Ireland?

Why? It's a heritage thing.

Brekke doesn't sound like an Irish name. It isn't, though Brekke forebears from the fjords of central Norway (my grandfather, Sjur Engebrettsson, emigrated from the Sognefjord in 1893) might have visited the Irish coast during an outburst of Scandinavian tourism about 1,000 years back. And if those ur-Brekkes reached the west of Ireland, they might have effected a family union that instead waited until 1953.

That's the year my parents, Steve Brekke and Mary Alice Hogan, married. She is the daughter of Anne O'Malley "Mighty Anne" Hogan, who in 1898 was the first of her family born in the United States. Her parents, Anne Moran and "Big" Martin O'Malley, came from Clare Island, at the mouth of Clew Bay in County Mayo. They had 13 children, one who died before the family emigrated. They gave rise to a line of butchers, teachers and priests.

And now, a great-grandson who fiddles around on the Web.
While fiddling, he (I) stumbled across these decent Irish sites. Of course, I think our time would be better repaid reading aloud to our friends favorite passages of Joyce or O'Brien (Flann or Edna) or Yeats or Synge or O'Casey or O'Connor or O'Faolain or Heaney or Kavanagh or Trevor or Doyle or even, gulp, Binchy. Or watching "The Commitments."
But here they are anyway:

Islands Around Ireland: Clare is one of them, and this site merits mention for including the Brekke/O'Malley home place on its list of major Irish islands and what kind of tourist facilities they have.

My own Clare Island page includes writings about the island based on my 1973 trip there. I'd like to hear from anyone who knows the island for their own first person accounts or news.

The Genealogy Home Page: One of many Web sites devoted to the task of finding out about all those dead people responsible for your plight today.

UK+Ireland Genealogy: More links to dead folks. But important dead folks they are.

The Irish Times: Ireland's paper of record, sort of. If you want to keep up with affairs across Ireland, this is an informative and fun read. For the all-Ireland hurling and Gaelic football finals, they had a live page running.

Stanford University's Ceolas, a Celtic music archive that can probably tell you everything you want to know about your favorite Irish performer and other Celtic musicians.

Uileann Pipe Information List: Really, probably a lot more than most people ever dreamed of learning about the Irish pipes. Lists of teachers, classes and instrument and equipment sellers.

Hurling, one of Ireland's traditional games. Won't see Reeboks raiding this sport any time soon.