Our Home, Our City

Denis Hegarty, an Irish immigrant, has been living in New Orleans for years as a drayman. Now his wife Mary forced him to partner with her brother to form a cotton pickery to earn more money, along with Americanizing his name as Dennis Haggerty, to sound like a famous local department store. When the business is about to fail, Mary turns to a Voodoo fortune teller for help. If they move their family and the animals to a certain house in a certain way, all will be well. They didn't realize that the new house may be haunted, but the original owner thinks the ghosts 'keep to their own business'. The pickery prospers, just in time for a controversial presidential election, a secession crisis, civil war and occupation. Meanwhile, the two Haggerty daughters, Elizabeth and Catherine, are caught up in a murder, a theft, a ghostly little girl who speaks only French, and a prophecy about a neighbouring boy marrying Elizabeth. In the midst of destruction, loss, and capture of their city, the Haggerty Family has enough problems to contend. Our Home, Our City is based on the family memoirs of Catherine B. Dillon, a writer who lived in New Orleans in the early 20th-century; woven together in a historical fiction by Kirk P. Haggerty, a distant descendant of Dennis and Mary Haggerty.