Throwing the Net Wide

 

While last month may have been my moment to celebrate the small victories in ancestral research, this month I'm hoping to throw the net wide and pull in information on several family members. For September, we'll move on to another of my father-in-law's Irish great-grandmothers, this time looking at the Flannery family from County Tipperary.

Now that I'm equipped with Ancestry.com's ProTools--and especially the "Networks" beta version--I can easily put together a cluster of possibly related people. In this case, I'll be keeping close tabs on people with that same surname, both in the northern parts of County Tipperary, where my father-in-law's great-grandmother once lived, and onward into the 1850s and beyond, when she and her family began appearing in records in Canada.

Looking at clusters of connected people can be particularly helpful when we find no other pathway to move forward in our research. Particularly when working with families of Irish heritage, there are other clues which may help piece together a proposed family constellation, such as names of godparents for pre-famine baptisms in Ireland. Migrations en masse may also provide clues as to why names of neighbors back in County Tipperary soon afterwards showed up in census records in one particular town, far across the Atlantic Ocean. 

This month, we'll first review what we've already discovered about this great-grandmother Margaret Flannery, wife of Denis Tully. From there, we'll explore the other Flannery households which also appeared in records for Margaret's new home in Canada, as well as do a thorough search through church baptismal records back home in County Tipperary. As we widen the family network, we'll also keep an eye on any DNA matches related to this Flannery line to see what leads they may provide.

Granted, this month may be a repeat of last month's exhaustive searches through Catholic Church documents, but we'll do so, pen in hand. Any clue to help build this cluster of Flannery connections may lead us to the goal we're seeking: to connect Margaret Flannery with her siblings and parents, whoever they were.

Celebrating the Small Stuff

Sometimes, you just have to celebrate the small things in life. 

It's time for my biweekly count, and this time, I can't say much has been accomplished in my search for Johanna Falvey's roots in Ireland. The numbers bear that out. I've only been able to add seventy six new names to my in-laws' family tree. While that may sound like a good number of people—complete with documentation, I might add—the great majority of them are residual discoveries from last month's research. Finding the previous Falvey generation in County Kerry has been challenging. 

Most of this month has been spent trawling through baptismal records, one by one, looking for mothers' maiden names, and even names of godmothers, in hopes of finding a cluster of Falveys who might turn out to be family. There's not much to write about in that routine search—certainly not to put into my database of family connections.

Granted, that family tree now has 41,339 documented individuals included, so I guess I can take a pass for one report. However, I know that the going will be just as glacial in the upcoming month, as I battle the invisibility of more Irish ancestors of my father-in-law. 

On the other hand—and here's where I can celebrate the small stuff—I noticed that, despite adding not one single additional person to my own family tree in these past two weeks, I suddenly received a sizable uptick in DNA cousins at Ancestry.com. After gaining absolutely zero new DNA matches since the beginning of the month, I suddenly have eleven new matches to consider. I'm not sure what prodded such a jump; I don't recall any spectacular sales announcements...although I have noticed somewhat of a price war brewing between DNA companies lately. Could that be the inspiration? I now have 2,675 DNA matches on my side, and 1,442 matches to consider on behalf of my husband's family.

Tomorrow, we'll move on to a new Irish ancestor to mull over—and likely spend another month trawling through baptismal records and other document sources. One thing's for sure: if we don't look, we'll never find the answers—even the small ones. But there's always the hope for a big discovery. Besides, the small stuff eventually adds up.

Drawing Up a List for Next Time

 

At the end of the month, it's hard to move on from what is, essentially, an unfinished research project. While I did find possible parents for my father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna Falvey, I'm still not convinced about her family constellation. Having DNA matches whose lines—at least at this early point—still don't seem to line up with my recent discoveries gives pause to reconsider.

At this point, as I do for all my month-long research projects for my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors each year, I draw up a list of what I'd like to find next. Though the idea is to provide myself a shopping list of what to do the next time I tackle this ancestral puzzle, sometimes, I can't help but continue working on that list, even well after the close of a month. Kind of like an addict to "whodunnit" novels, I have this compulsion to stay on until I discover the resolution to the mystery—but sometimes, the amount of work left undone becomes too unmanageable in the face of the next month's project. The "what's next" list reminds me to quickly return to the task, the next time I revisit this ancestor—and to tuck it away for now.

Struggling with Johanna Falvey's own family tree may be a guaranteed part of future research, as well. Due to her date of birth, some time during the early 1830s, this put her toward the earlier time period of availability of Catholic Church records in the more rural parts of Ireland. And yet, fast-forwarding to her likely sister "Debora" (Gobnait) and her marriage to Daniel Cullinane and the arrival of that couple's children into the 1860s puts us at another research disadvantage with so many Irish people of their age fleeing the country for the promise of a better life elsewhere—disrupting the age-old naming traditions and baptismal sponsors' selections.

With those disruptions in Irish traditions, the ability to build a tree's collateral lines, for instance, puts us on more shaky ground as we move beyond the famine years. While I will certainly examine the names of godparents for Johanna's siblings and search for those names also appearing in other family baptisms to build a theoretical tree based on those age-old traditions and the network of names linking the community together, that tactic won't hold quite so reliably in the next generation as emigration took its toll on the local population.

Of course, I can always hope for additional Falvey cousins to test their DNA. With the passing of time, however, even that wish may be weakened. After all, any descendants of Johanna's siblings would be my husband's fourth cousins, at the closest. As younger generations step up to test, that relationship level becomes even more distant—or vanishing.

Whether continuing to build the family trees of DNA matches, or exploring the handwritten baptismal records of 1830s County Kerry, Ireland, I still have plenty to do before I exhaust the possibilities for discovering more about Johanna Falvey. We will, in a few years, revisit her research challenges. For now, though, it's time to wrap up this month and move on to the third of my father-in-law's Irish ancestors to research for this year.

Sometimes, I Just Wanna . . .

 

...hop on plane and fly to Ireland and search for those ancestors' records in person. 

It's nearly the end of another month, and I've yet to make any breakthrough on my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey. I can presume that her sister was named Gobnait—or Gobineta, or Debora, or even Abby—but I'd feel more confident in that if I could find further documentation. I can also presume that Johanna had younger brothers named Patrick and whatever actual Irish name the family might have used instead of Demetrius. But find any further record that could reasonably be linked to those family members? Not really. Not even by a thorough search through microfilmed records online.

Even exploring the discovery of "Debora" and her husband, Daniel Cullinane, while leading me to a couple possible immigrant sons through DNA matches, has not yielded any further leads. For this family, too, I've searched through available Irish records to find any trace of the Cullinane children without much success. There is so much more work to be done on this collateral line.

And yet, those DNA matches taunt me to find a connection. There is obviously one there, even if I can't see it. 

Along the way, I've certainly built a list of resources to consult for similar research questions about Irish roots. As I explore Irish civil registrations post-1864, juxtaposing townlands and registration districts, I've found resources not only for my Falvey question in County Kerry, but for use in research in the other counties in Ireland. From an overall guide to finding registration districts at FamilySearch.org to some tools for looking up specific townlands and their corresponding overarching government jurisdictions—for example, the Falvey family's townland of Knockauncore—I've saved these resources, and more, for future projects.

There will be more such projects to come. After all, my father-in-law claimed one hundred percent Irish heritage, with three of his grandparents born in Ireland, as well as all eight great-grandparents. Even though this month is coming to a close—and thus, we'll need to set aside our quest to discover more about Johanna Falvey's roots—we'll have one more Irish ancestor to search for in the coming month.

The Nemesis: Name Twins

 

Independently building the family tree of a DNA match may seem a smart move—until, that is, we discover we have gotten swamped in the murky waters of unknown ancestries. In particular, my nemesis for this foray has been the realization that I've now been plagued with name twins. Time to move forward with caution.

My goal was to inspect Patrick, this supposed son of Daniel Cullinane and "Debora" Falvey, the supposed direct line ancestor of a DNA match. While I had found most of this couple's children baptized in the Catholic parish of Kilcummin in County Kerry, Ireland, I had not been able to locate such a record for any son named Patrick.

