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It's a trip I've made many times since childhood - by sea and by air - but never with a microphone, and never with a long list of questions for my aunties. 5 live's Family Week prompted the network's controller to suggest my family, whose roots are firmly and fully in , for a Who Do You Think You Are?- style investigation.

I knew a fair bit anyway. My mother's younger sister, Nancy Murphy, is a genealogist, so names going back four generations were already familiar. This trip was an opportunity to spend time with her and look even further back on both sides to discover new names, new lives, and new links.

My own parents and siblings are already at the centre of things for me, so it felt like a huge treat to be able to spend the day poring over the family tree as far back as 1761 on mum's side and the turn of the nineteenth century on dad's. Nancy and I chatted while looking at old family photos:

A key figure to emerge, not least because we have a fabulously clear photograph of her, is my great grandmother, Anne Fogarty (nee Nolan).

She was born in Ballyhaden, Borrisokane, in 1851 and married farm labourer James Fogarty in 1872. That marriage created the Fogarty link to Ballyhaden, the house my father was born in and where my colleague Catherine Norman and I have just been fed royally by my Aunty Mary.

Anne's skills as a dressmaker probably came in handy when she went to have fifteen children over twenty four years! Only one, Bridget, died in infancy. Two more daughters, Ellen and Ann, died in their twenties, but we don't know why.

In the same photograph is Anne's oldest daughter Catherine (my dad's auntie Kate), Kate's husband Patrick Brennan and two of their five children, Edward (Ned) and Honora (known as Babe Brennan).

It seems extraordinary that the Edwardian children in this picture are my Dad's first cousins. His father was Kate's much younger brother, William. Tragically, she was to lose her husband and two year old son James (Manzi), who was knocked down by a car in 1916. It was probably the only car to go through the town in that year. I met his sister Daisy when I was a little girl and she was an old lady.

Back to the present, and my auntie Nance's reflections on that group are illuminating. Anne and James, and their siblings, were all born in the mid-nineteenth century, during or in the immediate aftermath of The Famine.

Nance makes the point that although a million people died, and three million left Ireland, many families (like mine) don't seem to have been affected. However, typhus, or 'famine fever' as Nance called it, was an ever-present threat and didn't discriminate.

On to my mum's side, where Nance was able to take me back to Inch graveyard and the headstone of Bernard Bannon, my great great great grandfather who died at just 37 years of age in 1803. The importance of finding a clearly marked gravestone can't be underestimated, because at the time people weren't required by law to register deaths.

Bernards great granddaughter, Mary Bannon, married James Tynan in 1926. They were my mum's parents. My mum told me years ago that her mother had been engaged to a young man who died of TB. Years later, her marriage to James was a 'made match - essentially, it was arranged. James died in 1933, leaving my grandmother with four young daughters. Nance was just three months old, mum a toddler, and her older sisters Brigid and Peggy were not yet ten.

It wasn't unusual for childless aunts and uncles to raise kids when a parent died. For Peggy (the oldest), this meant going to live with their aunt Anne. Anne was James Tynan's twin sister and lived ten miles away - in 1933, I imagine this was a long way from your mother and sisters.

Auntie Nance told me Anne was a conservative woman who disapproved of lipstick and women wearing trousers (I'm doing both as I write). She was also, it turns out, an early 20th century domestic goddess, turning her hand to anything from crocheting to growing her own food, cookery, to nursing.

Some of it rubbed off on auntie Peggy, who made me a beautiful peacock blue crocheted dress for my ninth birthday. Another strong memory I have is of her meticulously doing my hair for my Holy Communion. She didn't marry and was the first of all my aunts and uncles to die, ten years ago.

In the 1950s and 60s, huge numbers of young Irish people headed to England for work or for an adventure. My parents, who'd met at a dance in Nenagh's Scouts Hall, married in 1957 and moved to Liverpool.

Around the same time, all of mum's sisters, dad's three sisters and a brother were all living away from Ireland. Their jobs and destinations varied - Nance was a nurse in London; Peggy lived in Wales; auntie Sheelagh taught in the south of England; uncle Jim was in Australia; and aunties Mary and Anne were both nurses in Yorkshire. Some stayed, and some returned after a few years.

Irish women who were nurses or teachers returned to an Ireland which, even in the 60s, would restrict them in a way the UK would not. The marriage bar meant that once a woman working as a public servant took a husband, she was obliged to leave her job.

This happened to my auntie Nance. Her husband Donal Murphy was himself a civil servant and campaigned for an end to this practice, which was outlawed in the early 1970s.

I'm on the plane home now, excited at the prospect of taking all of this and more back to my family in Liverpool, especially my nieces and nephews, who are between five and 19 years old. They've all been to Tipperary many times and the older ones do ask about the family history from time to time.

I can't wait to hand over to them the extensive family tree that Nance has provided for us, and flesh it out with the stories she's told me on this journey.

How many of us are lucky enough to be able to sit in their great grandmother's kitchen, in the house where their father was born, and his father before him? The aunties and uncles I grew up knowing and spending my summers with have been a huge influence. When our own dad died in 2003, their very presence was a massive comfort.

Dad was one of the columns of our life and when that was lost, to be able to sit with his brothers and sisters, almost splinters of him, was helpful beyond measure. Above and beyond all that, they and the people who came before them, on both mum's and dad's side of the family, are an impressive group of people I'm fortunate to be part of.

Shelagh Fogarty presents Breakfast on 5 live from 6am every weekday. She'll be talking more about her family history on Tuesday 7 December. Listen to the programme on the Breakfast website.