Looking for the Rest of the Family

 

In the quest to find the origin of an Irish immigrant named John Kelly—I pause while you laugh—I had hoped to find additional baptismal records for the rest of his family. 

In the decades following the Irish famine years, John Kelly had married and begun a family. His marriage to Johanna Falvey pinpointed the sacrament's location in County Kerry as the diocese of Kilcummin, and noted their residence to have been in Knockauncore. Baptismal records for two of John's children provided locations within the Killeentierna diocese: Barnfield and Currow. Other transcribed records mention Molahiffe, possibly a civil registration rather than a religious record.

The various locations given for the family has long seemed confusing to me. I remember pondering that very puzzle before leaving on our family's research trip to Ireland, over a decade ago. (Hint: the trip not only didn't help resolve the issue, but had some locals puzzled over the designated townlands, too.)

One way to resolve that issue about geographic designations was to simply graph the distance. My first stop was to the National Library of Ireland's entry on Catholic parish records, where I found a sketch of County Kerry's dioceses, from which I drew a close-up of the locations in question.

It was easy to see how close the three in question were to each other. Molahiff, mentioned in one transcribed record for daughter Mary Ann's birth, lies to the west of Killeentierna, diocese in which both Kelly daughters' baptisms were entered, and also to Kilcummin, where parents John Kelly and Johanna Falvey had been married in 1859. And as a point of reference, though it is not included in that map excerpt, Kilcummin lies directly north of Killarney, an easily-recognized name to many people.

Next, it was to Google Maps, to outline the distance between the locations mentioned in the records: the townland of Barnfield and the village of Currow in Killeentierna, the townland of Knockauncore in Kilcummin, and Molahiffe. If all locations were put into a circle route, it would mean a journey by foot lasting nearly six hours. However, I doubt Molahiffe was mentioned as a place where the family lived, but possibly where they needed to file a civil report of the birth. Eliminating that outlier from the map meant a trip of about three and a half hours to travel between the other locations, a very possible distance to travel by foot.

The key, I hoped, would be to find records for the rest of the Kelly children, but though I tried searching through the Irish Catholic Parish Registers collection at Ancestry, I was unable to find any further records for Timothy, Catherine, or even Patrick Kelly, whose birth has been listed in subsequent American records as both Ireland and the United States.

Lacking any further Irish records for John Kelly's children, I still have other ways to search for John's origin. One way, which I had tried years ago with little success, is to examine the one close associate of the family who had also migrated to the United States and lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, same as John and Johanna. Perhaps it's time to revisit that connection once again.

Map above courtesy the National Library of Ireland entry on Catholic Parish Registers.