It may be all well and good to learn the traditional Irish naming pattern and then determine who an ancestor's likely parents might have been. But when we go searching for that brick wall ancestor's possible siblings back in the homeland, things can get tangled quickly.
The problem lies between the Catholic tradition of memorializing saints through bestowing their names upon the family's newborns and the sticking point of recording those acts of adoration in a foreign language.
In the case of Johanna Falvey's family back in County Kerry, that foreign language of record, at least for the Church, was Latin, while the Falveys--undoubtedly for centuries--probably conversed day to day in their native Irish tongue. Not that there weren't Irish saints, but that all records were entered by priests in Latin.
Tracing the baptismal records of Patrick and Anna Falvey's children gives us not one, but two apt illustrations. Their daughter, baptized in February of 1830, was listed in the parish record as Gobineta. When I trace the lines of Falvey DNA matches backwards in time, I can see that she must have married someone in County Kerry named Daniel Cullinane. However. if I follow the baptismal records for the Cullinanes' children, the mother's name appears alternately as variants of Gobineta or totally different names, such as Debora. Tracing one supposed DNA descendant, that name also appears as Abby. Were these three different wives of the same Daniel Cullinane?
Take this other Falvey example, Gobineta's younger brother Demetrius, baptized in January of 1837. When I try to trace his line down to the present, I find nothing. But my husband has a DNA match whose ancestor was named Jeremiah Falvey--another given name that sounds just about as Irish as Demetrius. What's going on here?
Searching for guides to how the Irish handled the sometimes awkward mismatch between what was on the record and what was used around the home when mom or dad called that child for dinner, I had to locate more than one resource. The FamilySearch wiki provided a useful chart of "Given Name Equivalents" to help me with Gobineta and Demetrius, but I had to use the "find" function to locate some details.
Gobnait, as it turns out, was the actual Irish name. Apparently, the priest recording the Falveys' daughter in the baptismal records tried to compromise, giving a Latin twist to the decidedly Irish saint's name Gobnait. From the FamilySearch wiki chart, I can see that Gobnait was used interchangeably with Abigail and Debora. Thus, in searching for Gobnait Falvey's name in subsequent records, I'll need to be prepared to look also for these alternate names.
As for Demetrius, that baptismal name was not given as an alternate for another Irish name in the wiki chart, but I did find information elsewhere. A listing of Irish given names at rootsireland.ie informed me that the traditional Irish name Darby is sometimes substituted by Demetrius--and also is considered an alternate for Dermot or Diarmuid. Those alternates, in turn, showed up in some unsourced lists on some sites on the (now very) old RootsWeb--such as here, and here, if you can stand reading despite the aggravating placement of ads--and could also be a substitute for the name Jeremiah. Or you can simply turn to a reliable source like John Grenham and glean his quick listing of some Latin to Irish equivalents to find the same information.
Thus, finding DNA matches whose pedigree leads back to someone named Jeremiah rather than Demetrius, or Debora or Abby instead of Gobnait, may not be such bad news, after all. I'd say it's time to start building out those branches and checking the documentation connecting each generations from Johanna's siblings to the present.
Good morning! I'm sure you know this but the reason that the church records are in Latin is because it was considered the universal language of the Church. So baptisms in England France Italy Spain Poland etc. Were all recorded in Latin which by then was not only a foreign language but a dead one!
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