According to the tree posted for this line on Ancestry.com, Patrick had emigrated from his homeland bound for the United States, and showed up in records in the area around Boston. That's where I began my search.

As I mentioned yesterday, I had found Patrick's marriage record from May 15, 1890 in the city of Boston. I began tracing his descendants from that point, adding his wife and children to a floating tree I had set up on Ancestry's beta "Networks" tool. I quickly learned that Patrick's wife, though named Johanna, preferred to go by the nickname Annie. As I moved through the decades, census records enabled me to add the names of the Cullinanes' growing family.

A growing family, that is, until I realized one problem: there were apparently two families in the Boston area with parents named Patrick and Annie Cullinane. And, as you can imagine, each of those families contained some of the same children's names. My challenge was now to not take that left turn down the wrong family line.

Think about this for a moment. Patrick, born in the early 1860s according to the various ages he provided for documents, had moved to Boston from Ireland sometime before his 1890 wedding. Rather than focus on Patrick, for a moment, let's focus on the city which he adopted as his new home, and the time period in which he did so.

Ever since the first waves of Irish immigrants arrived at the port of Boston following the famine back in their homeland, Boston's population burgeoned. From 1850 to 1860, for instance, Boston's population grew by nearly fifty percent, and the phenomenal growth continued decade over decade until the turn of the next century. It's no surprise, then, to learn that people of Irish descent form the largest single ethnic group in the state of Massachusetts. By 1850 in Boston, those steadily-arriving Irish immigrants had already become the largest single ethnic group in the city.

It's easy to see, then, that name twins would be lurking in Boston's historic records. It doesn't matter whether the surname was widespread or less common. Couple that with a rather limited set of Irish given names, derived from saints and repeated through traditional naming patterns, and we still have reason to exercise research caution, even for a less-common surname like Cullinane.

I think I've found my way around this research hazard so far, but there are other challenges in piecing together this family tree. While Ancestry's ThruLines tool may have offered an explanation to lead me from the DNA match's supposed ancestor downwards through the generations, it may be prudent to return to that tried and true genealogical research advice: to begin, start with "yourself." I may just need to do that with this DNA cousin's proposed tree, in order to let the documentation lead me to the answer.  

Two Brothers Bound for Boston?

 

Discovering whatever became of the children of an ancestor's sibling can be a challenging prospect, especially if that ancestor lived in Ireland. While we can find baptismal records for many of the children of Daniel Cullinane and his wife Gobnait Falvey, tracing what became of those children after their birth in County Kerry in the 1860s and 1870s has not led to reasonable answers.

Then there is this question of whether any of the Cullinane children remained in Ireland. Though their birth post-dated the horrific famine, many Irish were still emigrating in hopes of a more promising future—which led me to a question to consider. Could two of the Cullinane brothers have been bound for Boston as young adults?

Though the reason which first prompted my question has to do with DNA matches to this line, on the other hand, there is substantial documentation to make me wonder. Take the Cullinanes' son Timothy. Someone by that same name showed up in marriage records for the city of Chelsea, just over the river from Boston in the United States. The 1883 register entry shows a twenty three year old Irish laborer by the name of Timothy Cullinane of Boston about to wed Margaret McCarthy of Chelsea. This would place his birth at about 1860, just a bit younger than what our Timothy's October 1858 baptismal record had noted. Coincidentally, this soon to be married Timothy claimed his parents were Daniel and Deborah.

A document only ten years later showed the unfortunate Timothy Cullinane yielding to death coming from pulmonalis phthisis—or tuberculosis. Though his age given at the time of his death would put his birth around August of 1861, and his parents' names as Daniel Cullinane and "Abby" Falvey, knowing what we now know about the nicknames for Gobnait Falvey, it is likely that we are still tracking the right Timothy Cullinane.

Or how about this other Cullinane immigrant to the Boston area. On May 15, 1890, this son of Daniel and "Debby" Cullinane married another Irish immigrant, Joanna Sullivan. He was likely the same immigrant, born in County Kerry, who filed his petition for United States citizenship in Massachusetts on September 26, 1889. And, of most keen interest to me, he was an ancestor of a DNA match I've been eyeing.

Though it seems promising that this, too, was a son of our Daniel Cullinane and Gobnait Falvey, there are several problems with this hypothesis. The first is that the man reported his occupation to be a marble worker—not a typical line of work for the son of an Irish tenant farmer. In addition, this man signed his name on his petition for citizenship, an unlikely ability for a Catholic raised during that era of religious discrimination in Ireland. But key to all this questioning is the fact that the name Patrick was not among those baptismal records I had found for Cullinane children, back in the Kilcummin parish in County Kerry where his parents attended church. Not, especially, for the date at which this man reported his birth: June 15 of 1860.

Whether that Patrick turns out to be a missing child of that same Cullinane family, I can't yet tell. But this is a call to go back to square one and examine the documents to build my own tree for this DNA match independently.

How Far Can Seventeen Stretch?

 

The number was seventeen—centiMorgans, that is. I wasn't sure how far seventeen could reach, so I had to take a look. Seventeen, after all, is the amount of genetic material shared by my husband and his most likely DNA match claiming Falvey roots. And that is not very much.

The possessor of that particular seventeen centiMorgan segment is someone who possibly descends from Gobnait Falvey and Daniel Cullinane of County Kerry in Ireland. Gobnait—or Debora, as she was listed in the many baptismal records of her children—was likely the sister of Johanna Falvey, my father-in-law's great-grandmother. If this DNA match is the same number of generations removed from Johanna and Gobnait's parents as my husband is, we'd be looking at a fourth cousin. Slim possibilities, indeed.

Just to make sure, I popped over to DNA Painter, the website which hosts an interactive version of Blaine Bettinger's updated Shared centiMorgan Project. There, I checked the possible reach of a seventeen centiMorgan match to see if it could indeed show up to connect fourth cousins.

As it turns out, sharing seventeen centiMorgans with a DNA match could indeed be a reasonable number for fourth cousins. And the connection could stretch in either directions. Probabilities are that both a third cousin and even a second cousin's child could be revealed by that amount of shared genetic material—and, heading in the other direction, so could a fifth cousin or even a more distant relationship than that.

With this particular DNA match, the assumption is of descent from Daniel and "Debora" Cullinane, but as often happens, there appears to be discrepancies in the proposed ThruLines line of descent. We'll take some time this week to examine whether this supposed son of the Cullinanes did indeed emigrate from Ireland. We'll also follow the route of another Cullinane son who supposedly did the same. Sometimes, in using DNA for family history, we learn far more about other people's family trees than we at first assumed.

Sloppy Handwriting and Line by Line Searches

 

Finding "Debora" Falvey's baptismal record happened quite by accident. Thankfully, I already had found evidence that her name certainly wasn't "Debora," though that was the name provided for some of her own children's baptismal records. Nor was it Debby or Abby or any other nickname I had run across in documents. When she was born in 1830, her parents' intention was apparently to give her the traditional Irish name Gobnait—hard to translate, but a name that resonated with her heritage, especially in her home in County Kerry.

And yet, I couldn't find her own baptismal record. Granted, reaching back to that early date can be a challenge for Irish records from the Catholic Church, given the history of that era. But what I hadn't counted on was a case of sloppy handwriting and the resultant indexing challenge.

Somehow, "Gobineta" Falvey turned into Gobineta Faley—not quite what the parish priest had entered, but an understandable misreading in the indexing process. The actual entry for the child's surname looked like Falevy—though her father's name came closer, looking like "Folvey."

Taking my cue from that experience, I decided to search those church records backwards from the point of Gobineta's 1830 baptism to see if I could find any record for her sister Johanna Falvey, my father-in-law's great-grandmother. While on that trail, I also looked for any other entries which included the family name Falvey, whether for the parent of a child or a godparent. I'm still trying to piece together a reasonable family tree for this line.

