Translating Gobnait

 

When we see a mother's name change from one child's baptismal record to the next, do we presume that the father listed in the documents had remarried? That, after all, was the situation we found when we assembled all the Catholic baptismal records for the children of Daniel Cullinane in County Kerry, Ireland. For some of his children's records, the child's mother was said to have been named Debora. In others, it was either Gubbenelas (for son John), Gubboneta (for Honora) or Gobinetta (for Michael). Where did that come from?

The actual name, as it turns out, should have been Gobnait—at least as far as the Irish are concerned. The trouble is, for those Irish families adhering to the Catholic faith, all church records were kept in Latin, not English, and certainly not in the Irish language. But not all traditional Irish names were translated into Latin—at least not easily. Indeed, translating a name like Gobnait even into English results in some unexpected options.

Indeed, one list found online of Irish given names and their anglicized equivalents—a helpful resource for those of us researching our roots back in Ireland—is quite lengthy and, I suspect, does not include the entire universe of possibilities. Another list provides the next step of translations between English names and their Latin equivalents. Somehow, we are stuck in the middle, juggling the two lists to figure out just whether the baptismal record we just found might indeed be the right one for our Irish ancestor.

In the case of a name like Gobnait—which, by the way, is officially supposed to be noted in Latin as Gobnata—it comes from the name of an early medieval Irish saint. Gobnait's long history, though, does not mean the woman has been forgotten over the centuries; to the contrary, there are regions in Ireland where she is still venerated, one of which is in County Kerry, the same place where my father-in-law's Falvey roots originated.

The difficulty is that, for whatever reason through the more recent centuries, the given name Gobnait attained a number of nicknames which, to an English speaking researcher, might not make sense. Take a look at this list of possible variants, said to include names as different as Abigail and Deborah.

Knowing this now, I can safely assert that Daniel Cullinane's wife, whether listed in church records as "Gubboneta" or "Debora," was indeed the same person. And since I discovered a DNA match who claims to have descended from a son of this couple, it won't surprise me to find more records with these variants for Daniel Cullinane's wife as I seek to verify how this DNA match connects with my father-in-law's family.