Introduction I first became acquainted with the Lost and found series during my studies towards a Ph.D in Archaeology at NUI Galway. As most enthusiastic (read fretful) doctoral candidates do, over the course of my study I sought out every publication of relevance to the subject of my thesis; in my case, passage tombs and Neolithic Ireland. It happened that one of the books I consulted was Lost and found, Vol. 1. As per my routine, I consumed any of the edited articles that might have a bearing on the subject matter of my thesis and largely ignored work of unrelated subject matter or time periods. The result of these efficiencies was that I overlooked a paper by Jean Farrelly, which turned out to be of great importance to me in a way I could never have imagined at the time. That oversight was to be redressed several years later, when I was asked to write a piece for this third volume of Lost and found. In preparation I had a quick look back at the first two books to see what might be a good addition to the collection. It was then I stumbled upon the article by Jean on a seventeenth- century glasshouse in Shinrone, Co. Offaly, which included reference to the de Hennezel family with which it was thought to be associated. Not only was the article of interest as the fruit of a rather brilliant and ground-breaking piece of archaeological research, but it held my attention from another perspective: it appeared that the family who were responsible for the glasshouse may have been ancestors of mine. I had known that our family on my paternal side could be traced back several generations to County Offaly and that our family name was derived from de Hennezel. I was also cognisant that the Hensey name was very unusual in Ireland; as a child it struck me as odd that there were less than a dozen families of that name in the national phone book. I was unaware, however, that there was 397 38 Looking glass: archaeology and ancestry in seventeenth-century Ireland Jean Farrelly and Robert Hensey