Well, I made it back to 1823 with only three mentions of that Falvey name. I know, I know, that even predates the 1824 marriage of Patrick Falvey and Ann Fleming, the supposed parents. But I had to do a thorough search, just in case.

Still no Johanna, making me wonder whether the not-unusual case of clerical error may have struck, making Johanna into the Latin "Joannes" by mistake, rather than using the feminine form of that name. The format used by this parish for baptismal record keeping didn't help. Instead of incorporating the usual Latin wording for "legitimate son/daughter of" to complete the baptismal statement—which would have indicated gender of the child as well—this record was laid out in a more chart-like fashion, giving solely the names in the required columns.

However, in this perusal of the baptismal register, page by page, I noticed a few details. For one thing, there was a multitude of Fleming relatives mentioned in that church's records. Gobineta's mother must have been from a large extended family, indeed.

The second thing I noticed was that the mention of the Falvey name—even if morphed into something else due to sloppy handwriting—was quite scarce. I did find one godfather by the name of John Falvey mentioned for a Sullivan child. And though I couldn't read the abbreviation for the godfather's name on an earlier record in 1823, it looked like Cos-- Falvey. Who knows? Perhaps the Falvey relatives were not from this area.

I'll continue this line-by-line search through the Kilcummin parish records to look for more Falvey connections, just in case—but I doubt I'll find many more. Though it will be more difficult, it may be worth my time to return to Gobineta's entry and follow that same path backwards through the years to see if this time I can reconstruct the Fleming family connections.

Or I can return to the DNA connections and start to pull my hair out in frustration over those missing pieces of the puzzle.

More About Ancestral Addresses

 

It's always nice to get a shout out from another genealogy blogger, and that's exactly what happened this weekend. Gail Dever of Genealogy à la Carte included my post about ancestral locations, "Measuring the Distances," in her weekly blog roundup. 

The added bonus was that right below the mention of my blog was a selection from another publication which expanded on the theme of my own post. Writing for the Genealogical Society of Queensland, Andrew Redfern explained, "Why Addresses Matter in Family History."

Featured toward the top of the article was a photograph of an item my grandmother used to call a "little black book." Just like the author of that blog post has described, my own grandmother kept one of her own—and now I have it. It is indeed, as Andrew Redfern put it, a family heirloom.

More than just describing the contents of that diminutive directory, the GSQ article goes on to explain all the ways addresses can help lead to revealing hints about those brick wall ancestors. The author challenges all of us to draw up an address history of our own lives as a keepsake to pass down through the generations.

I couldn't agree more. My grandmother's little address record was a valuable guide in my own family history research—even those little offhand notes and tidbits she filed within the pages of the book. Between that and those other "scraps" of paper that members of previous generations used to save—how odd that we now only see them as "hoarders" of such treasures—we sometimes discover answers to the questions which could not have been found any other way.

. . . But the DNA Says So

 

Looking at all the baptismal records for the children of Gobnait "Debora" Falvey and her husband, Daniel Cullinane, in County Kerry, I now have a pretty good idea of who those children were. In order, I first have Mary, whose godmother was my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey. Following that, the list continues with Timothy, John, Hanoria, Ann, Michael, and Daniel.

Having the documentation to verify that lineup may be all well and good, but when I look to those few DNA matches descended from that Falvey ancestor, their path to the past doesn't agree with those hard-earned results from baptisms and civil registrations. The DNA may say that they are connected to my father-in-law's ancestor, but the paper trail simply hasn't yet gotten the message.

One sticking point is Daniel and Debora Cullinane's second-born son. According to the baptismal record, that son was named John. According to the DNA matches who descend from that second-born son, his 1860 baptismal record should have read Patrick, not John.

And can you blame them? If the traditional Irish naming pattern still held sway—and after the famine, it didn't always do so—the second-born son should have been named after the maternal grandfather. In the case of Daniel and Debora Cullinane, her father's name was certainly not John; it was Patrick.

Fast-forward to our modern age, complete with Internet access to digitized church and governmental verifications of our ancestors' life history, and add DNA into the mix. While I am still in the process of confirming the line of descent offered in DNA matches' family trees, one thing is obvious: these are DNA cousins who descend from a son of Daniel and Debora named—wait for it—Patrick.

Now what? Looks like it's time to start from scratch and build the family tree for some of these DNA matches, to check every step of the way from the match to the specific ancestor. At best, we'll figure out what the exact connection might be between DNA cousins. At the least, perhaps we'll learn something new in the process. 

Measuring the Distances

 

One word of advice I've always appreciated receiving about researching Irish ancestors was to cross-check any possible marriage records with the distance between the townlands where the bride and groom were said to have lived. The question to consider would be to determine how the couple met. Given the typical modes of transportation in rural Ireland in the mid-1800s, if young people were to get out and meet each other, it would most likely have to be by foot.

Thus, the question becomes, how far a walk is that? The advice I learned was: no greater distance than the round trip which can be accomplished in one day. 

The most likely scenario for such travel would be a trip to market, whether to buy or to sell. Even if the potential couple were to meet up at market from homes in entirely opposite directions, each would still need to return home at the end of the day.

With the challenges of knowing just where all those tiny townlands are in Ireland, I accidentally discovered that Google Maps shows specific townlands in response to a user's inquiry. Having learned that, I simply set the app to get directions between two townlands, then indicate the mode of transportation I prefer to measure. In this case, of course, it would be transportation by foot; no trolley car rides for these inquiries.

Thus, if I found a couple with my ancestors' names, but living in a different townland than where I had last found them, this extra bit of information could help me determine whether I had found the right people, or simply stumbled upon name twins who would lead me astray.

As I go through records for possible Cullinane relatives descended from Gobnait (or "Debora") Falvey, I've been constantly popping back to check distances on Google Maps. Even when considering if the couple had moved from one location to another, it helps to see the distances measured. Townlands, after all, are rather small sections of property, so moving from one to another may be within reason—but moving far enough away to entail an all-day hike leads me to doubt the familial connection. 

The Tedium of Incremental Steps

 

At this stage of the search for Falvey family connections, we've entered what I call the tedium of incremental steps. Not much action is taking place, but the step by step moves are necessary in order to make any progress on our research question.

We've been focusing on the family of one possible sister of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey of County Kerry, Ireland. This sister married a man named Daniel Cullinane and, for the most part, remained in the same townland, Knockauncore, where I had previously found Johanna before her own  marriage and migration to the United States.

Since the Cullinane family had at least four children born after the date at which Ireland instituted civil registrations for everyone—finally including Catholics—I decided to locate the government records of their birth. I found an entry for each of those four—Hanoria, Ann, Michael, and Daniel—noting the discrepancy between dates of birth noted in each child's baptismal record and that of the civil registration. Who knows which date each child would carry throughout life as a way of secondary identification.

The tedium of it all wasn't necessarily in finding those four civil registrations. Where the true grunt work begins is in the next step: trying to locate each of these Cullinane children twenty to thirty years later in marriage records.

Such a task assumes a number of premises. For one thing, the assumption that the child lived to adulthood. A second assumption would be that the child, now grown, remained at home to be married in Ireland—not somewhere across an ocean in any of the locations where we've already found Falvey DNA cousins: Australia, New Zealand, or even North America.

The draw, though, is that it is possible to find such records, if those premises turned out to be true. If the children remained in Ireland, roughly in the same neighborhood as where they were born, not only might I be able to muddle through the many name twins who had gotten married, but I could theoretically push ahead yet one additional step: look for them in the death records of Ireland, currently available online from about 1871 until fifty years before our current year.

Finding marriage and death records is not a task limited to only those four youngest children of the Cullinane family. Though I can't find any birth entries in those civil registrations for the older Cullinane children, they might be discoverable in marriage or death records. Add even more tedium.

Still, considering the rare find of an ancestor in Irish records, wouldn't the tedium be worth the possible result? Though this process won't necessarily be something for which I'll write up the blow-by-blow details, if any surprises do show up, I promise to mention them. 

