"How Far Back Can You Go?"

 

In researching ancestors, I've generally preferred chasing after those family members who lived in North America, especially when it comes to those who were alive in the 1700s and even 1600s. American records can help us push back through the generations far more reliably than I've experienced for the homelands of those immigrant ancestors whose arrivals dated in later centuries.

Now that I'm working on my father's Polish great-grandparents' lines, I frankly haven't held out too much hope for making progress back through earlier generations. But since Randy Seaver recently asked, in a comment, "How far do the records go back?" I thought it might be an interesting diversion to actually take a look.

For a quick and dirty sketch of possibilities, I turned to the website of the Pomeranian Genealogical Association—or, as they put it in their native Polish, Pomorskie Towarzystwo Genealogiczne. (You can see why I call it PTG for short.) Granted, the bulk of that website, as far as I can see now—there are several articles on that site for which there are no translations into English—involve volunteers transcribing records held at regional archives. Searching their database produces results from their transcriptions.

At the PTG website, I simply constructed a search using as wide open a request as possible. Basically, I repeated the search I had done the other day, asking for all records for the shortened surname "Radom." I didn't select any specific regions, nor delimit the results by date.

My very simple search provided an overload of information: 2,602 birth records (most of them, I suspect, being baptisms), 780 marriages, and 1,039 deaths. Naturally, not having set stricter parameters, it was then up to me to scroll through the results. Fortunately, the database arranged itself by date, allowing me to quickly answer Randy's question.

The earliest records noted, by that search method, were for births from Chełmno, a town about sixty five kilometers south of Lubichowo, a journey in my great-grandparents' time of about fourteen hours, so not likely a location featuring any of my ancestors. And that search was additionally limited by the use of one surname, while previous generations might yield results by checking the as-yet-unknown maiden name of an ancestor's mother.

Still, one never knows. After all, those earliest records from Chełmno dated back to 1683. If I am so lucky as to find such old records for any of my ancestors, I'd say I'll be making quite a bit of progress on my brick wall Polish kin.

If, however, I employ the specific field labeled "Civil Registry Office/Parish" and select "Lubichowo kat." for the Catholic Church records of the village where I found the Radomski family, the earliest date available was for births in 1801. Marriages in that village ranged from 1828 through 1941 for that "Radom" surname search, introducing the possibility of reaching for more recent descendants of collateral lines in hopes of figuring out those Polish mystery DNA matches I've found at MyHeritage.com. The deaths entries for this surname stub ranged from the mid to late 1800s, an uninspiring option for expanding that family line.

Of course, if any of my father's Pomeranian ancestors moved to Lubichowo from neighboring villages, perhaps there would still be a chance for me to push through that stalled scrimmage line and gain new ancestral territory. That will remain a puzzle for me to ponder for the rest of this month's research task.

Considering a Few Record Keeping Details

 

As I'm explaining the collateral lines I've found for the Radomski family, you might be wondering, "Why is it Susanna Radomska when her dad's name was Radomski? To answer a question like that, we may need to step away from our story for a process break to consider a few details.

Now that I've moved away from my father-in-law's Irish ancestors to spent the last three months of this year on my own father's Polish roots, it would help to remember a few items we learned when we studied this part of my family in past years. 

Among other things, one of the most obvious differences, now that I'm recording Polish family names was seeing the change in surname endings. Particularly for the quintessential Polish names ending in "-ski," we will see those endings change, depending on whether the ancestor we're referring to was a man or a woman. Women's surnames ended in "-a." With that simple explanation, we know that Susanna and her sisters would always have their maiden name represented as Radomska, even though their father was actually named Andrzej Radomski.

Another detail to grapple with: documentation. In English-speaking countries, we often can rely on multiple documented sources in the same language for tracing our ancestors. Through most of the past century, we had birth records, marriage certificates, or death notices—all completed in the same English we speak every day.

Not so in Poland. Depending on which entity was in charge of the government, a person's records might have been recorded in Polish, or they might have been entered in German, complete with the complicating factor of a handwritten script which few people now even know how to read. Yet, not all records were provided by the government—or survived the devastation of the years following our ancestors' lifetime.

