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.