"All the Others Take Nine Months"

 

There is an old joke about newlyweds and expectant parents, with the snide remark that "the first one can come at any time; all the others take nine months."

Somehow, in noticing the discrepancies between baptismal records and civil registration reports for the Irish relatives of my father-in-law's Falvey family, I had been searching for possible explanations. I ran across one online observation the other day that noted the occasional entry of a birth even before a marriage.

Of course, now that I want to share that, I can't replicate that search. But noticing one comment to yesterday's post, in which reader (and blogger) Kat explained that dates given for a child's birth might be, ahem, adjusted so as to avoid any reporting penalties, I wanted to follow up. Hence the search for that missing article. (Where are these tidbits when you really need them?!)

Along the way, though, I did find some additional resources to support Kat's observation. As I had mentioned yesterday, beginning on January 1, 1864, all births, marriages, and deaths were required to be reported to government authorities in Ireland. The difficulty was in getting the word to the right location for an Irish family's jurisdiction. This registration process was overseen by Superintendent Register Districts (now called local civil registration districts).

The problem was that, especially in the earlier years, some Irish births were simply not reported. According to Claire Santry on her site, Irish Genealogy Toolkit, "Some estimates put non-registration as high as 15% in some of the vast rural areas of the west." The reason? It might be a long distance to the closest registration center.

That, in itself, incurred another problem: those who didn't report a birth in a timely manner may have faced a fine for late registration. That, in turn, might have somehow impacted the date of birth reported when the registration was finally made. As was observed in the article at Irish Genealogy Toolkit, "the longer the period between the birth and the date of registration, the more likelihood the date of birth is incorrect."

Being that young Daniel, son of Daniel Cullinane and Debora Falvey, was born in County Kerry—one of those "vast rural areas of the west" of Ireland—I'm guessing his father was almost one of that estimated fifteen percent of reporting parents who didn't quite get there as soon as they could. 

From Church to Civil Records

 

Seeking records for my father-in-law's Catholic ancestors in Ireland presented more than one kind of problem. The first problem was discovering the destruction of so many historic records in that country. The second one was navigating around the problem of the near-invisibility of adherents to the Catholic faith. Civil registration of births and marriages for Catholics did not begin until 1864.

Thus, trying to trace the descent of children in a collateral line related to my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey Kelly, has been challenging. While I have been able to access some baptismal records for the children of this collateral line—that of "Debora" Falvey and Daniel Cullinane of County Kerry—I'd like to also trace them through civil records.

Most of the Cullinane children I've found have been recorded in baptismal records prior to that 1864 date, so there would be no mention of their birth in government records. However, to test the process, I tried my hand at the youngest of the Cullinane children to see what I could find. 

Starting with the youngest, a son named Daniel, I first checked on the index at Ancestry.com, looking for all entries for Cullinane children in County Kerry, delimited by the mother's maiden name. That result was so huge as to be of no help, with the main problem being lack of use of the maiden name. Clicking on one of the specific entries for a Daniel Cullinane gave a readout with little more of use than the identifying number to look up the document in the FamilySearch.org collection.

I jumped over to the Irish Genealogy website, where my search for a Daniel Cullinane, born 1874 in County Kerry, produced three results. Clicking through, a readout of the indexed material indicated a disappointing entry for the item, "mother's birth surname," of "null."

I'm glad I happened to notice a line below that, "View record image." It was hyperlinked, so I clicked through to the actual birth registration image. There, on the top line, was the entry for Daniel Cullinane, son of Daniel Cullinane of Knockauncore, just as we had found it in the baptismal record. Baby Daniel's mother's maiden name was indeed listed as Falvey. The proud papa gave the birth report on the fifteenth of August, leaving for a signature "his mark," an "x" in the proper box.

The only puzzling part was that the date of this son's birth was listed as July 23, 1874—when the baptismal record had listed his birth as July 15 of that same year, and the date of baptism as the very next day, not July 23. Until I can sort out this discrepancy, I'll keep both reported dates in mind, if I can follow each of the later Cullinane children through their later years. I do want to track each of these Falvey descendants, in case any DNA matches turn out to connect with this same surname. I'll repeat this same process for each of the other Cullinane children to note their civil registration information, as well.

Documenting Daniel's Descendants

 

One of my prime reasons for documenting the descendants of collateral lines is to confirm connections to DNA cousins. In this month's research goal of determining the siblings—and, hopefully, eventually the parents—of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey, there are several possible DNA matches who might provide some guidance. That is if, however, I am able to document the line of descent for any of Johanna's possible siblings.

One such possibility would be the family of Daniel Cullinane, who married a Falvey. Daniel's wife was the woman whose distinctly Irish given name—likely Gobnait—we discussed this past weekend. She was the one who showed up in Latin baptismal records for her children with her own name listed variously as Latinized versions of the Irish Gobnait, or even Latin versions of English-language nicknames bestowed upon that Irish name.

The only sign assuring me that Gobnait—or Debora, as she appeared in some church records—was sister to our Johanna was the fact that Johanna herself was named as godmother for one of the Cullinane children. But if Gobnait and Johanna were siblings, now what? How do I proceed with tracing the descendants of Daniel Cullinane and his Falvey wife? The same difficulties plaguing anyone researching Irish roots also make their appearance as we move on to the next generation: missing census records, spotty Catholic Church records. The only positive sign was the beginning of inclusion of Catholics in civil registrations in Ireland after 1863.

It just so happened that, in perusing all my husband's DNA matches, I did find a likely Falvey cousin among his test results. This one, in particular, was said to have descended from Daniel Cullinane and Debora Falvey. In fact, the line of descent was handily outlined for me by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool.

My appreciation of that fact, however, was short-lived: Daniel's son who was said to have been in that line of descent was someone born in 1860 by the name of Patrick. The baptismal record I had found for Daniel's son born in July of that same year was for a name recorded in Latin as Ioannes—or John in English.

True, ThruLines results, while partially based on actual DNA matches, are only as accurate as the family trees from which the suggested relationships are drawn. There may be something missing from the match's tree. Or John Cullinane's baptismal record could be for the child of a different Daniel Cullinane. Whichever way it turns out to be—and there could be other possible problems, as well—it shows me that we'll need to go back and take a second look. Or even more.  

Some are Faster, Some are Slower

 

When it comes to measuring progress on research goals, some seem to be achieved faster—and others seem slower. This month, so far, seems to be in the "slower" category.

Reaching back in time far enough to enter the realm of foreign research seems to put the brakes on progress for me. Despite having subscriptions to online genealogical services described as "international," I find that accessing records can be tempered by several variables. In the case of accessing documents for countries such as Canada or Ireland, privacy laws and other statutes limit public access to specific sets of records. Whereas the United States, for instance, deems privacy concerns to be protected with a seventy two year limit, some other countries have a trailing limit of a century mark.

This weekend, as I was working on some DNA matches linked to my father-in-law's Irish and Canadian relatives, I realized another research dilemma: information included in obituaries may follow different traditions or customs in other countries. I noticed this in particular as I read obituaries published in Canadian newspapers, which seemed reticent to even mention specific names of adult children of a deceased parent.

This puts me in a difficult position as I try to piece together the line of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna Falvey Kelly. Her Irish-born Kelly descendants, having grown up in the United States, gave me ample opportunities to locate them throughout their lifetime here in the States. But tracing the lines of Johanna's siblings, some of whom were said to have migrated to New Zealand, became more challenging because of this same dilemma with public records accessibility. Likewise even for those remaining back at home in Ireland.

It's no surprise, then, to see my research pace slowed in the past two weeks on my in-laws' family tree. In the past biweekly period, I added 204 additional documented relatives to that tree—a decent pace, but far from the progress I had made in past months. The Falvey line has been yet another Irish puzzle for me, though I keep hoping for a records—or even DNA—breakthrough.

