When There's No One to Look Back to

 

Yesterday was a day spent observing people ask each other where their ancestors were in 1776. For some, the answer was a proud, "right here in America." For my father-in-law's Irish roots, the answer could only have been a guess: somewhere amidst the green, green hills of Ireland.

Truth be told, as I tally my biweekly count once again, the amount of progress I made on my in-laws' family tree this time was not owing to a momentous discovery concerning my father-in-law's Irish forebears. For that question, I am still squarely stuck in the mid 1850s; there are simply no records available to pull me deeper into history.

I did, however, manage to add 373 additional documented relatives to that family tree, but only thanks to work done behind the scenes on the relatives from my mother-in-law's side, ancestors I had puzzled over this past spring. I'm still on the hunt for the parents of her brick wall second great-grandmother, Lydia Miler. Besides that, I did realize that her Jackson side did handily pull me back before that mesmerizing 250 mark on yesterday's calendar, so I worked on descendants from that line in hopes of confirming some DNA matches. There are so many yet to work on there.

That tree, as you can imagine, has been growing steadily despite the brick wall research obstacles. Right now, I count 44,002 documented relatives on the combined tree for my in-laws. On the other hand, not much has happened on my own side of the equation, where the tree count is still holding at 41,957. Come this fall, we'll turn our attention to that side of the family, but next week, it will be time to return to the question of John Kelly and his origin in County Kerry, Ireland.

Beyond 250

 

Celebrating 250 may be acknowledging a significant historic landmark—and I hope fellow Americans' festivities today are enjoyable (and safe!)—but as genealogists know, there is much that goes into any story that comes from our roots. And there is much that will be required of us to move with any significance beyond this 250. But for this one day, may you, family, and friends enjoy together what the day means to you. Happy Fourth!

Family? Or Friend?

 

When researching a brick wall ancestor with a name as generic as John Kelly, we sometimes need to reach beyond the usual tactics. In this instance, not knowing for sure where in County Kerry our Irish immigrant John Kelly originated, nor having the luxury of any documentation on John's parents from his adopted home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I'd be at a loss in discovering his roots except for one tantalizing detail: John stuck close to another Irish immigrant by the name of Timothy Kelly.

There were some tantalizing parallels between John's family and Timothy's family. Each man had named their oldest daughters Catherine and Mary. Both had a son named Timothy. They both worked for the railroad in Fort Wayne, living around the corner and down the block from each other. And—I couldn't help noticing—Timothy lived next door to someone named Daniel Falvey who had the same surname as John's wife's maiden name. Could these folks be family? Or merely friends who coincidentally shared a surname, job, and other similarities?

The similarities reached farther than those details. I discovered that, in the aftermath of the unexpected loss of John's daughter Catherine after the birth of her son, she was buried in a family plot co-owned by John and Timothy, likely purchased in 1875 after the death of Timothy's first wife. Perhaps it's time to pull out some old notes drawn up when I visited the Catholic Cemetery in Fort Wayne to ascertain who else was buried in that family plot. 

Perhaps, too, it's time to revisit this unexplained connection between two Kelly men and their (coincidental?) neighborliness following a migration of over three thousand miles. It's likely been well over a decade since I last puzzled over this relationship. Though I can't yet tell whether these two were Kelly family members or simply good friends through thick and thin, the question warrants a closer look.

Looking for the Rest of the Family

 

In the quest to find the origin of an Irish immigrant named John Kelly—I pause while you laugh—I had hoped to find additional baptismal records for the rest of his family. 

In the decades following the Irish famine years, John Kelly had married and begun a family. His marriage to Johanna Falvey pinpointed the sacrament's location in County Kerry as the diocese of Kilcummin, and noted their residence to have been in Knockauncore. Baptismal records for two of John's children provided locations within the Killeentierna diocese: Barnfield and Currow. Other transcribed records mention Molahiffe, possibly a civil registration rather than a religious record.

The various locations given for the family have long seemed confusing to me. I remember pondering that very puzzle before leaving on our family's research trip to Ireland, over a decade ago. (Hint: the trip not only didn't help resolve the issue, but had some locals puzzled over the designated townlands, too.)

One way to resolve that issue about geographic designations was to simply graph the distance. My first stop was to the National Library of Ireland's entry on Catholic parish records, where I found a sketch of County Kerry's dioceses, from which I drew a close-up of the locations in question.

It was easy to see how close the three in question were to each other. Molahiff, mentioned in one transcribed record for daughter Mary Ann's birth, lies to the west of Killeentierna, diocese in which both Kelly daughters' baptisms were entered, and also to Kilcummin, where parents John Kelly and Johanna Falvey had been married in 1859. And as a point of reference, though it is not included in that map excerpt, Kilcummin lies directly north of Killarney, an easily-recognized name to many people.

Next, it was to Google Maps, to outline the distance between the locations mentioned in the records: the townland of Barnfield and the village of Currow in Killeentierna, the townland of Knockauncore in Kilcummin, and Molahiffe. If all locations were put into a circle route, it would mean a journey by foot lasting nearly six hours. However, I doubt Molahiffe was mentioned as a place where the family lived, but possibly where they needed to file a civil report of the birth. Eliminating that outlier from the map meant a trip of about three and a half hours to travel between the other locations, a very possible distance to travel by foot.

The key, I hoped, would be to find records for the rest of the Kelly children, but though I tried searching through the Irish Catholic Parish Registers collection at Ancestry, I was unable to find any further records for Timothy, Catherine, or even Patrick Kelly, whose birth has been listed in subsequent American records as both Ireland and the United States.

