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.
Hi Jacqi! You probably know this but baptisms before births are pretty common. There was a fine for not reporting the birth within a specific time frame. As you can see the birth wasn't reported until August 15, 1874. My guess would be that the time frame was a month, so they gave the date of the 23rd to make sure there was not question of being outside the time frame
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