Still, that family tree has grown to include 41,263 individuals, an effort reaching back for more than a decade. And even though work on my own family tree has temporarily taken a break until next October, when I return to work on my own father's side of the family, that tree also has topped forty thousand individuals—40,259 names, to be specific.

The main point is to remember the value of steady, consistent work towards a research goal. For some research goals, we may speed onward to the finish line, while other goals seem doomed with roadblocks from the start. There are so many variables impacting progress, not only whether we can find that magical way around that stubborn brick wall ancestor, but even details like accessibility of records from the right place during the right time period. In the case of reaching back to Ireland to trace Johanna's roots—or stretching halfway around the world to inquire of records about migrating collateral lines in New Zealand or Australia—a lot can go into whether we find those answers, or not.

Translating Gobnait

 

When we see a mother's name change from one child's baptismal record to the next, do we presume that the father listed in the documents had remarried? That, after all, was the situation we found when we assembled all the Catholic baptismal records for the children of Daniel Cullinane in County Kerry, Ireland. For some of his children's records, the child's mother was said to have been named Debora. In others, it was either Gubbenelas (for son John), Gubboneta (for Honora) or Gobinetta (for Michael). Where did that come from?

The actual name, as it turns out, should have been Gobnait—at least as far as the Irish are concerned. The trouble is, for those Irish families adhering to the Catholic faith, all church records were kept in Latin, not English, and certainly not in the Irish language. But not all traditional Irish names were translated into Latin—at least not easily. Indeed, translating a name like Gobnait even into English results in some unexpected options.

Indeed, one list found online of Irish given names and their anglicized equivalents—a helpful resource for those of us researching our roots back in Ireland—is quite lengthy and, I suspect, does not include the entire universe of possibilities. Another list provides the next step of translations between English names and their Latin equivalents. Somehow, we are stuck in the middle, juggling the two lists to figure out just whether the baptismal record we just found might indeed be the right one for our Irish ancestor.

In the case of a name like Gobnait—which, by the way, is officially supposed to be noted in Latin as Gobnata—it comes from the name of an early medieval Irish saint. Gobnait's long history, though, does not mean the woman has been forgotten over the centuries; to the contrary, there are regions in Ireland where she is still venerated, one of which is in County Kerry, the same place where my father-in-law's Falvey roots originated.

The difficulty is that, for whatever reason through the more recent centuries, the given name Gobnait attained a number of nicknames which, to an English speaking researcher, might not make sense. Take a look at this list of possible variants, said to include names as different as Abigail and Deborah.

Knowing this now, I can safely assert that Daniel Cullinane's wife, whether listed in church records as "Gubboneta" or "Debora," was indeed the same person. And since I discovered a DNA match who claims to have descended from a son of this couple, it won't surprise me to find more records with these variants for Daniel Cullinane's wife as I seek to verify how this DNA match connects with my father-in-law's family. 

A Johanna Sighting

 

Using whatever Catholic parish records are available to researchers online today, I've been on a hunt for any mention of the name of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey Kelly. Since this search entails finding her name in Irish records in the 1800s, I'm already at a disadvantage, due to the destruction of so many of such documents. 

Coming up empty-handed in so many of these searches, I turned to a new approach: looking for the Falvey name recorded in the mother's maiden name, or even as the name of a baptized child's godparents. Anything to find a mention that could point me back to Johanna's own family in County Kerry, Ireland. And, at last, I spotted my first Johanna sighting.

That first victory came when I was reviewing baptismal records in the Catholic parish of Kilcummin. In an entry dated August 10, 1856, I found the baptism of Mary Cullinane. I wouldn't have otherwise been looking for that surname, but since Mary's mother's maiden name happened to show up as Falvey, I had to take a look.

Mary's father was named Daniel Cullinane, and the mother identified as "Debora" Falvey. The family was listed as having been from the townland of Knockauncore. This was a promising sign, since I had already spotted several other entries linking the Falvey family to that same townland.

My next step was to finish reviewing that church entry to see who was listed as the godparents. In this case, however, there was only one name entered: Johanna Falvey. I wasn't sure why there weren't the customary two names entered for the sponsors, but nonetheless glad to have seen Johanna mentioned somewhere in records from this part of County Kerry.

With that possible relationship in mind, I then went on to find all the baptismal records for Daniel Cullinane's other children. After Mary's 1856 baptism, I located one for son Timothy in 1858, though the family was said to have been located in the townland of Clashnagarrane by then, five kilometers away. I found a nearly illegible baptism for a son whose name looked to be John Cullinane in July of 1860, also at that second townland.

Then, after a gap of nearly six years, suddenly the family was back in Knockauncore for the baptisms of Honora in 1866, Anne in 1868, Michael in 1871, and Daniel in 1874. In only one of those other children's baptisms was a Falvey included as a godparent: someone named Mary Falvey, who was the godmother for Honora.

If we could presume that the age-old tradition of only naming siblings or in-laws as a child's sponsors still held, we could conclude that Mary would be sister to both the mother, Debora, and our own Johanna, but after the years of the Great Famine, that was not necessarily always the case. We'd have to test those connections further.

However, there was something else I noticed in my survey of baptismal entries in the Falveys' home church. For some of Daniel Cullinane's children, their baptismal records noted his wife to be named Debora. But in others, the name appeared to be Guboneta, or Gobinetta. One might presume that Daniel had lost his first wife and remarried, but if we follow the baptisms in date entry, Debora makes an appearance in both the earliest and the later entries. (And, to confuse matters even further, there was one baptism in which the mother's given name was listed as Maria.)

There is a possible reason for this variance, of course, but to explain it will take a bit of time. We'll look into this matter tomorrow.

Possible Patrick Connections

Last week, I explored a possible connection between my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey Kelly, and someone in County Kerry, Ireland, named Patrick Falvey. Could Patrick Falvey and his wife, Anne Fleming, be related to Johanna's own line? It was time to explore what records I could find concerning this couple.

We had originally found the family in records of the Catholic parish of Kilcummin, beginning with their November 24, 1824, marriage record. Now, it was time to branch out to find any mention of them as parents in the baptismal records of their children.

While later records of their supposed daughter, Johanna Falvey, located her in the townland of Knockauncore, the first baptismal record I found for this earlier Falvey couple was in a townland called "Knockmanigh." The record was for the baptism of a son named John, dated June 1 of 1827. The godparents were listed as John and Catharine Connor.

The townland listed in the parish record is now actually spelled Knockmanagh, as I could see when seeking a map to identify the location (see entry #34 here). Checking maps again, I saw that the distance between this townland and the one traditionally established as the Falvey home, Knockauncore, was a bit over six kilometers, or a walk of about ninety minutes.

With the next appearance of Patrick and Anne as parents named in baptismal records, they had returned to Knockauncore. On May 24, 1835, they presented a son named Patrick for baptism in the same Kilcummin Catholic parish. The godparents listed for this occasion were Patrick Connor and Catherine Fleming—with Catherine likely being a sister of the baby's mother.

I was able to find a third baptism in this same church parish for a baby of Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming. Dated January 6, 1837, the record was for a son listed as Demetrius—not exactly what I had in mind as a distinctly Irish given name. However, knowing that Latin baptismal record traditions in Ireland's Catholic Church sometimes got creative with converting Irish children's names from the vernacular, I went looking for some assistance in "translating" this surprise. Sure enough, according to Claire Santry's (thankfully) still-available website, the "Latinised" name Demetrius in Catholic records could actually signify a child the family preferred to call Jeremiah, Jerome—or even Dermot or Darby.

Whatever the Falvey family chose to call him at home, this 1837 addition to the family could look to John Dugan and Ellen Doody as his godparents.

So far, those three were the only children of Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming for whom I could find baptismal records. No sign of Johanna—which meant I was off to examine not the names of candidates for baptism, not even their parents' names, but solely the names of the godparents in search of additional Falveys in the Kilcummin parish. Yes, it's hard work, slogging through those handwritten records, but the payoff was that I did actually find something worth following up on, tomorrow.

