Don't Let Gone be Forgotten

 

I mentioned last weekend that I would be traveling for the next few days. A journey to northern California's wine country, setting of a conference my husband would be attending, somehow reminded me of the importance of keeping track of the details of our own history. Sometimes, that history can be a visible, and daily, reminder of our past. Other times, it can be gone—and soon after, forgotten.

There in beautiful Santa Rosa, I couldn't help but remember one significant building which, in an instant, was gone. The building was a red-painted round barn, built in 1899 as part of the winery established by the Fountaingrove community.

On a trip to Santa Rosa in the fall of 2015, my husband and I had stayed at a hotel situated right in front of the historic building. I was clueless about what lay behind us until we checked into our second story room and opened the drapes to take in the view. There it was, up on the hill behind us: a sixteen-sided piece of local history.

Two years later, it was gone, taken out by the devastating Tubbs Fire.

It has been almost exactly nine years since that loss, not just of one historic building, but of tens of thousands of acres of homes, farms, stores, medical centers, school campuses, and other community gathering places. When those buildings are gone and the years pass, for all except those directly impacted, we tend to forget what once, but for the inferno, had been there.

That becomes a reminder to me of all the visible signs of our family history. As I wrote after the loss, "Some things just aren't there anymore." The homes where we visited our grandparents, the school where an aunt or uncle attended, the store where Dad got his first job as a teenager: all these tangible signs of our family's past ultimately disappear from the scenery. Sometimes, when we return on that nostalgic trip to see things as we remembered them, even the roads have changed so much that we can no longer find our way.

It's only when we write down these details to preserve them—or sketch out the place as it once was, or label the photographs before we forget the names our grandparents told us—that we can keep that history fresh in our minds. Better yet, so we can pass those ephemeral details on to the next generation when it is their turn to keep the memories alive.

Above: Fountaingrove Round Barn, November 2015; photograph courtesy of Chris Stevens.

Not Even From "County Cherry"

 

This month has led us in circles as we wandered through ancestral records seeking the family of Johanna Falvey Kelly, my father-in-law's great-grandmother. Even pursuing Johanna's neighbors in Fort Wayne, Indiana—who tantalizingly possessed the same surname as her maiden name—couldn't yield us any clues, despite obituary mentions of Irish roots in "County Cherry."

You know how newspapers can go. I've bemoaned editorial errors ever since I started posting family stories on this blog. In the case of this extended search for the Falvey family's roots, "County Cherry" seems actually quite quaint, despite being an editorial blunder. But, despite decoding the entry, the location information still wasn't enough to solve my problem about where the Falvey family originated.

My focus for this part of the month-long search happened to actually be a neighbor of Johanna Falvey and her husband John Kelly. Living just around the block from the Kellys' home on Hoagland Avenue where they settled after immigration happened to be not only another Kelly family, but a Falvey family, as well.

While I still can't figure out how Timothy Kelly and his family connect to John Kelly, Timothy's neighbor Daniel Falvey also beguiled me. Living next door to Timothy Kelly on Brandriff Street, Daniel and his Irish-born wife, listed in 1880 as "Dabora," headed up a household of four young, American-born children.

Since Daniel's obituary leant little help in naming any siblings or parents—other than mentioning four children and "the wife"—I thought it might be helpful to trace that wife. Looking at her entry in the 1900 census, where she appeared as Abbie, I wondered if her true name might be the same as Johanna Falvey's likely sister, Gobnait. That traditional Irish given name, as we've already learned, often was shortened to nicknames like Debby or Abbie.

Since Abbie died in 1933, I looked for her obituary. Nothing. 

Building out her own family tree, I then looked for any reports on Abbie's siblings. The 1910 obituary for one brother, John, mentioned nothing about origins, but did list his siblings. Following those siblings led me to the 1920 obituary for their sister Johanna.

That's when I stumbled upon those editorial errors. Incorrectly (though admittedly charmingly), Johanna was said to have been born in "County Cherry." In fact, one sister, Elizabeth Moran, was said to still be living in "County Cherry" at the time of Johanna Sullivan's 1920 death in Fort Wayne.

Following the concepts of cluster genealogy, I tried my hand at figuring out just where Elizabeth Moran—and by extension, her siblings Johanna and Abbie, and possibly even Abbie's husband Daniel Falvey—might have originated. After all, many immigrants from the same community might travel in a group, especially when responding to the offer of a job, or the chain migration of following another relative who had already made the move successfully.

Still, try as I might to find any entry for an Elizabeth Moran from "County Cherry"—or even County Kerry—Irish baptismal and marriage records revealed no clues for any of Daniel and Abbie's roots in  townlands near the origin of my father-in-law's Falvey forebears. The two Falvey neighbors in Fort Wayne so far show no connections other than their coincidental nearby residences.

Some Things we may Never Know

 

After finding a listing of available dates for the baptismal records in the Catholic parish of Kilcummin in County Kerry, it turns out there was more to the story. In fact, I had already used the "missing" baptismal records for the children of Daniel Cullinane and Gobnait Falvey, the suspected sister of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey. However, despite reviewing the collection I found on Ancestry.com for Kilcummin records beginning in 1859, there were no more mentions of the Falvey maiden name than I had already discovered.