Some of the records left to us were those drawn up by the church of that time period—in my ancestors' case, the Catholic church. That church brought with it the tradition of recording all information in yet another language: Latin. 

With that litany of differences, I as a researcher am left with a decision: should I record the names as I find them in the Latin records of my ancestors' religion? Or should I list them as they surely were known colloquially, in their own lifetime and surroundings? 

To answer that question, I not only have chosen to record my ancestors by the Polish tradition of matching the surname to the ancestor's gender, but to list them by the Polish version of their given name. Thus, for Susanna's father, I enter him into my family tree not as Andreas, which is how his church record would have identified him, but as Andrzej, as his peers might have called him.

Likewise, when I encounter a name which includes a letter which, in Polish, would include a character not recognized in the English alphabet, I chose to represent that letter as it would have been recorded in the person's native land. Thus, when Zuzanna became the bride of Jan, I recorded his name using the diacritical mark, "ł" for Puchała.

Finding and entering those unusual characters in records using my American-made computer with its English speaker's keyboard can seem to be somewhat of a challenge to record all these foreign names correctly. And yet, even with the limitations of not having purchased my keyboard in Poland, I've found an easy work-around. Sure, I can also memorize the ascii codes for each symbol, but who am I kidding? I don't have that great a memory. Instead, I use Google Translate to create, cut and paste the diacritical marks I need into my text. 

Simply go to the Google search page, click on the nine dots in the upper right corner, and select "translate" from the drop-down menu. Then, select the language needed, look for the keyboard icon to "Turn on Virtual Keyboard," then hit the "ctrl+alt" key to select the special characters for that language whenever you need to add a diacritical mark to the word you wish to enter.

I then copy the word and paste it where I need it. I'll paste it in a document I'm writing, or on a blog post, or I'll even add it to the name field for my family tree on Ancestry.com or other tree-building service. With relatively little effort at all, I then can include my ancestors in my tree using the name they were known as, back home in their native land.

Susanna's Siblings

 

For anyone wishing to find distant cousins useful in pointing to a specific shared ancestor, DNA is the best bet. However, where those cousins live and where they tested may signify the best possibility for testing companies. In my second great-grandmother Susanna's case, unless I find any more emigrants among her Polish siblings, the best likelihood for discovering distant cousins would be the most international of the major genetic genealogy companies. Hence, I'll be spending a lot of time at MyHeritage, scouring the match lists for descendants of Susanna's siblings—if, that is, those siblings lived to adulthood and had children of their own.

One dismaying detail about researching the collateral lines for my newly-discovered Polish ancestors was seeing how many of those family members died young. After reviewing the multiple tragedies of loss experienced by Susanna, herself, I braced myself in preparation for looking to the children of the previous generation. The 1850s, at least, were a rough decade for Susanna's family. What more could go wrong in the generations preceding that?

From what I'm seeing at this point, I may yet discover some distant cousins descending from that generation of the Radomski family. Though I am not yet done documenting Susanna's siblings, so far I've found transcriptions of baptismal records for Katarzyna ("Catharinam") in 1821, Susanna's younger brother Simon (likely Szymon) in 1826, Francisca (Franciszka in Polish) in January of 1828, and her apparent twin, Anna, also baptized at that same date. 

Bracing myself for the inevitable—after all, Susanna's own children didn't fare too well in that rural northern region of Poland known as Pomerania—I expected to find each sibling's baptism followed soon afterwards with a record of the baby's burial. So far, no. In fact, I'm finding some marriage records for those siblings, as well. Not only that, but I believe I've found a marriage record for Susanna's own parents in 1814.

Now to move on to mapping out the possible descendancy of those collateral lines. There may be a DNA match from among my Polish cousins, after all.

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.

Looking for the Rest of the Story

 

There isn't always a way to find proof for the rest of the story, especially if it involves Irish ancestors during those gaping holes in official records. I tried, but those black holes of record keeping got the best of me, I'm afraid.