Lacking any further Irish records for John Kelly's children, I still have other ways to search for John's origin. One way, which I had tried years ago with little success, is to examine the one close associate of the family who had also migrated to the United States and lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, same as John and Johanna. Perhaps it's time to revisit that connection once again.

Map above courtesy the National Library of Ireland entry on Catholic Parish Registers.

Before the Journey Began

 

One way to trace the route of immigrant ancestors is to look to their children. Not just the locations where those children were born, but the year of their arrival can give us a sketch of their parents' meanderings.

Before the journey began for John Kelly, he had married Johanna Falvey and the couple had at least four children before leaving their homeland in County Kerry, Ireland. The baptismal records help pinpoint the family's whereabouts before their final decision to set sail for America.

John and Johanna were married in 1859, and by the next year, they had welcomed in their oldest son. They named their boy Timothy, and as practicing Catholics, the Kellys surely had him baptized, but where is the question. I've yet to locate that record, as well as that of the second-born child, a daughter they named Catherine, who eventually became my father-in-law's ill-fated paternal grandmother. 

For their third child, however, John and Johanna chose to have that daughter baptized at the Catholic parish in Killeentierna in County Kerry. The September 25, 1864, record noted that the Kelly family was residing in the village of Currow at that time. The only other bit of information was the note concerning the godparents, James and Margaret Fleming, surely one or the other of which would be a sibling to either parents.

From that discovery, we now have a Kelly couple named John and Johanna who have been said to reside in either Currow, as we saw for this one baptismal record, or the townland of Knockauncore, as we saw yesterday for Johanna's entry in her marriage record. At any rate, these two locations help us zero in on the vicinity where John Kelly and his wife once lived—or remind us that there could be more than one couple with a husband claiming a name as common as John Kelly, urging us to look further for more information on the family's whereabouts for the baptisms of their other children before they left Ireland.

John Kelly's Wife

 

To find an ancestor from Ireland with such a name as John Kelly means relying on a "F.A.N. Club" full of helpful hints about the man's whereabouts. That's why I was elated when I first discovered that John Kelly had married someone with the name Johanna Falvey. With a name like that, I reasoned, John Kelly's wife possessed a surname uncommon enough for it to stand out in the crowd.

Initially discovering John Kelly was not difficult at all. I relied on the oral reports of older relatives who had kept notes on such details. After all, John Kelly was my father-in-law's great-grandfather, a relationship close enough to have been held in the memory of relatives my father-in-law knew personally. And even though my father-in-law is long gone, his brothers—and then their children—have carefully kept those records.

But discovering where John Kelly came from is another matter. We already knew he died in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1892—and that was the problem. John Kelly's passing fell just a few years short of when government records expanded their reach to include pertinent details such as parents' names or place of birth.

John Kelly's wife, on the other hand, lived long enough to provide details which, preserved on paper, could be passed down through the generations. Johanna Falvey's passing in 1903 provided not only a death certificate but two different obituaries full of details. A more straightforward newspaper entry provided a place of birth as County Kerry, Ireland, and the news that "several sisters" still lived in Ireland, as well as one in New Zealand, while notes from another obituary mentioned that Johanna came from the Lakes of Killarney.

More to the point was the information that Johanna came with her children to America, inferring a marriage before that point in Ireland. Sure enough, there was a March 2, 1859, entry in the Catholic parish records of Kilcummin in County Kerry noting the marriage of one John Kelly and Johanna Falvey, noted to be from "Knocanscore"—likely the townland of Knockauncore.

Now that I've returned several times over the years to learn more about Johanna and her supposedly uncommon surname, the experience has taught me that Falvey is not an uncommon name at all—at least for that region of County Kerry. That, too, may complicate this month's search for more information on her husband's early years in Ireland.

There are, however, other possibilities for approaching this research question. Tomorrow, let's look first to the children born to the couple before they left Ireland. 

Looking for THAT John Kelly

 

Choosing to search for an Irish ancestor named John Kelly may end up being a hopeless genealogical battle, I'll admit. But here it is, nearly the beginning of July, and I'm ready to move on to the seventh of my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for 2026.

Yes, the Irish did love to give their sons saints' names like John, and sure, the family name Kelly has historically played the number two spot, behind Murphy, in Ireland's surname lineup. But this month, yep, I'll be looking for John Kelly. But not any John Kelly; I have a special one in mind. I'll be looking for my father-in-law's paternal grandmother's father. That John Kelly.

That John Kelly was an Irish immigrant to America. But not like the hordes of emaciated Irish, escaping the doom of starvation in their beautiful homeland in 1848. That John Kelly actually arrived late on our shores, possibly right before the 1870 census. And unlike the majority of Irish immigrants, that John Kelly came not to New York or to Boston, but to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where possibly a relative or former neighbor had sent a tip back home about available jobs in the railroads.

Following our John Kelly was his wife Johanna and their three surviving children: Timothy, Catherine, and Mary. To the rest they had bid a final goodbye beneath the Irish sod before their long journey westward.

Most of what I already know about that John Kelly I learned from researching his wife. She, the former Johanna Falvey, not only presented a surname which I thought might be unusual enough to provide helpful leads, but lived a life which stretched just long enough to attain the more modern record-keeping conveniences that enable descendants to better trace their roots.

To get started, tomorrow, on our search for our John Kelly, we'll take a look at what's already been discovered about his wife, Johanna Falvey. After that, we'll take a blind leap into the void and hope we can somehow find our way to that one specific ancestor named John Kelly.