Follow the story of Catherine (Cat) Brennan and Seamus (James) Haggerty, two County Donegal, Ireland natives on their way to a new life in America.

Cat’s family, sponsored by her Auntie Reed, look forward to a new life in grand Philadelphia, after near starvation when their father is arrested and deported to Van Damien’s Land for stealing a goat to keep his infant children alive.

For Seamus and his younger brother Padriac, they leave behind a mother, who urges them to escape the “Haggerty Curse” by leaving it behind them in Country Donegal, where they have watched so many of their kinsmen suffer and die from the dread disease.

But a chance meeting on the road to Derry, to catch a sailing ship bound for Philadelphia, seals their fate when young Cat spies the awkward, shy young man who she dreams of making her husband some day, if only she can hurry and grow up before anther lassie steals him away.

Philadelphia is not kind to the Haggerty brothers, who have anglicized their names to James and Patrick. Hearing of work in the Pennsylvania coal fields, they set off to make a quick fortune so that they may have the farm they dreamed of, owning their own land, a right denied them as Catholics in their native Ireland.

Haggerty’s Curse is based loosely on the author’s own great grandparents’ story, Irish immigrants who migrated to Indiana in the late nineteenth century.  It is the all too familiar story of the hardships the Irish faced on the shores of America, when they arrived by the millions both during and after the great potato famine of the late 1840’s.

If you saw The Gangs of New York, Far and Away, or the Molly Maguires, you’ll love Haggerty’s Curse.

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Haggerty's Curse is based on the author's own family's medical history.

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