About Face

 

What if the research direction you've chosen to pursue doesn't yield any answers? If I can't find further detail on my father-in-law's brick wall Irish immigrant Kelly ancestors, perhaps changing direction might help. Surely those Kelly siblings from the 1850s now have multiple descendants all over this country.

Pivoting about face may seem counter-intuitive, until I realize that even if our family didn't receive all those coveted keepsakes, someone in the family surely did. And it's in search of that "someone" that I'll reverse direction and look for descendants of James and Mary Kelly.

I usually make this a practice, solely because I have multiple mystery DNA matches whom I can't fit into the family tree schemata. Tracing each collateral line's descendants helps open up the possibilities for how each DNA match relates. But in this Kelly case, while I thought I had done a thorough job of this line, apparently I had neglected a few branches.

So it's back to tracing all the descendants of the siblings of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Catharine Kelly Stevens. Actually, what launched me into that search was the thought that perhaps some of Catharine's brothers could have filed for naturalization, once they settled in Lafayette, Indiana. Unfortunately, all of them died before any census records could provide a hint of when that process could have happened—if at all. The only one alive for that 1910 census immigration question was the baby of the family, Ann Kelly—by the time of that 1910 census, widow Ann Doyle. As a woman, her citizenship status at that point would have been based on her husband, so no date was entered in the census.

While there are other routes for determining application for naturalization in earlier years—another task to add to that ever-growing to-do research list—I realized there are also several blanks left in that descendancy review for Kelly collateral lines. So, instead of looking backward in time for the next few days, I'll be looking ahead from that arrival point in Indiana in the 1850s, to see if I can find anyone who just might have been the fortunate recipient of all the family mementos—hopefully someone who would be willing to share what they've discovered about their roots.