One encouraging detail about researching Irish ancestors was how they supposedly held to specific traditions in the naming of their children. Looking at the children of Johanna Falvey and her husband, John Kelly, could reveal much—if these Irish immigrants held to the traditions of their homeland even after their arrival in the United States.
Pulling up the 1870 U.S. census, the first enumeration in which the entire family appeared in the same American household, we see John and Johanna and four children living in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In order of their ages, those children were Timothy, Catherine, Mary, and Patrick. (Youngest son John did not make his appearance in this American document until 1880, at which point oldest son Timothy was no longer in the record, having tragically died in 1876.)
If, in the 1860s in County Kerry, Ireland, John Kelly and his wife Johanna had kept the old tradition of bestowing names on their newborn children, we could be certain that John Kelly's father was named Timothy, as that was the name he gave his oldest son. Likewise, with the arrival of his second son, we would learn that it was highly likely that Johanna's own father was named Patrick.
That, of course, is a big "if." If the parents, for whatever reason, thought it prudent to deviate from the ages-old tradition—and how would we know at this point?—that pattern would not be reliable. Or, if there were children missing from documentation, thus inserting another possible son into the family constellation, that could lead us to make a wrong assumption.
Barring such difficulties, taking this list from the 1870 census at face value would lead us to presume that Johanna Falvey Kelly's father's name should have been Patrick. With that proposal, we'll take some time this week to test out what such an assumption may reveal.
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