A Technology Tantrum

 

A little rant about technology tantrums may be in order, right at this point. I've been searching for online information hinting at the possible relatives of Johanna Falvey Kelly, my father-in-law's great-grandmother from County Kerry, Ireland. My strategy has been to find all the baptismal records I can for Johanna's children, in the hopes that the godparents named in the documents would be the traditionally-designated siblings or in-laws of Johanna or her husband, John Kelly. I want to use these to guide me in building a possible listing of Johanna's siblings.

Unfortunately at this point, I am not researching from home, but at our family's annual August vacation destination—which means I am at the mercy of hotel Internet connections. And yesterday's connection was spotty. Try as I might, I could not finish my final edit—nor add the updated link I had hoped to include in the article on Currow. As in providing a viable answer to my own question, "Where in the world is Currow?"

Turns out, the final word on Irish locations happened to be the final website I had consulted. (Isn't that always the case?!) According to the Placenames Database of Ireland, logainm.ie, Currow is indeed a "village"—or, as the website puts it, a "population centre"—within the civil district of Killeentierna. But conveniently for us, this website also provides one additional clarification: Currow is considered to be part of the townland of Ranalough.

Backtracking to my "oldies but goodies" map, I could then find Ranalough's location on the townlands map for Killeentierna (see townland number nine) and judge whether it was a reasonable distance between the earlier and later locations of the Kelly family home. It's not exactly what I'd call a sweet summer day's meander through the countryside, but doable for someone fit for a hike: from the Kilcummin townland of Knockauncore, where we had previously found mentions of Johanna Falvey, to Ranalough in Killeentierna, Google maps puts the distance at just under fourteen kilometers, a journey taking about three hours.

Whatever computer glitch dogged me on the final edit of yesterday's post has apparently become the ghost that disappeared overnight, for today, I've been back to searching for baptismal records again. In hopes that FamilySearch.org's Full Text Search has, by now, added enough resources from Ireland to help me find my Falveys, I've taken a closer look there, as well. 

Result: though many are transcriptions, not the actual digitized baptismal records—thus missing the sought-for element of godparent names—I've found a font of useful way-finders pointing me in new directions. We have a lot to review in the next few days, both in Johanna's generation and in the generation of her likely parents.

Losing the Location

 

Sometimes, it seems the only way to locate our Irish ancestors would be to have some local guidance. That, at least, is how I felt after trying to find the location of the two Marys born to John Kelly and Johanna Falvey. Looking into Irish records from the outside, as a foreigner, may mean I'm missing something in the translation. It seems I've lost the locations mentioned in those Kelly baptismal records.

According to baptismal records in the parish of Killeentierna, the first Mary, born about September of 1864, was recorded as hailing from a place called Currow. The second Mary, arriving in March of 1867, was noted as being a resident of Barnfield.

All well and good—until I started looking for each location on a map. After all, there could have been a chance that we were seeing were two couples in the same time period, each with the husband named John Kelly—a very real possibility in Ireland—and the wife known as Johanna Falvey (again, in County Kerry, also likely). I needed to see how closely each location was situated to the other. If the two spots were distant from each other, the chance that these were baptismal records of two separate families would be much higher.

So much for plans. Since the tiniest of Irish geographic designations were classified as "townlands," I had expected Currow and Barnfield to be likewise within that classification. However, neither Currow nor Barnfield could be located on that oldies-but-goodies website I had mentioned last weekend. With a sigh of resignation, I turned to the much more modern resource for Irish land divisions, townlands.ie, but found no guidance there. So where was this place, Currow, after all?

I gave up and looked at Wikipedia. There, in an entry labeled—duh—Currow, I learned that, somehow, it was not considered a townland, but a village. Within County Kerry—at least I still have the right spot—it is part of the Electoral Division of Killeentierna, as well as being included in the Catholic parish of the same name.

Thankfully, the Wikipedia article continued with a section labeled Townlands, in which it explained how "the names of Currow's townlands reflect the local history and landscape." However, in reviewing those fifty-plus townland names, I spotted several which were, in other sites, labeled as townlands of Killeentierna. Which way was it?

Bottom line: Barnfield was a townland included in that list. Somehow, somewhere in the vicinity of Currow lies a place called Barnfield. Wherever it is, it would surely have been close enough to have been the residence of a family who had previously been said to be a resident of Currow.

Until I can find more definitive resources for that location puzzle, I'll need to set aside the question of the two Marys. Besides, there are other baptismal records connected to the Kelly and Falvey families to pursue. After all, this particular quest's purpose is to gather the names of godparents for the Kelly children, godparents who would be the possible siblings of either John Kelly or his wife, Johanna Falvey.

Goal: Catalog Godparents

 

Family history explorations can sometimes bring us surprises. As I piece together the story of my father-in-law's Irish great-grandmother Johanna Falvey Kelly, searching for her name in every document I can find has led to something unexpected.

My goal this month in reviewing every document I can find is to catalog the names of the godparents for each of her children's baptisms. By the time Johanna and her husband, John Kelly, arrived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, it was clear to see from the subsequent census—the 1870 U.S. Census—that the family already included four children, all of whom, with the exception of ten month old baby Patrick, had been born in Ireland. That included eldest son, Timothy, plus daughters Catherine and Mary.

Taking my search back to Ireland—specifically to the parish of Kilcummin in County Kerry, where I had found them before—I began looking for baptismal records. While I haven't yet found one for either Timothy or Catherine, I did find one for the Kelly daughter Mary, but it was in a different church parish, called Killeentierna.

Looking closer, however, I spotted another problem. This Mary was baptized on September 25 of 1864. The Kelly daughter by that name in the 1870 census was listed as a three year old child.

Though the date seemed off, I recorded the godparents' names, anyhow: James and Margaret Fleming. The church register noted the family's residence in a place called Currow—a location which puzzled me at first, and will be something to examine in more detail tomorrow.

Then, it was time to search for the "real" Mary, the Kelly child born about 1867 in County Kerry. And there she was, in that second parish, with the residence identified as Barnfield. Here, the godparents were listed as John Fleming and Mary O'Brien.

While the parents were consistently listed as John Kelly and Johanna Falvey, the change of location—not to mention, the two daughters each named Mary—puzzled me. I thought it might be time to head back to the maps of County Kerry's parishes and townlands to look for some guidance.

Sometimes, Older is Better

When our family history takes us across the Atlantic to homes in other countries, we need reliable resources to achieve our research goals. As I work on the roots of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna Falvey Kelly, I've been faced with a collection of place names in County Kerry but I'm lacking any sense of place. Especially when it comes to the concept of townlands, I have no way to relate. I need a map.

Fortunately, Google brought me back in time to a website resource which, years ago, I had known all too well. In its heyday, it was a go-to site for those of us chomping at the bit to use online resources for genealogy—before archives and other repositories were ready to technologically accommodate the deluge of our research demands.

That old resource was called RootsWeb. Originally a smorgasbord of family history tidbits submitted by users around the world in that each-one-help-another spirit, it is now hosted, years after it was launched, by Ancestry.com. Thankfully, many of the original submissions posted on the site are still preserved and accessible. Many of the pages put up by individuals and collectives included efforts which were not only helpful back then in the late 1990s and past the turn of the century, but useful today, as well. It's just that now the material is in read-only format.

Yes, it's been about thirty years since RootsWeb appeared on the online genealogy scene, but now that I'm puzzling over County Kerry townlands for my father-in-law's Falvey roots, what should appear in my Google search, but a link leading me to a wonderful old RootsWeb post on that very subject. And—this is the important part—it includes a series of maps.

Granted, for this month's research puzzle, I had been using the Irish website, townlands.ie, and it is indeed helpful. But frozen in time in the RootsWeb collection is a page explaining Civil Parishes of County Kerry, with links to townland lists and maps. Thus, scrolling down that page to the section containing the map of County Kerry's eighty seven civil parishes, I can click on Kilcummin, for instance, and find the Falvey family's former residence in Knockauncore, just as the church records had indicated. And when I start finding Johanna Falvey and her husband, John Kelly, appearing in townlands in other civil parishes—Killeentierna, for instance, as we'll see next week—I can see the location for myself, and determine the distance between each townland.