I was elated to find signs that perhaps Maria (more likely, Mary) Falvey and John Kerin had married, after all. Seeing both their names listed as godparents for the newborn baby of Mary's likely sister Gobnait Falvey Cullinane gave me the idea to look for a marriage record. If they had, though, it would have been between the birth of Mary's child in 1854 and the baptism of her sister's daughter in April of 1866.

Looking through online records of marriages in the Catholic parish of Kilcummin in County Kerry, my plans were quickly thwarted: according to a reliable source, both records for baptisms and marriages dropped off the face of the earth between 1859 and 1873. And what records I could find before that gaping hole did not seem to contain any entries for the couple.

Next, I pursued what I thought was a brilliant idea: check to see whether Mary and John had any children besides the one entry I had found in 1854. Despite the gap in church records, perhaps if the couple had a large family, as many did then, I could find a child born to them after the beginning of civil registrations in 1864. I headed over to irishgenealogy.ie to check, but couldn't find any likely entries, despite even using the wildcard symbol for the surname as K*r*n, since the many spelling variations led me through nine pages full of possible entries.

I won't yet give up searching for this new branch of the Falvey family, but my eyes are ready to call it quits for now. I'll save some additional attempts for another day.

Church Records Tell All

 

(...but sometimes you need to read between the lines).

It was an entry from the baptismal register of the Catholic parish of Kilcummin which caught my eye. Scanning the records from the mid-1800s for signs of my father-in-law's Falvey family, I noticed the entry for a woman named Maria Falvey. It wasn't so much her name which made me pause, however, but the words above that mention which told me there had to be a story hidden in there somewhere.

The entry was for the baptism of a child born in October of 1854. Starting out in the usual Latin, the priest noted that he had baptized a child named John, but in the place of the usual "filius legitimus" or its typical shorthand abbreviation, the entry specifically emphasized the underlined status as illegitimate. And yet, there was the father's name. Whether he had claimed that responsibility and owned up to that son, or whether everyone in that small townland of Knockauncore would have known anyhow, I can't be sure.

What the entry showed was that, married or not, John's parents were John Kerin and Maria Falvey. Alongside that notation, the sole name designated as the child's sponsor was a woman named Anna Fleming. While Irish baptismal records for that time period toward the later years of the Irish famine sometimes only included one godparent due to the devastation of that era, the naming of one godparent was also a typical statement for children born out of wedlock.

My first wonder, given the same townland as my father-in-law's Falvey family, was whether Anna Fleming was one and the same as the mother of Gobnait Falvey and her siblings—and, possibly, also my father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna Falvey. In that case, this godmother for baby John Kerin—if, indeed, he was permitted to take his father's surname—would also have been his maternal grandmother, if his mother Maria were Anna Fleming Falvey's daughter.

It was quite possible that that was who this Anna Fleming was. First, Catholic records of that time period and location mentioned all women by their maiden name. Secondly, I had found an entry in Griffith's Valuation for that townland which mentioned a woman named Anne Falvey which, lacking a name of her husband, most likely indicated a widow for that tax record. Since Griffith's Valuation for County Kerry was completed about that same time—July of the previous year—it told me that Anna Fleming of the baptismal mention could likely have been the widow Falvey.

I noted that baptism in my growing list of all baptisms in Kilcummin parish which included a Falvey surname for one of the parents. While the baptismal record was not shy in telling all about the child's legal standing at birth, there was still much to read between the lines as to the identity of his mother Maria—likely Mary—and her connection to the rest of the extended Falvey family recorded in that church parish.

Continuing my line-by-line search through the parish's records, I advanced through the pages to another entry containing that same surname, Falvey. This one, in April of 1866, was for Hanora, a daughter of Daniel Cullinane (entered, according to the priest's handwriting, as Callinan). The child's mother—thankfully entered in Latin as a version closest to her Irish name, rather than some traditional substitutes—was Gubbonetta Falvey. And the godmother was listed as Maria Falvey.

According to some sources, Irish tradition had it that the godparents named at a child's baptism were to be siblings or in-laws of either parent. While that tradition was not as closely adhered to beyond the famine years, there was a good possibility that with this one line of the church record, we can claim this Maria to be sister of Gobnait Falvey and daughter of Patrick Falvey and Anna Fleming. 

