I fly to Brooklyn on September 8, and if I am honest, the research plan is not the real reason I keep going back. My paternal Irish families arrived in the 1850s, and their descendants are still here. Five generations later, I am the one booking the flight. This post is about the long-lasting pull of one borough: the Plunketts in Red Hook, the Dowlings in Prospect Heights and then Kensington, the same few streets turning up in census after census. It is about the trip ahead too, the family archive in my aunt’s house, a morning at Holy Cross Cemetery, and a day with the old deed books in Queens. Not one house or one grave, but the connection among all of them, and the borough that made my family.