The RootsWeb website is now read-only, since its functionality has morphed over the years as computer technology requirements have, by necessity, had to change and upgrade. Seeing what has happened in the effort to preserve Rootsweb over the decades, I shudder to think that someday, that one section of the website with those helpful maps might disappear. My many thanks to those who worked to create those interlinking resources—and I hope those resources remain accessible. But just in case, I did print out a copy of the maps so I could make some handwritten notes as I follow the Falveys and Kellys about in County Kerry. This may be an "old" resource, but it certainly has not lost its usefulness. 

Adding Anne and Patrick

 

What if Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming could be the parents of my current research target for this month? The documentation I found yesterday looks promising, but of course not sufficient to firmly clinch the relationship between this couple and my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey Kelly.

I decided to take the risk and enter their names in my father-in-law's family tree for a test run. Then, I jumped over to Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool to see what might materialize among the scant few DNA matches related to Johanna Falvey's line.

While not a stellar result, Patrick and Anne are now listed as the ancestors of eleven of my husband's DNA matches. Most of those matches actually connect through direct relationships to Johanna, of course, but there are now two other supposed siblings from whom some DNA matches descend. The majority of these new connections tie us to descendants from New Zealand, as I had discovered in the past. These are matches whose founding Falvey ancestor, whoever he was, emigrated from County Kerry in Ireland. We still haven't been able to discern the connection, though we've struggled with that for years. Hopefully, discovering more about Patrick and Anne may lead us closer to an answer.

However, since I now have Ancestry's ProTools to experiment with, I can use their "Shared Matches" provision, then sort the results for any given DNA match from closest to most distant relationship.

This approach expands the range of possible Falvey DNA matches from the original eleven proposed by ThruLines to a much broader set of cousins. And depending on the luck of the draw, as I move from one possible Falvey connection to his or her shared matches, I can sometimes find matches whose close relatives have also tested, helping me pinpoint the exact spot in the family tree.

Granted, not that these tools make sorting matches an automatic—or even streamlined—process. I am still bouncing between matches in the United States, in New Zealand and Australia, even in Canada, besides the expected descendants still living in Ireland. But by returning to the original church records in Kilcummin parish, and especially looking for residents of the townland of Knockauncore, I am beginning to piece together a network of parents, children, and even godparent relationships that might reveal a bit more information, despite lack of explicit documentation. Coupling that with a network of DNA matches may supercharge the effort.

The network which draws together these distant cousins from around the world may well be the tool which defeats the destruction of so many historic documents back home in Ireland.

Could This be the One?

There are some times when, seeking records of Irish ancestors, we stumble upon an old entry, stare at the miserable handwriting, and wonder, could this be the one? 

"Is it or isn't it?" That's been a question I've been asking myself repeatedly this month, while trawling through digitized copies of baptismal and marriage records from the 1800s in County Kerry, home to Johanna Falvey in her native Ireland. Despite her position as my father-in-law's great-grandmother, that near relationship could just as well have been several more generations removed, judging from the scarcity of Catholic church records from that century. However, I think I may have found something.

Examining the entries from the church parish of Kilcummin, the same place where we discovered the entry about Johanna's own marriage to John Kelly, I ran across one entry dated years before that, in November of 1824. Seeing the date, I nearly held my breath; it's been so hard to find records from that early in the century for the other branches of my father-in-law's family.

The entry named the groom as Patritius Falvey—Patrick—and his bride as Anna Fleming. Fast forward from that 1824 wedding to the 1853 entry in Griffith's Valuation, and perhaps we have discovered the maiden name for the Anne Falvey listed in that later record from the townland of Knockauncore. And though I haven't yet been able to locate a baptismal record for our Johanna, seeing her years later with her husband John Kelly in their immigrant household in the 1870 census in Fort Wayne, Indiana, reveals one encouraging note: their second-born son was named Patrick, just as Irish naming traditions would lead us to expect—if this marriage record for Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming is the correct couple.

Finding these encouraging entries bids me take a closer look at what else might have been entered in that church register. After all, between pages fading over time and the challenges of deciphering handwritten entries, a surname like Falvey doesn't always make the transition unscathed in indexing processes. I've seen some entries listed as "Felvey," so I wouldn't be surprised at other variations which could foil the search process. Spotting the family's surname through a page by page search may be my only alternative, but at least there are some compelling possibilities, even on first glance. We'll review some of those next week.

Townlands and Tax Records

 

Working our way backwards in time for Irish ancestors can be challenging, once we've pushed beyond the dates of those most recent publicly available census enumerations—1911 and 1901. It's a struggle to find records on Irish ancestors, once we dive into the 1800s. Still, we've been fortunate to find a church record which seems to be the couple we've been seeking, Johanna Falvey and John Kelly, which contained a reference to the specific townland where Johanna once lived.

Once we've found that potential townland residence for Johanna Falvey's family, let's take a look at any records we can find around the time of her 1859 marriage to John Kelly. One obvious resource would be the tax records of the time, with the one most well-known to researchers being Griffith's Valuation.

Granted, Griffith's Valuation was completed in County Kerry several years before that point, in 1853, but at least that is one resource now available to us online. I pulled up the transcription for the specific townland we're zeroing in on—Knockauncore—to gain a listing of names of the residents.

According to Griffith's, the townland of Knockauncore contained a total of eighteen entries for taxable properties, illustrating the diminutive size of such geographic entities. Even within those eighteen entries, we can see some names repeated within the list.

My first goal was to look for the surname of our Johanna—Falvey. Sure enough, there was one person listed there, by the name of Anne Falvey. Could she have been the mother of Johanna? Hard to tell at this point, but it was definitely encouraging to find someone there in that townland with that same surname.

Next question: what about Johanna's husband, John Kelly? Any promising signs for him? After all, the marriage record only designated where Johanna had lived; there was no such mention for John's residence. Griffith's, however, revealed another encouraging detail: there was someone in that same townland named Mary Kelly.

In addition to those two family names, I decided to make a note of the other surnames in Knockauncore since it was such a small area, keeping in mind the concept of cluster genealogy. After all, those neighbors could also be family members; I just haven't yet been able to see any connections.

Among the neighbors of Anne Falvey and Mary Kelly, I found Fleming, Keane, Duggan, McCarthy, Ryan, Connor, and Sullivan—all very traditional and easily recognizable Irish surnames.

Since I realized that there are other valuation records besides Griffith's posted online, I decided to review the surnames represented in Knockauncore for those other records, as well. After finding two more such records, the next step was to list each tenant's name and create a chart to track which names appeared in which of the three total tax records I had found. This, of course, is almost like the valuation records we find in Ireland today, where one tenant's name remains on the books until lined out with the new resident's name written over the original entry—a great way to trace a house history.

My hunch about the value of tracking neighbors' names may turn out to bear results, an encouraging sign I spotted when looking further for records with the Falvey name. We'll turn to one such possibility tomorrow.

Getting Situated

 

An ancestor's records may point us to her Irish origin in a particular county, and we foreigners get all excited. For someone living in North America, the designation of a county may sound fairly specific, but for those in Ireland, there is quite a way more to drill down before we hit the real answer about where that ancestor's home was actually situated. 

In her adopted new home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Johanna Falvey Kelly, my father-in-law's great-grandmother, was said to have been born in County Kerry. Admittedly, finding that information on her death certificate and in her obituary represents a great start. But researching Irish forebears, as the advice goes, requires us to drill down to the most specific local region, known as a townland.

Finding a townland can be challenging. Think of this: in County Kerry, there are a mere 2,756 townlands within its boundaries. Ready to start searching?

One way to divide and conquer this maze of possibilities is to seek for the correct civil parish. That approach will essentially whittle down the total of possible townlands to a more manageable number. If we look at the civil parish of Kilcummin, for instance, we now have only seventy six townlands to contend with.