There was one other detail which I had missed in my original discovery of the entry for the Cullinane daughter. On returning to this record, having by then noted the earlier entry for the illegitimate birth of Maria's son, I noticed the other person named as godparent for Hanora Cullinane: John Kerin.

Whether John Kerin and Maria Falvey, as parents of their baby John in 1854, had subsequently decided to marry, I can't yet say. I haven't yet made it to the parish's marriage records—if, indeed, they are still even in existence. But reading between the lines, I can't imagine Maria's sister naming the both of them as godparents if the two of them weren't on good terms. Reading between the lines, I'd say John Kerin and Maria Falvey, at some point, had married—and possibly had more children after that point.

Continuing my line by line search through the parish records may reveal that I now have one more family to follow among the Falvey descendants, but that discovery would only have come by reading between the lines, even given an organization which took a "tell all" approach to the records they kept.

The Tedium of Line by Line

 

There is something about reading, line by line, through those Irish baptismal records in the Catholic parish of Kilcummin that makes me want to transcribe the whole lot, enter it into a spreadsheet, and feed that record into AI for analysis. As I scroll through the decades, the surnames from the 1830s give way to an entirely different set—of strangers?—but then, given another ten years, morph back to the same Falveys, Flemings, and Cullinanes I've been seeking.

As tedious as the project has been this month, I haven't yet given up on reading, page by page, through the records. I'm still looking for any entries mentioning the surname Falvey in this County Kerry parish, but by now, I've made it to the end of 1858. 

Now that the Falvey surname has reappeared in the record, it is mostly on account of Gobnait, the possible sister of Johanna Falvey, my father-in-law's great-grandmother. Knowing the variations ascribed to her given name—Abby and Debora have also appeared—I can't be confident that I've found the right relative, but the same husband's name seems to pair with hers, no matter what she was called.

Yet, there have been no other sitings for Falvey family members—with one exception. That entry, one which possibly would be accompanied by a sad story if only I could find a way to confirm it, is one I need to pause and record in these chronicles of Falveys. Whether it leads to a future DNA connection, or even a confirmation that my research is on the right track, I can't yet be sure. But I want to note it while it is fresh on my mind.

With that, tomorrow we'll look into what can be found—spoiler: not much—on a woman in the 1850s named Mary Falvey.

Could Someone Have Gotten this Wrong?

 

I'm going to venture out and possibly say the unforgivable. When it comes to baptismal records, could someone have gotten the details wrong? 

I ask, because I'm having a difficult time locating the baptismal record for my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey. Sure, right now I'm riding on guesswork in estimating that her father's name might have been Patrick Falvey. I'm making that presumption based on traditional Irish naming patterns, in which the second-born son was supposed to be named after his maternal grandfather. Combining that assumption that the name would be Patrick, along with Johanna's own obituary indicating that her native home in County Kerry was somewhere near the Lakes of Killarney, has led me to Catholic records in the parish of Kilcummin.

Granted, Ireland has had a history of records lost for tragic causes, but in the case of the Kilcummin records, all appear to be intact during the time frame when other children of Patrick Falvey and Anna Fleming were born. It seems odd to have missed only the records for the year when Johanna was likely born—although pinning a date to her birth has itself been a challenge.

According to subsequent records, the year of Johanna's birth has ranged from 1826 through 1830. Two census records—for 1870 and 1880, after she arrived in Fort Wayne, Indiana—pinned her birth as occurring in 1830. The 1900 census made that even more precise: November of 1829, a reasonable date, given the wiggle room of previous year-only age estimates.

Johanna's death certificate, on the other hand, reported her birth occurring in 1826. Since her age at death, according to her obituary, was given as seventy seven, the math would bear that out—but even her headstone didn't help with these calculations. Complicating matters, Johanna's youngest son, John Kelly, was born in 1876, making his mother fifty years of age at his birth.

Not that that would be impossible, but quite unlikely. And yet, turning to the baptismal records back in Kilcummin parish in County Kerry, even searching page by page through all the possible years in which she could have been born, I find nothing.

