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.