Looking Ahead

 

While I'm working on extricating myself from the current tree-building mess I'm in, I thought I'd take a moment, despite being early, to introduce next month's research project. After all, tree-building, while a lot of work, only rarely provides the kind of fascinating discoveries worth writing about.

As the Twelve Most Wanted project has done for the past several years, come July, I shift my focus away from the three selected ancestors from my mother-in-law's line and move on to my father-in-law's tree. With a step like that, we leap from colonial America to land in the turmoil of mid-1800s Ireland, a very different part of the dominion of the United Kingdom.

In the next three months, we'll focus on three Irish ancestors from my father-in-law's family. The process will begin with the selection for July: John Kelly.

Regardless of who he was in my father-in-law's family tree—we'll get to that next Monday—we first need to consider how convoluted a search like that can be. 

Just by considering his name—John Kelly—we already realize what a challenge we face in the coming month. A given name like John, bestowed upon an Irish-born son of the mid-1800s, would put him in ample good company. While I don't have statistics for popular names in the exact year of his birth, just taking a glance at name popularity statistics for a time period just after his death, we can see that the name John was a popular choice for Irish parents. One source indicated that, by 1911, John was the most common man's name in Ireland.

Add to that predicament the fact that the surname Kelly won't make the situation any easier. Based on data available in the mid-1800s, the surname Kelly wasn't exactly the number one surname on the island but it came in close—the second most common surname in all of Ireland, after Murphy.

And there you have it: the task lying ahead of us for next month's selection for my Twelve Most Wanted. Truth be told, I've needed to jump into this messy research project for years but being aware of the challenge just seemed to help point my attention in other directions. Now that I'm running out of low hanging fruit in my hunt for ancestral history, it's finally time to face up to the challenge when July gets here next week.