However, I did find something else. On June 1, 1827, I located a baptismal record for someone listed as Joannes Falvey, son of Patritius Falvey and Anna Fleming. Unlike many other Catholic baptismal records I've seen, the priest at the Kilcummin parish did not follow the usual format of writing the entire narrative statement out in Latin, "I baptized [name], legitimate son/daughter of [father and mother]."

Thus, by the Kilcummin record using a chart form rather than the traditional narrative, we are robbed of the chance to see the subject/verb agreement in Latin as a guide. Gone, too, would be the opportunity to read whether that was "filius" (son of) versus "filia" (daughter of). Granted, a statement like "I baptized John" (Ioannem) would not look very different than "I baptized Johanna" (Ioannam), but when reading two hundred year old chicken scratch, we need all the help we can get.

Despite squabbling over what might seem like minor details, there was another thought that occurred to me. This is not the first time I've searched for a record for an Irish ancestor named Johanna. Years ago, in searching for another Irish antecedent of my father-in-law, this time the sister of his maternal grandfather John Tully, I had run into records listing that Johanna as "Johann." Could it have been owing to faded records and impossible-to-read handwriting? Possibly. But it shows me that that name is subject to occasional slips of the pen, even resulting in daughters being recorded as sons.

Whether that "John" baptized in the Kilcummin parish was the Falveys' son or a mistaken entry for what should have been their daughter Johanna, I can't say at this point—perhaps I'll never be able to say for sure. That makes it all the more important for me to trace these possible siblings of Johanna, especially now that we've been gifted with such a perceptive tool as DNA testing.

With that, we'll begin looking at the descendants of Johanna's possible sister, Gobnait Falvey, to see if we can find any confirmation of their family connection.

When Irish Names get Tangled With Latin

 

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.

Add to the Research Wish List: Legible Handwriting

 

For one last, desperate attempt at rounding out the extended family picture for Anna Flanagan Malloy, my father-in-law's great-grandmother, I returned to church records of the 1800s at the Catholic parish of Ballyagran in County Limerick. Those, if you remember, were spotty records; if they had been a complete collection, I'd have known by now which sibling or in-law had stood at the 1848 baptism of Anna's daughter as godparents.

Preserved baptismal records would have been a nice touch, but there was something else to add to that wish list: legible handwriting. The priest keeping the records for Ballyagran seemed to be in constant fear that someone was about to snatch the very records from his hands before the ink dried.

When I located the Ballyagran records online, I first looked at entries for the Flanagan family. Then, since Anna's niece Johanna Flanagan had married someone named John Lee, I was curious to see whether I'd find any connection between the two surnames back in their homeland. Doing a search specifically on that surname Lee limited to Ballyagran, I did find five baptisms and one entry for a marriage.

Here is what I found, as best as could be read, considering the abysmal handwriting. The earliest record was a baptism for Catharine Lee on September 21, 1842. Her parents were likely Thomas Lee and Brigida, a woman whose maiden name may have been Fox or Fos. Brigida's brother was the likely godfather, though I can't read his given name. Margarita Dineen was the godmother.

Next was Margaret Lee, baptised on March 3, 1843. Born to parents David Lee and another Brigida—maiden name recorded as Molony—she had godparents David Lee and Margarita...um...Nojan???

Johannam Lee was baptized on February 16, 1852. Father Jacobis Lee was likely called James in real life. His wife was listed as Maria McAuliffe. After that is where I run into more legibility issues: godfather Patritius Brunniham (?) and godmother Johanna McAuliffe.

The next two baptisms were much later, after a wide gap in the records. Jacobus Lee was baptized May 26, 1864, born to David Lee and another Maria with an illegible surname—not to mention sponsors Jacobus and Ellina with equally unreadable surnames. And on December 9, 1869, Danielem Lee, son of David Lee and Maria Neiland (?) was baptized in the presence of sponsors Michaele Boice and Brigida Lee.

