Coming home: the heritage trip
For the Irish diaspora, a first trip home is part holiday, part homecoming. Start with the townland and parish your family left; Irish civil records are indexed free at irishgenealogy.ie and Catholic parish registers are digitised by the National Library of Ireland.
Build the trip in two halves: base near the ancestral county for at least three nights (parish church, graveyard, county archive), then balance it with the Ireland of today.