Some things we may never know, I've resigned myself to thinking. I checked two different registers now, reading line by line through each collection, in case impossibly messy handwriting may have foiled the indexing process. And yet, the Falvey name had all but disappeared in the Catholic parish where they once had been found.

The same process of working my way forward in time from the baptismal dates of the other Falvey children has not worked well, either. Admittedly, I could try leaping forward a couple decades to see whether I could find those same names in the 1901 census, but I'd have no guarantee that the names I'd find would be the same people I had located after their birth over thirty years prior to that enumeration. Besides gaps in records, Ireland is riddled with name twins.

Not that I'm ready to give up on this search. Though the original inspiration to find Irish relatives had been left, courtesy of Johanna Falvey Kelly's obituary, assuring us that she had been survived by several sisters back in Ireland, I now wonder how well she had kept in touch with those family members back home. Could she have known when any of her siblings had died? Or left home, just as she did, to sail the ocean and begin anew?

There is, of course, one other alternate approach to wrestling with this riddle: I can keep reviewing my husband's DNA matches. Even there, though, there seems to be a disconnect between those Falvey arrivals in Massachusetts or Michigan and their origin back in County Kerry. Family members were not shy about sharing their origin in County Kerry, but anything more specific than that, I've yet to find.

Still, what have we got to lose with such a records impasse in Ireland? The DNA route may be worth another look-see before we close out the month and move on to another hard-to-trace ancestor.

Looking for the Rest of the Story

 

There isn't always a way to find proof for the rest of the story, especially if it involves Irish ancestors during those gaping holes in official records. I tried, but those black holes of record keeping got the best of me, I'm afraid.

I was elated to find signs that perhaps Maria (more likely, Mary) Falvey and John Kerin had married, after all. Seeing both their names listed as godparents for the newborn baby of Mary's likely sister Gobnait Falvey Cullinane gave me the idea to look for a marriage record. If they had, though, it would have been between the birth of Mary's child in 1854 and the baptism of her sister's daughter in April of 1866.

Looking through online records of marriages in the Catholic parish of Kilcummin in County Kerry, my plans were quickly thwarted: according to a reliable source, both records for baptisms and marriages dropped off the face of the earth between 1859 and 1873. And what records I could find before that gaping hole did not seem to contain any entries for the couple.

Next, I pursued what I thought was a brilliant idea: check to see whether Mary and John had any children besides the one entry I had found in 1854. Despite the gap in church records, perhaps if the couple had a large family, as many did then, I could find a child born to them after the beginning of civil registrations in 1864. I headed over to irishgenealogy.ie to check, but couldn't find any likely entries, despite even using the wildcard symbol for the surname as K*r*n, since the many spelling variations led me through nine pages full of possible entries.

I won't yet give up searching for this new branch of the Falvey family, but my eyes are ready to call it quits for now. I'll save some additional attempts for another day.

Church Records Tell All

 

(...but sometimes you need to read between the lines).

It was an entry from the baptismal register of the Catholic parish of Kilcummin which caught my eye. Scanning the records from the mid-1800s for signs of my father-in-law's Falvey family, I noticed the entry for a woman named Maria Falvey. It wasn't so much her name which made me pause, however, but the words above that mention which told me there had to be a story hidden in there somewhere.

The entry was for the baptism of a child born in October of 1854. Starting out in the usual Latin, the priest noted that he had baptized a child named John, but in the place of the usual "filius legitimus" or its typical shorthand abbreviation, the entry specifically emphasized the underlined status as illegitimate. And yet, there was the father's name. Whether he had claimed that responsibility and owned up to that son, or whether everyone in that small townland of Knockauncore would have known anyhow, I can't be sure.

What the entry showed was that, married or not, John's parents were John Kerin and Maria Falvey. Alongside that notation, the sole name designated as the child's sponsor was a woman named Anna Fleming. While Irish baptismal records for that time period toward the later years of the Irish famine sometimes only included one godparent due to the devastation of that era, the naming of one godparent was also a typical statement for children born out of wedlock.

My first wonder, given the same townland as my father-in-law's Falvey family, was whether Anna Fleming was one and the same as the mother of Gobnait Falvey and her siblings—and, possibly, also my father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna Falvey. In that case, this godmother for baby John Kerin—if, indeed, he was permitted to take his father's surname—would also have been his maternal grandmother, if his mother Maria were Anna Fleming Falvey's daughter.

It was quite possible that that was who this Anna Fleming was. First, Catholic records of that time period and location mentioned all women by their maiden name. Secondly, I had found an entry in Griffith's Valuation for that townland which mentioned a woman named Anne Falvey which, lacking a name of her husband, most likely indicated a widow for that tax record. Since Griffith's Valuation for County Kerry was completed about that same time—July of the previous year—it told me that Anna Fleming of the baptismal mention could likely have been the widow Falvey.

I noted that baptism in my growing list of all baptisms in Kilcummin parish which included a Falvey surname for one of the parents. While the baptismal record was not shy in telling all about the child's legal standing at birth, there was still much to read between the lines as to the identity of his mother Maria—likely Mary—and her connection to the rest of the extended Falvey family recorded in that church parish.