The final record found was an entry for a February 1854 marriage of David Lee and Maria Nulan (?), which gives us a clue about the maiden name of Daniel's mother. If this Maria was indeed the same woman as Daniel's mother, despite the differing spelling of the surname, then the records are likely missing several baptisms in those ten years between the couple's two appearances in the church's records.

Such, apparently, was the case for much of the religious records of this particular Irish parish, giving a visible illustration of why it is so frustrating to find signs of our Irish ancestors on paper, even as recent as the mid-nineteenth century. 

Checking the Neighborhoods

 

It was a sure bet—I thought—that Irish immigrant Catholic families of the 1880s in Chicago would have been sure to have their newborn babies baptized, so I continued looking through records of the Church of the Holy Family to spot verification of John and Johanna Lee's youngest children. When I found none of them listed in the digitized files, I wondered if the family might have moved to a different parish.

Since the Catholic Church traditionally set up local parishes based on geographic areas, organized under dioceses, it made sense to discover which parish might belong to a Catholic family's neighborhood. Thus started my hunt to find Catholic Churches in the Chicago area, based on any newer addresses of the Lee family. Since Johanna had died in 1909 at a different address in Chicago—3414 Parnell Avenue—I entered that address in a search engine and asked for the nearest Catholic parish for that neighborhood.

The search result pointed me to Saint Gabriel's Church which, conveniently, has digitized baptismal records available online at FamilySearch.org. I'm still in the process of searching through that record set, page by page, because not all entries are in date order. However, even before I've completed that search, I can say I doubt I'll find the youngest of Johanna's children listed there. Perhaps the Lee family hadn't moved to that location until long after the arrival of their youngest children.

The next step was to find a way to locate Chicago city directories. It was time to go through the listings, year by year, to pinpoint the Lee family's location. From those addresses—assuming the Lee family had moved from their original address during the years when their youngest children were born—I could then search for the appropriate Catholic parish for accessing baptismal records.

Finding Chicago city directories is not a one-stop-shopping process. ChicagoAncestors.org pointed me to some directories digitized at the Newberry Library, such as this 1880 city directory. Looking under the entry for "L," then heading to the Lee surname, I quickly found twenty one listings for John Lee. Fortunately, I already knew from the 1880 census that our John Lee was a cooper, so that entry was easily distinguishable, and I saw that he was still living at the family's old address. So much for finding a new church for his children's baptisms.

To find city directories for other years was a challenge. Blogger "Sassy Jane" (Nancy Loe) provides a resource page, "Free Chicago City Directories Online," filled with clickable links for Chicago area directories and other resources, which was helpful. ChicagoAncestors also sent me back to Newberry for a directory for 1885, revealing a change of address in 1885 for our John Lee to a home on Forty Second Street. Once again seeking the closest Catholic parish for the Lee family's new neighborhood, search engines pointed me back to Saint Gabriel's.

While I'm still having no luck finding mentions of Lee children at Saint Gabriel's—at least for our John and Johanna—I realized I had a third mention of a possible Catholic parish for the family. On Johanna's own obituary in 1909, it mentioned the funeral was to be held at "Nativity Church." For this, I'm off again, searching for any records and history of that congregation to find mentions of the Lee family and point me to the right neighborhood for the family.

Nothing is Ever Easy

 

It may be hard enough to actually locate the digitized record set needed to find that elusive ancestor, but once that collection is found, proceeding to the long-sought document should be rather straightforward, right? Wrong. Nothing is ever easy, especially in genealogy. There's always a snag along the way.

Thanks to a generous Chicago researcher, I now had the link to the records for Holy Family Church in Chicago, home parish for Irish immigrants John and Johanna Lee. According to the 1880 census, John and Johanna lived an easy walk from one of the city's longest-standing Catholic parishes.

Despite realizing that this set of microfilmed reels was not indexed for computer searches, I was ready to hunt and peck my way through to family history answers. Information on the collection told me that the first film contained the alphabetized handwritten index to help find the records, organized year by year, so that was step number one for me.

