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.