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.

Will it be Any Better The Next Time Around?

 

Every time I select another Irish ancestor to research from my father-in-law's roots, I wonder: will it be any better the next time around? There is such a dearth of Irish records. It seems like not much more than an invitation to jump into the document void when I choose another one of those Twelve Most Wanted for the year; all my father-in-law's ancestors came to America from Ireland, the land of destroyed records.

For this month, we'll return to puzzle over Johanna Falvey, my father-in-law's great-grandmother from somewhere in the region known as the Lakes of Killarney. My only positive signal is that her 1903 obituary mentioned being survived by several siblings remaining back in her Irish homeland.

As I mentioned back at the beginning of the year when I selected Johanna as the eighth of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025, it may be possible that any research progress we make will be thanks to the addition of more DNA matches. I've already been in correspondence with one Falvey DNA match. As if a sign of forthcoming serendipity, not long ago I received an email from another Falvey researcher who was sharing recent discoveries. Perhaps there will be more to find in Ireland, after all.

Each time I return to wrestle with those brick-wall ancestors, I struggle with the idea of trying, once again, to succeed at what I had already failed to accomplish in prior years. Then I remind myself of all the advances in online searching—FamilySearch.org's Full Text search, for instance—and I'm encouraged to try once again. This month's pursuit of Johanna Falvey Kelly will be one of those "once again" attempts at discovering her roots in County Kerry.