Since I had scrolled way too far in that collection for my first jumping-off spot, I found myself stuck in 1879. I decided to begin my search with John and Johanna's fourth son John James Lee, who was born in October of that year. Problem: there was no sign in the index of anyone surnamed Lee, let alone someone named John James Lee. Thinking perhaps he was not baptized in the same month as his birth, I scrolled through the indexed names, month by month, until I reached January of the subsequent year. No sign of John James Lee.

By that point, I was so close to the entries for 1881, I decided to continue the search with John James' younger sister Lillian, who was born in July of that year. Surprise: no entry for Lillian, either.

Perhaps going in the opposite direction might yield better luck. Hey, who am I kidding? I already knew that my new-found genealogical genie had located that earlier Lee child's record. George Aloysius Lee, born in June of 1877, should be in that index. Holding my breath, I took a look.

Thankfully, there he was, his entry in the index indicating that he was baptized on June 22, 1877. If I cared to view the actual entry the priest made in the ledger, I could go to page 167 to see for myself.

That, of course, I didn't need to do, as I already had a copy of that record, thanks to the helpful Ancestry.com subscriber who shared her research finds. And I knew that two children younger than George would also be in the church's records.

What of the older children? Since the 1880 census seemed to indicate that the family still lived in the area of that particular parish, I had expected to see the Lee children included there. After all, even if the family moved away, the parish's territory covered an immense part of the city of Chicago, nearly seven miles wide.

With four more Lee children yet to find in baptismal records, I'll need to continue the search. My main purpose at this point is to find the names of each child's godparents, and hope that the Irish tradition for selecting sponsors had a strong hold on this immigrant family. I need some clues about siblings in these babies' parents' generation to reconstruct a missing family tree for both Johanna Flanagan and John Lee.

Thanks to Some Genealogical Kindness

 

If it weren't for the help of others in the genealogy world, how many chances would we have missed to find the details we're seeking on our brick wall ancestors? Thanks to someone posting baptismal records online to share with whomever needed them, I learned that the home church in Chicago for Irish immigrants John and Johanna Lee was named Holy Family. But which Holy Family congregation? As it turned out, searching online brought me to at least two, if not more similarly-named churches.

I first took my search to the records digitized at FamilySearch.org. Through their wiki, I discovered that there were plenty of resources for those seeking Chicago ancestors. Referred from FamilySearch, in a long list of repositories, I found a list for Catholic Churches in Chicago. Posted on the now-static RootsWeb site, the list didn't seem to exactly include a church named Holy Family, but it did mention one called Saint Francis of the Holy Family. Problem number one: the name wasn't quite the same as what I'd found on the posted baptismal records. Problem number two: the hyperlink clicked through to...nothing.

Another link brought me to a FamilySearch collection of records from Catholic Churches in the Chicago area, but that didn't seem to bring up any records for the family I was seeking.

I took my search to the search engines. There, I found two possibilities. One was a Chicago church called Our Lady of the Holy Family, but reading that organization's history, it seemed to be a newer parish. The other church was called, simply, Church of the Holy Family.

That parish seemed to fit the specifications more closely. The church's history, for one, made it the perfect fit. And its location was close enough to the Lee family's home, according to the 1880 census, to be within walking distance from their home on Fourteenth Street.

The only problem was locating a copy of digitized records for this church. According to FamilySearch, only records of closed parishes are held by the Archdiocese of Chicago; if the church is still serving a congregation and the records aren't digitized online, then what?

Thankfully, I had reached out to the source of that Random Act of Genealogical Kindness and asked about the baptismal discoveries she had posted on Ancestry.com. Within a matter of hours, there in my inbox at Ancestry was not only a series of useful links for Chicago research, but the specific record set she had used to access those Lee baptismal records from the Church of the Holy Family. Sure, it's a set of records on microfilm reels to be searched the old fashioned hunt-and-peck method but, grateful for the guidance, at least now I can start the process.

Retracing Steps

 

When you don't have every detail documented for a brick wall ancestor, there is only one thing to do: retrace your steps and check for more records to fill in the blanks.

