Last Thoughts on Hopeless Tasks

 

How do you search for a Kelly needle in an Irish Catholic haystack? Sounds like a hopeless task to me—unless I can come up with any last thoughts on the process. And, surprise, I have—but they will likely have to wait for a future attempt at finding these Kelly ancestors.

Much like researchers have realized the value of searching for clusters of family members when seeking, for instance, an unknown ancestor's will, I can see the value in designing a search which looks for not just one baptismal record, but a cluster of the entire family's baptismal records for a specific—and limited—geographic area. In other words, while I might not be able to confidently point to the baptism of one baby named Catharine Kelly—the name of my father-in-law's great-grandmother—if I could find several Kelly family members baptized in or near the same parish during the right years, that could point to the right family for me.

Because of census records and other documentation in the Kelly family's adopted home in Lafayette, Indiana, I do know the names of James and Mary Kelly's children. Their oldest—as far as I can tell—was a son named Matthew, born about 1825. He was followed by three sisters: Rose, Catharine, and Bridget, who arrived between 1827 and 1834. His brother Thomas was born in 1837, and the baby of the family, Ann, made her appearance in 1839.

Could all of them have been born in the same location in Ireland? While I have seen signs that some family members of other branches of my father-in-law's Irish heritage might have moved from one townland to another, it is far more likely that geographical changes would be minimal than widespread. What are the chances that all of them could have been baptized in the same church?

As far as I know, there is currently no search protocol to find such a cluster in one set of keystrokes, so I'll be left to the grunt work of comparing results, one baptism at a time, across the whole of the island of Ireland. But it would be a possible plan to help flush out some possible families to target for future research efforts on that Kelly family's origin. And, with not many other alternatives available to me, even an option filled with repetitive busy work may be better than giving up entirely.