Many Long Years to Home

Many Long Years to Home is the story of an Irish nurse. Margaret Fogarty’s journey starts early in the 19th century, at the abrupt end of her childhood, and it takes her from the southernmost reaches of Ireland to an unfamiliar part of the Irish countryside, and then to a town, and then to the city of Dublin. How does it happen that someone leaves family and the place of their birth, and travels on in search of another home? As a young woman, she lost family members to the cholera epidemic in 1832. She then went on to be trained at the City of Dublin Hospital on Baggot Street. Like millions of others from her homeland, she left Ireland in the 1840s and traveled to North America, where she settled in New Haven, Connecticut. She found work at the local hospital, which later became Yale-New Haven. In the middle of the 19th century, in an era marked by epidemics and war and social upheaval, her work as a nurse remains as what is remembered. Love, and loss, and tragedy fade into the background. This historical novel traces the engrossing story of a woman immigrant, heroic in the face of life’s challenges.