Peruse her biography:

The Penultimate Years

Part 1: Clichy
Part 2: St. Pol-sur-Mer
Part 3: Lake Garda
Part 4: Ballybunion
Part 5: Encore St. Pol-sur-Mer

The Penultimate Years:
Il Duce and Other Assorted Autocrats of Short Stature

Part 4: Ballybunion

Sir Randy Ruddock was famed (and reviled) throughout Ireland for his brush-like head of hair and propensity for saying, "talk to the hand, baby."

With Mussolini and D'Annunzio out of the picture, Ruddock pounced on the now available Chesley, spiriting her away to Ireland to bask in the glory of his potato fields.  Unfortunately, within days of setting foot on his native soil, the Potato Prince caught Late Blight Fungus,[12] a nasty disease normally only deadly to tubers, and immediately snuffed it.

Once again, Emily was alone.  Luckily, Ruddock had no heirs and no one else knew he was dead, so she moved into his palatial home at Ballybunion, Co. Kerry, at the mouth of the Shannon.  After the frenetic pace of the past few years, she appreciated the opportunity to stop and smell the peat bogs.  Emily had few distractions other than the occasional poignant memory, and she made tremendous progress on her memoirs during the next few months.  She also kept up her regime of rowing, and reveled in continued intestinal good health.

In July, Emily's routine was disturbed briefly by a telephone call from Irish Prime Minister Eamon de Valera in Dublin .  Chesley and de Valera had each formerly been recipients of the other's political fence wedgies, but they shared a mutual respect that ignored partisan considerations.  On this occasion, De Valera needed Emily's help.  Unexpectedly, an American flyer of her acquaintance [13] - Douglas Corrigan - had flown non-stop from Brooklyn , New York to Dublin without authorization.  Landing his modified Curtiss Jenny at Baldonnel Airport, "Wrong-Way" Corrigan claimed that he had mistakenly flown east instead of west to San Francisco.  De Valera was tempted to lock up Corrigan as he had no immigration papers, but a quick telephone call to Emily helped the Prime Minister realize that the worst to be feared from Corrigan was a bad case of gas resulting from the pilot having eaten nothing but fig bars during his 24-hour non-stop flight.  With thanks to Chesley, De Valera let the compass-challenged Corrigan return to America, and Emily returned to her writing.

Ballybunion was a short distance from Castlegregory and Cloghane, and Emily would frequently row down the coast of County Kerry in search of solitude and information about her family history.  As she had discovered from the funereal Cadaverous Brothers when trying to bury her uncle Michael Flannigan in 1901, this was the part of the country from which Flannigan's freakish gene had sprung.  According to her journal, in an entry dated August 21, 1939 , it was a chance encounter during one of these rowing excursions that led Emily to discover the astonishing fact that Michael was not truly her uncle.

It is as shocking a revelation to me as was Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. No doubt as absurd as it sounds, the man who has acted not only as my guardian angel, but as my Inspiration, was not my uncle at all.  As far as the records go, I can only guess that he was my great uncle, or perhaps, my great-great uncle.  One wonders that if his first test of the Nostril-Stretching-and-Hair-Clipping Apparatus had not gone so horribly wrong, if the avuncular man I thought I knew so well might not still be alive today?"

For decades, Chesleyan scholars have believed this passage, the last in Volume 12 of her journal, to be the sum total of Emily's newfound knowledge about her heritage.  Volume 14, maintained in pristine condition in the climate controlled Hall of Knowledge at the Chesley Institute in Potsdam , New York is silent on the subject, and it was long thought that Volume 13 had been purposely skipped for the same reason that builders left out the 13^th floor of tall buildings.

However, the recently unearthed Volume 13 of Emily's journal casts a little more light on the matter. [14]   On September 3^rd, 1939 she wrote:

I returned to the graveyard and spoke once again to the wizened old man who digs the graves and keeps the records in the Parish.  I suspect he keeps more secrets than I have had hot dinners, but he let slip some peculiar and troubling details of my uncle's early life.  If the gentleman is to be believed, and it hardly seems possible, Michael was not only not uncle, but also not a relative at all.  But that throws so much into disarray!  He was clearly my mother's brother, and that of all my dissolute aunts, but if he is not my relative, that can only mean. wait, I must listen to the news on the wireless."

Emily's handwriting trails off that that point, and no further elucidation is provided in Volume 13.  The next entry, dated September 4^th, is focused on geo-politics rather than personal matters:

Britain and France have declared war on Mr. Hitler and all of Germany .  I hope dear Benito is all right.  I wanted to send a telegram to Secretary of State Kellogg, but saying "I told you so, you smelly old buffer" seems a bit pointless, seeing as he's dead."