Continuing my line-by-line search through the parish's records, I advanced through the pages to another entry containing that same surname, Falvey. This one, in April of 1866, was for Hanora, a daughter of Daniel Cullinane (entered, according to the priest's handwriting, as Callinan). The child's mother—thankfully entered in Latin as a version closest to her Irish name, rather than some traditional substitutes—was Gubbonetta Falvey. And the godmother was listed as Maria Falvey.

According to some sources, Irish tradition had it that the godparents named at a child's baptism were to be siblings or in-laws of either parent. While that tradition was not as closely adhered to beyond the famine years, there was a good possibility that with this one line of the church record, we can claim this Maria to be sister of Gobnait Falvey and daughter of Patrick Falvey and Anna Fleming. 

There was one other detail which I had missed in my original discovery of the entry for the Cullinane daughter. On returning to this record, having by then noted the earlier entry for the illegitimate birth of Maria's son, I noticed the other person named as godparent for Hanora Cullinane: John Kerin.

Whether John Kerin and Maria Falvey, as parents of their baby John in 1854, had subsequently decided to marry, I can't yet say. I haven't yet made it to the parish's marriage records—if, indeed, they are still even in existence. But reading between the lines, I can't imagine Maria's sister naming the both of them as godparents if the two of them weren't on good terms. Reading between the lines, I'd say John Kerin and Maria Falvey, at some point, had married—and possibly had more children after that point.

Continuing my line by line search through the parish records may reveal that I now have one more family to follow among the Falvey descendants, but that discovery would only have come by reading between the lines, even given an organization which took a "tell all" approach to the records they kept.

The Tedium of Line by Line

 

There is something about reading, line by line, through those Irish baptismal records in the Catholic parish of Kilcummin that makes me want to transcribe the whole lot, enter it into a spreadsheet, and feed that record into AI for analysis. As I scroll through the decades, the surnames from the 1830s give way to an entirely different set—of strangers?—but then, given another ten years, morph back to the same Falveys, Flemings, and Cullinanes I've been seeking.

As tedious as the project has been this month, I haven't yet given up on reading, page by page, through the records. I'm still looking for any entries mentioning the surname Falvey in this County Kerry parish, but by now, I've made it to the end of 1858. 

Now that the Falvey surname has reappeared in the record, it is mostly on account of Gobnait, the possible sister of Johanna Falvey, my father-in-law's great-grandmother. Knowing the variations ascribed to her given name—Abby and Debora have also appeared—I can't be confident that I've found the right relative, but the same husband's name seems to pair with hers, no matter what she was called.

Yet, there have been no other sitings for Falvey family members—with one exception. That entry, one which possibly would be accompanied by a sad story if only I could find a way to confirm it, is one I need to pause and record in these chronicles of Falveys. Whether it leads to a future DNA connection, or even a confirmation that my research is on the right track, I can't yet be sure. But I want to note it while it is fresh on my mind.

With that, tomorrow we'll look into what can be found—spoiler: not much—on a woman in the 1850s named Mary Falvey.

Catching up with Cousin Bait Messages

 

One of the indispensable aspects of researching our genealogy is the access we gain through using online services. Whether for building a family tree or puzzling over DNA matches, most services offer some way for us to directly contact those distant cousins who also are pursuing the same ancestors. Think of this messaging service as a form of "cousin bait."

While I try to connect with key researchers chasing my surnames, it is so easy for those messages on, say, Ancestry or 23andMe to get lost in the translation. Just this week, I was elated to receive a note from someone I had contacted nearly a year ago who, oops, just realized that I had written. What a gift to have received the reply, complete with photographs and a brief biography of each of the ancestors in question! I can certainly say this was one response which was worth the wait.

I realize there are many ways in which messages to researchers may not reach the person intended. Many such messaging systems depend on the subscriber keeping their (hidden) email address up to date. If a subscriber doesn't note their address change, that person won't receive my message, but the host service certainly can't do much about it.

Another reason why messages don't arrive may be because the person no longer maintains a subscription. Thankfully, in one recent case of someone with a lapsed subscription, Ancestry actually followed through and sent the message anyway. I know I'm leaving myself open to spam, but I always include my personal email address in my messages, and thankfully this recipient spotted that in my message and was able to directly contact me, despite no longer being a subscriber. 

Granted, some messages to fellow researchers, if actually answered, yield very little information. That is certainly the luck of the draw. In this week's case, I benefitted from the details I learned from this distant cousin's response. For that, I'm grateful. Each of us knows a little more about our close family from personal experience than others, such as distant cousins, would be able to know. Details gleaned from personal letters, or notes on the back of photographs are gems only close family might have—if, that is, their children and grandchildren didn't indiscriminately toss all those "old papers" and memorabilia.

Those are the details that we might only find if we reach out and connect through messages to our distant relatives whom we stumble upon while using an online genealogy service. Sure, there are many messages which remain unanswered, but it's worth it to go through the effort anyway. I do it in hopes of finding the one who knows the answers that I couldn't have found any other way.