Townlands and Tax Records

 

Working our way backwards in time for Irish ancestors can be challenging, once we've pushed beyond the dates of those most recent publicly available census enumerations—1911 and 1901. It's a struggle to find records on Irish ancestors, once we dive into the 1800s. Still, we've been fortunate to find a church record which seems to be the couple we've been seeking, Johanna Falvey and John Kelly, which contained a reference to the specific townland where Johanna once lived.

Once we've found that potential townland residence for Johanna Falvey's family, let's take a look at any records we can find around the time of her 1859 marriage to John Kelly. One obvious resource would be the tax records of the time, with the one most well-known to researchers being Griffith's Valuation.

Granted, Griffith's Valuation was completed in County Kerry several years before that point, in 1853, but at least that is one resource now available to us online. I pulled up the transcription for the specific townland we're zeroing in on—Knockauncore—to gain a listing of names of the residents.

According to Griffith's, the townland of Knockauncore contained a total of eighteen entries for taxable properties, illustrating the diminutive size of such geographic entities. Even within those eighteen entries, we can see some names repeated within the list.

My first goal was to look for the surname of our Johanna—Falvey. Sure enough, there was one person listed there, by the name of Anne Falvey. Could she have been the mother of Johanna? Hard to tell at this point, but it was definitely encouraging to find someone there in that townland with that same surname.

Next question: what about Johanna's husband, John Kelly? Any promising signs for him? After all, the marriage record only designated where Johanna had lived; there was no such mention for John's residence. Griffith's, however, revealed another encouraging detail: there was someone in that same townland named Mary Kelly.

In addition to those two family names, I decided to make a note of the other surnames in Knockauncore since it was such a small area, keeping in mind the concept of cluster genealogy. After all, those neighbors could also be family members; I just haven't yet been able to see any connections.

Among the neighbors of Anne Falvey and Mary Kelly, I found Fleming, Keane, Duggan, McCarthy, Ryan, Connor, and Sullivan—all very traditional and easily recognizable Irish surnames.

Since I realized that there are other valuation records besides Griffith's posted online, I decided to review the surnames represented in Knockauncore for those other records, as well. After finding two more such records, the next step was to list each tenant's name and create a chart to track which names appeared in which of the three total tax records I had found. This, of course, is almost like the valuation records we find in Ireland today, where one tenant's name remains on the books until lined out with the new resident's name written over the original entry—a great way to trace a house history.

My hunch about the value of tracking neighbors' names may turn out to bear results, an encouraging sign I spotted when looking further for records with the Falvey name. We'll turn to one such possibility tomorrow.