the heart of Laois countryside, the satnav is about as useful as an amnesiac in a memory test. Luckily, once again the hospitality of local people comes to our rescue.

“Ah, the Cleere family, you’ll be wanting Garyduff in Clogh,” says an elderly woman leaning out of an open back door.

Despite her directions, we quickly get lost again and at a church in the next wrong village we ask the warden for help.

“Ah, the Cleere family, Patsy Cleere you’ll be wanting . . . tell them I sent you and to put the tea on ready,” she says.

We finally arrive at a pretty pale-green farmhouse on a beautiful blue day. We knock on the door. Within minutes it’s like we’ve known these cousins all our lives. They produce a fine farmhouse tea seemingly from thin air. We couldn’t have wished for a warmer welcome. The kids stroke the cows, ride a 1960s tractor, make friends immediately with Patsy’s grandson. We adults fill each other in on the who, where, what, and when of all our lives. The time passes too quickly.

It turns out this was where Johanna was born. It was her parents’ farm and grandparents’ before that. And here we were sitting under the same roof, looking out over the same fields as generations of Kate’s family have done. This feels where it all started and a great way for us to end.

This was a trip of a lifetime, in more ways than one.

A simple click on an ancestry site set the ball rolling, and helped us find our lost connections. Now the internet is enabling us to keep them. It’s also a way of ensuring that our children know their heritage and a sense of belonging that goes way beyond places.

They have had a fabulous experience, a wonderful holiday and learned a great lesson about kindness and hospitality that I fear would have been hard to find elsewhere.

What more could you ask?