Dr Joseph Nolan was a doctor in Tullow, Co Carlow, when the first World War broke out. His two sons, Edward and James, aged 32 and 21, were killed within eight months of each other in 1917.
His daughter May had just married Capt John Cahill of Threecastles in Co Kilkenny. He was killed in August 1917. His two younger brothers died in action in France in the same year.
May's younger sister Jane was in France driving an ambulance. Her husband, an officer in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, was killed in 1942 during the second World War.
In the same year May lost her life in Poland, where she had moved after getting married again to a Polish count. Fluent in five languages, she had become a valued member of the Polish resistance during the second World War.
This was the story of one family, devastated by two world wars and forgotten by their own countrymen, which was read out to a hushed group of councillors from all over Ireland at a dinner this week on the eve of the opening of the Messines Peace Tower.
It was read by the former Methodist president, the Rev Richard Taylor, who had been sent it by a Kilkenny woman only last weekend. She asked those going to Belgium: "Please remember these Irishmen who died in the Great War. Dr Nolan was my great-grandfather. There is no one to remember his sons now, or Johnny Cahill and his two brothers."
The tiny Belgian village of Mesen (Messines) - where Irishmen from North and South won a famous victory for the British army in June 1917 - hosted a remarkable gathering of people in recent days. They were people who would hardly have shared the same room a few years ago, let alone come together to commemorate a shared memory of war, victory, pain and loss.
One 140-strong group of local councillors, business and church people was brought together by Mr Paddy Harte, the former Donegal TD, and Mr Glen Barr, the Derry community leader and former UDA political adviser, who were the originators of and energy behind the Island of Ireland Peace Park project.
Every county in Ireland was represented, just as a stone from every county has gone into the building of the Messines tower. Unionist councillors were there in strength, including one DUP man. But there were also Fianna Fail members from Meath and Donegal; dozens from the SDLP, Fine Gael, Labour and Alliance; former UDA chief Mr Andy Tyrie; Church of Ireland bishops and Catholic priests; British army chaplains and ex-Irish Army officers, led by the former chief-of-staff Gen Gerry McMahon; and the former head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Sir Kenneth Bloomfield.
"At home republicans and unionists don't meet. Here we have a common ground - it's marvellous," said Newtownabbey Unionist councillor Mr Ivan Hunter.
Independent Wicklow councillor Ms Susan Phillips said that as a southern Protestant she had been brought up "with a foot in both camps". However, for years she had refused, like most citizens of the Republic, to wear a poppy on the grounds that the thousands of young Irishmen who fought and died in 1914-18 "went to a war that wasn't Irish".
The final turning point for her was "an unbelievably healing statement" by that famous scion of Fianna Fail, Mr Padraig Flynn, in a speech to the group this week. Mr Flynn said simply: "They died for us."
"Obviously as an EU Commissioner he couldn't have said that without thinking of the European dimension. But I believe he also said it as an Irishman," said Ms Phillips.
Yesterday she wore a poppy and "for the first time in my life the two strands in me came together". Those two strands were there in her native parish in Wicklow, as in every place in Ireland. In Glenealy Church of Ireland church the plaques to the first World War dead remembered Irishmen with English Protestant names. In neighbouring Rathnew - which, for its size, lost more of its sons than any village in the country - they were Irish Catholics.
Her colleague Mr Tom Honan, a former Fine Gael chairman of Wicklow County Council, also wore a poppy. He said the first time he had put it on it had been "a slow reluctant motion. I thought for a long time before I did it. I had to overcome a serious mental block."
For some SDLP people in the group that block was still there: they could follow President McAleese's lead in commemorating the dead of the first World War; wearing an emblem so associated with the long years of unionist domination was still a step too far.
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield carefully put the other side's view. For many years unionists had seen how "that fairly large section of Irishmen who fought in the Great War had become forgotten people.
"That built up a feeling of prejudice and misunderstanding among unionists as they saw how the Irish State did not honour those who had fought alongside them in the British army. "The significance of the two heads of state appearing together in public in this particular setting is that it retrospectively brings those people back into the generous embrace of the Irish nation."
Cllr Fred Proctor from the Shankill Road, Belfast City Council's longest-serving unionist member, talked about the time he had visited the Somme war cemeteries with a group of young people from the Shankill and Tallaght. "I couldn't get those kids away from the graveyards. I was astonished at their interest.
"The people of the South of Ireland have been hiding their light under a bushel. They played a magnificent part in the first World War. Their casualties far exceeded those from Northern Ireland.
"Veterans of the 36th Ulster Division have told me that if the 16th Irish had been beside them on the first day at the Somme - as they were here at Messines - they would have driven right through the German lines.
"However politics has developed since, those young men were comrades then. To revive that spirit of comradeship among Irish people is hugely important," said Sir Kenneth.
The nationalist MP Maj Willie Redmond said something similar 82 years ago, a few months before he died at Messines. "There are a great many Irishmen today who feel that out of this war we should try to build a new Ireland. The trouble is, men are so timid about meeting each other half way. "It would be a fine memorial to the men who died so splendidly if we could over their graves build up a bridge between North and South."