Simply Search for the Surname

If I had it to do all over again—and I will, the next time we revisit this puzzle of Johanna Falvey Kelly's roots—I would have first examined all the DNA matches whose family tree simply contained the surname Falvey. Of those, my husband has a genetic link to at least twenty nine others.

Interestingly, those twenty nine others are not necessarily the same ones that popped up when I used Ancestry's ThruLines tool to connect with Johanna, my father-in-law's great-grandmother. For one thing—and a very encouraging sign—the DNA cousins from this surname group match my husband at about twice the amount of genetic material as those ThruLines candidates I had previously checked.

Does that make this tree-based group closer relatives? Not necessarily. The connections are still rather distant. Yet that might be enough to help guide me back to the precise family in the right townland and parish of County Kerry.

This tree-based group comes from Falvey immigrants who settled in a wide variety of places. One group, as we discussed yesterday, left Ireland bound for New Zealand. A very small subset, I suspect, make up those who call Australia their home, possibly leaving for that destination after first landing in New Zealand.

Another very small set of DNA matches currently live in Canada, which is not surprising, considering the economic and political dynamics of leaving Ireland simply to relocate in another part of the United Kingdom, as their ancestors must have done during the 1800s.

Those Falveys who immigrated to the United States fell into three camps. Johanna Falvey herself came with her husband and children to Fort Wayne, Indiana. There are two other DNA matches who link to that family line. Another set of Falveys—whether closely related or not, I can't yet tell—headed to Massachusetts. A third set, which I'm having more difficulty tracing, made their destination the state of Michigan.

Each set of immigrating Falveys warrants their own attention. I'll be building out their family trees on my own to verify what each DNA match asserts in their own tree. Whether each one can lead me back to parish records in County Kerry, I won't know until I trace each immigrant family back to their homeland.

That, however, will be job number one for the next time I return to this research puzzle. Now that we're at the end of the month, it's time to move on to the next of my Twelve Most Wanted. Come October, we'll shift from a focus on the Irish and begin considering the first of three paternal ancestors from Poland.