The Tedium of Incremental Steps

 

At this stage of the search for Falvey family connections, we've entered what I call the tedium of incremental steps. Not much action is taking place, but the step by step moves are necessary in order to make any progress on our research question.

We've been focusing on the family of one possible sister of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey of County Kerry, Ireland. This sister married a man named Daniel Cullinane and, for the most part, remained in the same townland, Knockauncore, where I had previously found Johanna before her own  marriage and migration to the United States.

Since the Cullinane family had at least four children born after the date at which Ireland instituted civil registrations for everyone—finally including Catholics—I decided to locate the government records of their birth. I found an entry for each of those four—Hanoria, Ann, Michael, and Daniel—noting the discrepancy between dates of birth noted in each child's baptismal record and that of the civil registration. Who knows which date each child would carry throughout life as a way of secondary identification.

The tedium of it all wasn't necessarily in finding those four civil registrations. Where the true grunt work begins is in the next step: trying to locate each of these Cullinane children twenty to thirty years later in marriage records.

Such a task assumes a number of premises. For one thing, the assumption that the child lived to adulthood. A second assumption would be that the child, now grown, remained at home to be married in Ireland—not somewhere across an ocean in any of the locations where we've already found Falvey DNA cousins: Australia, New Zealand, or even North America.

The draw, though, is that it is possible to find such records, if those premises turned out to be true. If the children remained in Ireland, roughly in the same neighborhood as where they were born, not only might I be able to muddle through the many name twins who had gotten married, but I could theoretically push ahead yet one additional step: look for them in the death records of Ireland, currently available online from about 1871 until fifty years before our current year.

Finding marriage and death records is not a task limited to only those four youngest children of the Cullinane family. Though I can't find any birth entries in those civil registrations for the older Cullinane children, they might be discoverable in marriage or death records. Add even more tedium.

Still, considering the rare find of an ancestor in Irish records, wouldn't the tedium be worth the possible result? Though this process won't necessarily be something for which I'll write up the blow-by-blow details, if any surprises do show up, I promise to mention them.