Old Family Stories Dislodged From Memory

 

Struggling over the Kelly family of Irish immigrants James and Mary, a vague memory dislodged from the back recesses of my memory. Family stories being the possible myths that they may be, I still want to record this one, in case I—or another distant cousin—need to follow up on it in during future research attempts.

For this memory, we'll go back to Uncle Ed, the keeper of the family "stuff" for the Stevens family. It was this couple, James and Mary Kelly, who were his and my father-in-law's second great-grandparents. Their daughter Catharine was his direct line ancestor, and he was the one who shared the family stories with me when I first began sketching out the family's ancestral lines.

The problem was that Catharine Kelly married someone named John Stevens, and their son John eventually married a woman by that same name: Catherine Kelly. When Uncle Ed first walked me through the family tree details, this became a point of confusion; I could sometimes lose track over which Catharine Kelly we were discussing.

I eventually discovered the younger Catherine Kelly came from County Kerry. As to the senior Catharine Kelly, Uncle Ed never provided a specific place of birth. He did, however, say she came from Dublin. 

Well, Dublin is a sizable city—at the time of the 1851 census, the entire County Dublin claimed 405,000 people—so if Catharine, her parents and siblings were born there, finding them might be a challenging task. But Dublin was also a key port for emigrants bound for a better future away from the devastations of the Great Famine. Could Uncle Ed have simply meant that the Kelly family sailed to America from Dublin? When I asked him, he couldn't say.

Looking at online resources now, I can find notes that the port at Dublin was among three Irish locations with the "majority of departures"—but that, according to the National Museum of Ireland, was before the 1830s, long before the Kelly family came to America. Still, Ireland's capital city could also have been the launching place for Irish immigrants to head, first, to the English port of Liverpool, another possible route for the Kellys.

Whatever the case, as I took up the last-minute research project this past weekend to find any possible baptismal records for the Kelly children, I was particularly swayed by some entries in various Catholic parishes in Dublin. Initial searches turned up several Dublin parishes, but on closer inspection, the first few produced false leads, such as a James and Mary who had daughters Bridget and Catharine—but in reverse birth order.

There is a long list of possible baptisms yet to go—piecemeal, one by one for each Kelly child—but starting the search helped me realize the one value of continuing this quest. Each baptismal entry reveals the mother's maiden name, as well as the names of sponsors, who most likely would be siblings or in-laws of either parent. These details can help extend that family tree yet another generation—if I can find a family with all children listed, record by record, in the same general area.

With at least six children to be accounted for, such a project will take far longer than the remainder of this last day of the month. With tomorrow's post, we'll not only move to another of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024, but shift from our focus on my father-in-law's ancestry to that of my own father. This final Kelly project will be duly noted and reserved to pick up once again in another research year.