Looking for Johanna—or any sign of other Falvey family members—in County Kerry is best accomplished by looking through government or church records. Fortunately for this particular month's research project, Johanna and her family were among the most recent of my father-in-law's migrating Irish ancestors, leaving Ireland long after the Great Famine—though not long enough afterwards to have made an appearance in the only preserved census records the country now possesses, those of 1901 and 1911. However, the more recent date of migration means we may find her name in better-preserved records than the crumbling, gap-ridden, or entirely missing documents of the years prior to 1850. 

Sure enough, I was able to find one promising marriage record for Johanna Falvey and John Kelly in the church parish of Kilcummin. On March 2, 1859, the Catholic priest noted that he married John Kelly and Johanna Falvey of Knockauncore, with witnesses' surnames Fitzgerald and Fleming.

That "Knockauncore" refers to Johanna's possible townland, a 266-acres package of rural farmland which the Falvey family and their neighbors likely called home. Let's take a closer look at what we can find about records in Knockauncore tomorrow. 

Where the Falvey Name Leads Us

 

While the search for other ancestors may eventually put us in a tailspin, looking for a surname like Falvey has one fortunate benefit: it points us straight to County Kerry, Ireland. Granted, I already know that fact from Johanna Falvey Kelly's obituary, published in Fort Wayne, Indiana, following her 1903 death. But even if I hadn't accessed that old newspaper article, the history of the Falvey surname would guide me in that direction.

It's not every surname which warrants an entry on Wikipedia, but there it is among all the digital entries: a brief overview of the history of the Falvey surname. While it is interesting to know about the long span of the surname's history—or at least its conjecture—descending from one of the High Kings of Ireland, what I want to zero in on this month will be far less regal. All I'm hoping for is the specific line involving my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna. 

For that, just as the Wikipedia entry pointed out, I'm far more likely to find kin if I look at the region around the Lakes of Killarney, or the Dingle Peninsula, as the Wikipedia history surmises, though anywhere in County Kerry or nearby County Cork might be a reasonable target. And, as that article also noted, to look among the common folk in those more humble rural areas.

Sure enough, if we push our search closer to modern times—at least by the time of the still-existent 1901 or 1911 census enumerations—we can see the spread of Falvey residences across the southwestern part of Ireland in surname distribution maps.

Our task this week will be to push back as far as modern documentation can go, to see where the Falvey surname is listed. Granted, this will be a spotty picture, taking in only those on property records or tax rolls. As we do that, we'll also need to get up to speed on the lay of the land: the names and the locations of the townlands in County Kerry which contain mention of the Falvey surname. We have a lot to cover this week, but let's make those townland diagrams our next stop.

Meet Johanna

 

When it comes to stories, we often think of the quaint launch into the narrative: "Once upon a time." That may work well for fairy tales, but in the tales of our family's history, we sometimes must rely on the end of the story before we can learn about the "once upon a time" beginning.

That's the way it has been for my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey. Most of what I learned about Johanna came from obituaries published in local newspapers in Fort Wayne, Indiana, far from her native home in Ireland.

However, even in the obituaries, I ran into conflicting information. Delighted to learn she had other relatives who also emigrated from County Kerry, I then was stumped by their identity. According to the May 1, 1903, edition of the Fort Wayne Sentinel, Johanna was survived by "several sisters living in Ireland and one in New Zealand." Turning to the next day's edition of the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, however, I see she had "several sisters and brothers who live in Ireland."

Fortunately for all us Falvey researchers one hundred twenty-something years later, we now know it is far more likely that the Falvey connection in New Zealand was a brother, if a sibling at all. But even that will take time to puzzle out.

Slowly, I've been trawling through digitized microfilmed records preserved in Ireland, piecing together the story of the Falvey family in County Kerry. Though the specific townlands vary from record to record, it seems the documents are talking about the same family. We'll take a closer look this month at Johanna Falvey's earlier years, long before her arrival in the United States in about 1869. But even piecing that together may rely on more records stateside than across the "pond." And what is found in Ireland may need some additional conjectures as to whether they appropriately fit within Johanna's own family story.

What we know for now is that, back in Ireland, Johanna Falvey married John Kelly, and together they raised three, possibly four, of their children before deciding to move across the Atlantic for a better future. In America, the family headed for Fort Wayne, Indiana—not a typical immigrant destination, but likely in pursuit of a job, based on information already provided from relatives who had traveled there before them.

There in Fort Wayne, the couple welcomed two more sons into the family, and suffered the loss of two other children. There, after working in one of the railroad shops as a blacksmith, John Kelly died in 1892, and his wife Johanna joined him eleven years later in 1903. (Incidentally, never trust what's engraved on a headstone; always seek additional confirmation.)

From what's been preserved from the end of their story in Fort Wayne, we'll try to inch our way backwards through time to discover the earlier years of this couple in Ireland and, hopefully, to piece together names of possible close relatives in County Kerry. In the end, our goal will be to follow those lines of collateral relatives to reveal the connection with not only the DNA matches in New Zealand, but in all the other locations where Johanna Falvey's relatives eventually migrated.

Counting the Results of our Efforts

 

Some research projects seem to shower down multiple tidbits of information, while others only eke out a bare hint of an answer. With last month's slow progress on my father-in-law's Flanagan line, you might expect today's biweekly report to be lackluster. Surprise! That simply isn't so, now that I've counted the results of my efforts.

Truth be told, the jump in this latest progress report is actually owing to a persistent refusal not to let go of the research goal for the previous month. Yep, I've still been working on my mother-in-law's Rinehart line from June, behind the scenes.

While that chore is nothing to write home about, the quest to include descendants of the newly-discovered children of Simon Rinehart has added up to a significant number of names on my mother-in-law's side of the family tree. Just in the past two weeks, with hardly a Flanagan among the names I've been finding, I managed to enter 212 additional Rinehart descendants to my in-laws' family tree. The tree now has a total of 41,059 individuals documented. And I'm still not quite done with that task from June.

My own tree, in the meantime, has stood stock still at 40,259 individuals. I'll resume work on that tree in the last quarter of the year, when I move from my father-in-law's Irish ancestry to the Polish forebears of my own father. In the meantime, we'll begin work in earnest on my father-in-law's Falvey ancestors from County Kerry tomorrow.

When There's a Job to be Done

 

Whether working in genealogical research or in any other line of work, to get a job done, you need the right tools. If this isn't the first time the job's been done, hopefully those tools will be found stored in the right place.

In the case of our task for August—the eighth of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025 being my father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna Falvey—I was unfortunately remiss in putting away those tools from the last time I visited this brick wall ancestor's records. Granted, I haven't struggled to piece together Johanna's story since July of 2020, so I guess a little self-forgiveness is in order. Besides, I made up for my shortcomings with some remedial effort yesterday.

Of all my gleanings on the Falvey family in the past, I gained the most information by emailing with an unlikely research partner: a Falvey descendant living halfway around the world from me. For almost five years, we had put our heads together over this research mystery, each of us sharing what we knew about our respective sides of the family. From time to time, we were joined in the conversation by mutual DNA matches, though even with all the input, we still couldn't pinpoint the most recent common ancestors back in County Kerry, Ireland.

Apparently, the Falvey family's descendants are widespread; among the contacts made were descendants all across the United States, as well as in Australia and New Zealand and, of course, Ireland. Comparing notes with several researchers keen on finding their roots can add up to a considerable amount of correspondence. Even if it is digital, it does take up storage space. And it still depends on the organizing skill of putting things where they can be easily found once again.

That was the main task at hand. I've always kept a set of digital folders in my email account for family research communication, organized by surname. At the end of this review session yesterday, I can now say all the Falvey communication is tucked away in its rightful place, having been reviewed as a launching pad for the continuation of this research journey in the coming weeks.

On Monday, I'll re-introduce Johanna Falvey and review what we've already uncovered about her story, but first, we'll need to check on that biweekly review tomorrow. Then, on to the brick wall battle for this month.