Some Things we may Never Know

 

After finding a listing of available dates for the baptismal records in the Catholic parish of Kilcummin in County Kerry, it turns out there was more to the story. In fact, I had already used the "missing" baptismal records for the children of Daniel Cullinane and Gobnait Falvey, the suspected sister of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey. However, despite reviewing the collection I found on Ancestry.com for Kilcummin records beginning in 1859, there were no more mentions of the Falvey maiden name than I had already discovered.

Some things we may never know, I've resigned myself to thinking. I checked two different registers now, reading line by line through each collection, in case impossibly messy handwriting may have foiled the indexing process. And yet, the Falvey name had all but disappeared in the Catholic parish where they once had been found.

The same process of working my way forward in time from the baptismal dates of the other Falvey children has not worked well, either. Admittedly, I could try leaping forward a couple decades to see whether I could find those same names in the 1901 census, but I'd have no guarantee that the names I'd find would be the same people I had located after their birth over thirty years prior to that enumeration. Besides gaps in records, Ireland is riddled with name twins.

Not that I'm ready to give up on this search. Though the original inspiration to find Irish relatives had been left, courtesy of Johanna Falvey Kelly's obituary, assuring us that she had been survived by several sisters back in Ireland, I now wonder how well she had kept in touch with those family members back home. Could she have known when any of her siblings had died? Or left home, just as she did, to sail the ocean and begin anew?

There is, of course, one other alternate approach to wrestling with this riddle: I can keep reviewing my husband's DNA matches. Even there, though, there seems to be a disconnect between those Falvey arrivals in Massachusetts or Michigan and their origin back in County Kerry. Family members were not shy about sharing their origin in County Kerry, but anything more specific than that, I've yet to find.

Still, what have we got to lose with such a records impasse in Ireland? The DNA route may be worth another look-see before we close out the month and move on to another hard-to-trace ancestor.