Lately, I feel as if I am conducting negotiations between two parties who claim to be one and the same person. The sticking point is that these two men with different names seem to claim the same parents and the same year of birth. Yet, not being twins, that can't be possible.
The one son was baptized as John Cullinane in County Kerry, Ireland, on July 24, 1860. His baptismal record lists his father as Daniel Cullinane and his mother as Gubbenela Falvey—surely an attempt at providing a Latin version of the decidedly Irish name Gobnait. And then, poof! He disappeared from records, as far as I can find.
The other son, claiming the name Patrick Cullinane, may have been born on June 15, 1860. That, at least, is what someone thought when they reported that date for his birth. And yet, that Patrick also claimed that his parents were Daniel and "Debby"—the possible nickname for Gobnait or Gobineta (the likely Latin version mis-entered as Gubbenela).
That second Cullinane son may or may not have been the son of our Daniel Cullinane and Gobnait (or Debora) Falvey. That that detail can't easily be determined, however, means delving deeper into the identity of this particular Patrick Cullinane after his immigration from County Kerry, Ireland, to Boston, Massachusetts.
To make matters worse, Boston may have laid claim to not one but two or three men by that same name, Patrick Cullinane. And each may have married a woman who went by the same nickname as the others.
With marching orders like that, the rest of this month's search for the parents of Gobnait Falvey Cullinane—and thus her sister Johanna, my father-in-law's great-grandmother—may take some wild and crazy turns.
No comments:
Post a Comment