Two Brothers Bound for Boston?

 

Discovering whatever became of the children of an ancestor's sibling can be a challenging prospect, especially if that ancestor lived in Ireland. While we can find baptismal records for many of the children of Daniel Cullinane and his wife Gobnait Falvey, tracing what became of those children after their birth in County Kerry in the 1860s and 1870s has not led to reasonable answers.

Then there is this question of whether any of the Cullinane children remained in Ireland. Though their birth post-dated the horrific famine, many Irish were still emigrating in hopes of a more promising future—which led me to a question to consider. Could two of the Cullinane brothers have been bound for Boston as young adults?

Though the reason which first prompted my question has to do with DNA matches to this line, on the other hand, there is substantial documentation to make me wonder. Take the Cullinanes' son Timothy. Someone by that same name showed up in marriage records for the city of Chelsea, just over the river from Boston in the United States. The 1883 register entry shows a twenty three year old Irish laborer by the name of Timothy Cullinane of Boston about to wed Margaret McCarthy of Chelsea. This would place his birth at about 1860, just a bit younger than what our Timothy's October 1858 baptismal record had noted. Coincidentally, this soon to be married Timothy claimed his parents were Daniel and Deborah.

A document only ten years later showed the unfortunate Timothy Cullinane yielding to death coming from pulmonalis phthisis—or tuberculosis. Though his age given at the time of his death would put his birth around August of 1861, and his parents' names as Daniel Cullinane and "Abby" Falvey, knowing what we now know about the nicknames for Gobnait Falvey, it is likely that we are still tracking the right Timothy Cullinane.

Or how about this other Cullinane immigrant to the Boston area. On May 15, 1890, this son of Daniel and "Debby" Cullinane married another Irish immigrant, Joanna Sullivan. He was likely the same immigrant, born in County Kerry, who filed his petition for United States citizenship in Massachusetts on September 26, 1889. And, of most keen interest to me, he was an ancestor of a DNA match I've been eyeing.

Though it seems promising that this, too, was a son of our Daniel Cullinane and Gobnait Falvey, there are several problems with this hypothesis. The first is that the man reported his occupation to be a marble worker—not a typical line of work for the son of an Irish tenant farmer. In addition, this man signed his name on his petition for citizenship, an unlikely ability for a Catholic raised during that era of religious discrimination in Ireland. But key to all this questioning is the fact that the name Patrick was not among those baptismal records I had found for Cullinane children, back in the Kilcummin parish in County Kerry where his parents attended church. Not, especially, for the date at which this man reported his birth: June 15 of 1860.

Whether that Patrick turns out to be a missing child of that same Cullinane family, I can't yet tell. But this is a call to go back to square one and examine the documents to build my own tree for this DNA match independently.