The event had a profound effect on the entire community and it is now remembered annually with a candlelit, bell-ringing ceremony. I read about the wakes they held in their homes for the family members who would never be brought home. I was so moved by the stories of parents waiting for days and days of news of their sons and daughters. With help from Michael Molloy and others at The Addergoole Titanic Society, I began to understand the impact of the Titanic event on the Parish. I knew immediately that theirs was the story I wanted to tell in, what became my first novel, The Girl Who Came Home. These three young women survived with miraculous stories to tell. Eleven of the group lost their lives in the tragedy. Through further research, I discovered that Annie Kate, Delia and Annie were part of a group which has, in recent years, become known locally as The Addergoole Fourteen: a group of emigrants – friends and relatives – who had left their small villages in rural Ireland, travelled by cart and train to Queenstown in County Cork and boarded Titanic. Luckily, she was able to make a jump of fifteen feet to get onto another lifeboat as it was being lowered into the water. One (she believed) took the last place in the last lifeboat and another jumped out of one lifeboat in order to return to her cabin to fetch the new hat she had bought in Ireland especially for her arrival in New York. I dug a little deeper and discovered an incredible story of three young girls, travelling as part of a larger group, who had survived. In survivor accounts and newspaper reports from the time, the same Irish survivor names kept coming up: Annie Kate Kelly, Delia McDermott and Annie McGowan. I wanted to find an ‘un-known’ story within this famous tragedy, which would be the inspiration for my fictional re-telling. I wanted to find out how friends and families, especially those in Ireland, first heard the news that the ‘unsinkable’ ship had, indeed, sunk in The Atlantic. I wanted to find out what happened to those who survived the tragic event. I knew I wanted to write a novel about Titanic – not so much about the ship itself, but about the people who sailed on her. Sometime around May 2011, I began researching the Titanic.
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