Simply Search for the Surname

If I had it to do all over again—and I will, the next time we revisit this puzzle of Johanna Falvey Kelly's roots—I would have first examined all the DNA matches whose family tree simply contained the surname Falvey. Of those, my husband has a genetic link to at least twenty nine others.

Interestingly, those twenty nine others are not necessarily the same ones that popped up when I used Ancestry's ThruLines tool to connect with Johanna, my father-in-law's great-grandmother. For one thing—and a very encouraging sign—the DNA cousins from this surname group match my husband at about twice the amount of genetic material as those ThruLines candidates I had previously checked.

Does that make this tree-based group closer relatives? Not necessarily. The connections are still rather distant. Yet that might be enough to help guide me back to the precise family in the right townland and parish of County Kerry.

This tree-based group comes from Falvey immigrants who settled in a wide variety of places. One group, as we discussed yesterday, left Ireland bound for New Zealand. A very small subset, I suspect, make up those who call Australia their home, possibly leaving for that destination after first landing in New Zealand.

Another very small set of DNA matches currently live in Canada, which is not surprising, considering the economic and political dynamics of leaving Ireland simply to relocate in another part of the United Kingdom, as their ancestors must have done during the 1800s.

Those Falveys who immigrated to the United States fell into three camps. Johanna Falvey herself came with her husband and children to Fort Wayne, Indiana. There are two other DNA matches who link to that family line. Another set of Falveys—whether closely related or not, I can't yet tell—headed to Massachusetts. A third set, which I'm having more difficulty tracing, made their destination the state of Michigan.

Each set of immigrating Falveys warrants their own attention. I'll be building out their family trees on my own to verify what each DNA match asserts in their own tree. Whether each one can lead me back to parish records in County Kerry, I won't know until I trace each immigrant family back to their homeland.

That, however, will be job number one for the next time I return to this research puzzle. Now that we're at the end of the month, it's time to move on to the next of my Twelve Most Wanted. Come October, we'll shift from a focus on the Irish and begin considering the first of three paternal ancestors from Poland. 

Assessing the (Diminishing) Possibilities

 

Finding the possible link between Johanna Falvey Kelly, my father-in-law's great-grandmother who had migrated to Fort Wayne from County Kerry, and the four DNA matches I've found in New Zealand promises to be a challenge. That is not simply because of the distance between North America and the South Island of New Zealand; it's the tiny amount of genetic material that these DNA cousins actually share.

Looking at the numbers, the possibilities for a more distant relationship stretch from third cousin once removed all the way to eighth cousin or beyond. That, at least, is according to calculations from The DNA Geek regarding a match of eighteen centiMorgans. You can get a snapshot of the hopeless probabilities from the "What Are the Odds?" diagram here.

To put it briefly, the closest of the four New Zealand Falvey descendants are two matches who each have one segment of eighteen centiMorgans in common with my husband. That's it. Each of them, as well as the other two with similar genetic connections—but divided into two or more segments, rather than one unified strand—descend from one of three daughters of Norah Falvey, the supposed relative of Johanna Falvey who had emigrated from County Kerry to New Zealand.

I have not been able to locate any documentation on a Norah Falvey in the Catholic parish where I had found Johanna's marriage to John Kelly. Nor has her location come close to the other supposed sister of Johanna, whose DNA matches also connect with my husband. The closest baptismal record I could find for a Norah Falvey was for a distant parish which, though still in County Kerry, would have required a walk of several hours.

My hunch at this point is that, though those New Zealand cousins are likely Falvey connections, the nexus between their specific ancestor and the ancestor of the American Falveys would be far beyond that of siblings. While I agree that it will be helpful to map out these New Zealand cousins' connection to each other through this Norah Falvey, the most recent common ancestor may well be two or three generations beyond Johanna's as-yet unconfirmed parents.

