County Clare lost 42% of its farms. It had the highest eviction rate in Ireland. The Ennistymon workhouse saw nearly 5,000 deaths. This is the land Patrick and Terrence O'Brien fled in the late 1840s—the land where their family name once meant royalty, reduced to devastation. This companion piece to the Hidden Bonds documentary series explores what two teenage brothers witnessed before they embarked for America, never to see each other again.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

He hosted the Rotten Corks—a society of liquor dealers whose motto mocked the very Excise Law he was being prosecuted for violating. He fed elegant dinners to seventy-six members of the John J. Scott Guards. He erected a 148-foot liberty pole topped with a famous racehorse. He ran an illegal distillery. He was arrested multiple times. And when he lay dying in November 1874, he tried to tell a priest where he had hidden something valuable for his children. He died before he could finish. What was the secret Terrence O'Brien took to his grave?

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies Research to Story

DNA has proven what history forgot: Terrence O'Brien, who arrived in America as a famine refugee before his eighteenth birthday, carried the genetic signature of Brian Boru, High King of Ireland. The Catholic branch of the Royal House of Thomond—thought to have died out centuries ago—survived in the bloodline of a stable hand who built himself into a hotel empire in Jamaica, Queens. This is the origin story of a hidden prince.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

Miles Murtha Lawrence O'Brien lost both parents before he turned two. In 1874, four O'Brien children were scattered to different relatives — the three older children to their mother's family, the Higginses; baby Miles to his mother's family, the Bedells. They had no shared maternal relatives to hold them together. Against all odds, Miles and his half-brother James Henry reconnected as adults. James became a U.S. Congressman and founded a scale company in Brooklyn. Miles became his scale maker. Two marriages. Ten children. And the DNA that would reunite the family 150 years later.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies

From Research to Story

James Henry O'Brien lost his mother at four and his father at fourteen. The four O'Brien children were scattered to different relatives — James sent to another state, his baby half-brother Miles placed with grandparents. They had no shared maternal family to hold them together. Against all odds, James built himself into a U.S. Congressman. He founded the J.H. O'Brien Scale & Supply Company, a Brooklyn institution that lasted over 60 years. And he found his half-brother Miles, hiring him at the family business. When James remarried in 1902, Miles stood beside him as witness. The bond between them would shape both families for generations.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies

From Research to Story

Mary Ann O'Brien Smith and Elizabeth O'Brien Foley were sisters who weathered widowhood together. After losing their husbands, they shared a Brooklyn home for over two decades. But the most remarkable twist came in 1937, when Mary Ann's son Thomas—a New York Fire Captain—married Rose Higgins, the daughter of Thomas J. Higgins, who had served as executor of their brother Terrence O'Brien's estate. Two families already bound by legal trust became bound by blood. Today, three surnames—Higgins, Smith, and O'Brien—are inscribed on a single gravestone in Queens.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story