Beyond "Down Under"

 

One of the fascinating gifts of DNA testing for genealogy is being allowed a peek at how far our genetic connections can go. In the case of my father-in-law's Falvey connections, that line not only leads this American family back to Ireland, but it also provides us a link to distant cousins "Down Under" and beyond even that.

While it was a relationship as close as my father-in-law's great-grandmother who came from County Kerry, there are now third and fourth cousins popping up as DNA matches to my husband, who serves as testing proxy for my father-in-law who has long since passed away. I've tried my best to figure out these matches, but other than those direct lines descended from that great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey Kelly, I have yet to uncover the connection between the rest.

Pulling up ThruLines at Ancestry.com, I discovered there are four specific matches who supposedly descend from a woman called Norah Falvey. She, like Johanna, was said to have been born in County Kerry. But unlike emigrating Johanna, Norah's route took her even farther away than Johanna's journey to Fort Wayne, Indiana. For Norah, her destination—and final resting place—became the old settlement of Nelson on the South Island of New Zealand.

From those four specific DNA matches, I've discovered through Ancestry's ProTools that there are more than twenty other matches affiliated with that line in New Zealand. Obviously, I've found a lot of incentive to learn who this Norah Falvey might have been. Yet, try as I might, a review this past weekend shed no light worthy of "aha" moments. I cannot find any specifics on where in County Kerry this Falvey descendant once lived—none, at least, pointing out how she connected to Johanna Falvey.

While those many matches linked to Norah don't show up as a cluster in any reports at Ancestry, that doesn't mean I can't sketch out the connections between these distant cousins. While such an exercise might not inform my original research question concerning Johanna Falvey Kelly's origins and parentage in County Kerry, I can't help but remember that one line from Johanna's own obituary: that she had one sibling who had moved to New Zealand.

Someone in New Zealand obviously could claim a genetic connection to Johanna's own family line. Whether these DNA matches connect directly to that unnamed sibling, I can't yet determine, but keeping in mind this might be a years-long research pursuit, I may as well get started sketching out the connections I can find. That, if nothing else, will be a valuable addition to the Falvey research log for whenever I do alight on those elusive telltale records.

Missing the Connection

 

As frustrating as this seems—seeing we are nearing the end of the month, and thus time to move on to yet another of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026—I am having a difficult time making the leap from my husband's DNA connections in North America to their Falvey ancestors back in Ireland. Come to think of it, even the twenty of his DNA matches in New Zealand seem to be missing any connection to the parents of our specific Johanna Falvey Kelly. I'm beginning to wonder whether that sliver of matching genetic material is actually a persistent fragment passed forward from generations long before that time period.

Needless to say, this DNA puzzle has slowed down progress in adding another generation to my father-in-law's side of the family tree. In fact, not much of anything has actually been added to that tree. In the past two weeks, I've managed to find only thirty four individuals through tracing these Falvey connections, most of them through work on DNA matches. Truth be told, many of those new names hide within a "floating branch" of my father-in-law's tree, a token way to say, despite its presence, "I'm still not sure about this one."

Still, my in-laws' tree contains 44,402 documented individuals, which I'd consider a good start. Reviewing all the DNA matches yet to link to that tree, though, there is much work ahead, whether for the Falvey line or other branches of the tree. Other than what we might discover in the last few days of this month, we will need to move on to the next month's selected research subject.

With that shift, we'll also step from my in-laws' side of the family to my own. Not that that will be an easy transition; up next will be a leap from the dearth of documents in Ireland to the challenge of navigating foreign language records in the old dominion of Prussia. The last three months of the year will be the domain of the ancestral brick walls on the paternal side of my own family.

In advance of that move, in the last two weeks, I've had the opportunity to add ten more names to my own family tree. Most of those came, thanks to a recent email received from a distant cousin on my father's side of the family who shared some resources with me. In preparation for next month's move to research my paternal ancestry, that puts me at 41,979 individuals in my own tree.

Before we make that jump, though, we do have just three more days to muddle through some observations made evident by delving into those Falvey DNA matches which still stump me.

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.