It was thanks to some random acts of genealogical kindness that baptismal records for at least two of Johanna Flanagan Lee's children were shared on Ancestry.com. I had already spotted that, not due to my own efforts, but solely because of Ancestry's hints system. I had remembered cranking through the microfilm at a FamilySearch Center in decades past for my father-in-law's Chicago ancestors, but I was pretty sure I had never done anything so tedious for the Lee branch of the Flanagan family, so I was grateful for the discovery.

Little did I know how grateful I should have been. Since I had gone through this process in the past, I assumed it would be just as easy to do so now—if not easier, thanks to modern conveniences like computerized searches through digitized records, not to mention AI assistance and Full Text Search at FamilySearch.org.

Wrong. Looking at FamilySearch yielded no easy answers, though explanations in the heading for one particular collection did remind me of vital facts about Chicago records: 

• City of Chicago marriage licenses were separated from Cook County records...but only from 1894 onward
• For each hundred names in the index, the first set is for Cook County, then followed by City records
• The female index did not begin until 1878

Most important, though, was one main, overarching, glaring detail: if you were looking for a record before July 24, 1871, your luck was out. That's when the great Chicago fire wiped out most records for the city.

Considering that Johanna Flanagan and John Lee had a child as early as 1875—at least according to their entry in the 1880 census—one could conclude that history had snatched their marriage record from the jaws of complete destruction. It could be quite likely that they'd have married closer to 1874, at least in my thinking.

Wrong—at least if we can trust the Statewide Marriage Index at the Illinois Secretary of State's website. No matter which way I searched—groom's name only, Flanagan spelled as Flanigan, searching statewide versus Cook County records only—I came up with...nothing. Not, at least, for this couple. There were certainly many other men married in the state who claimed the name John Lee.

I returned to one of the baptismal records posted by the Ancestry subscriber, this one for a son born before the oldest child showing in the 1880 census. Details attached to the record noted that the church where the baptism occurred was a congregation named Holy Family Catholic Church.

Whether there were any records digitized at FamilySearch from that congregation, I couldn't yet say, so it would be important to check for availability. At any rate, it would also help to learn more about the congregation, itself. That, as my first step, I'll save for tomorrow's post.

Double-check Double Take

 

There are some times when you are so sure of something, it never seems to warrant a second look. On the other hand, when we're faced with an unresolvable brick wall, we can't seem to double-check enough. 

John Kelly is getting to be one of those ancestors. I had been so sure of the documents I had already found regarding this man from County Kerry and his wife, Johanna Falvey, that I never looked back. After all, I had baptismal records for two of his Irish-born children, pinpointing their residence down to the very townland. Why take another look?

It was when any forward movement on this family's research had been stalled for far too long that I decided to backtrack and re-inspect every detail. That's when something I noticed caused me a double take: the documents disagreed.

This involves the situation of John and Johanna's daughter Mary, born in 1864, and another daughter, born in 1867 whom they also decided to name Mary. My presumption is that the elder Mary died in childhood, but the name was so important to the parents that they gave the second child the same name.

Because each of these Kelly daughters was born on or after 1864—the date at which civil registrations extended to Irish residents of the Catholic faith—I thus had not one, but two different documents I could access for each child.

Checking the first Mary, I located her baptismal record in the parish of Killeentierna. Her entry in the church register was dated September 25, 1864. There in the entry was mention of her parents—John Kelly and Johanna Falvey—along with the names of her godparents, James and Margaret Fleming. The family's domicile was listed as Currow.

When I looked for Mary's appearance in the civil registration, filed at the registrar's district in Molahiffe, the entry indicated her actual date of birth as 18 September in 1864, and that the registration was filed on September 24. The same parents were named in the civil paperwork, and I could see that John Kelly, not unlike many of his Catholic neighbors of that time period, signed his name with an "X."

For the place of birth, though, a different location was offered: Curraross. How had I missed this before? I took a second look; sure enough, the same residence was given for Mary's father, preventing any attempts at explaining that perhaps Mary's family lived in one place, but she somehow was born elsewhere.

Curious about the variance between the two documents, I tried the same experiment with the second Mary Kelly. Sure enough, her March 24, 1867, baptismal record named the same parents and another Fleming man as her godfather, while listing her family's residence as Barnfield in the same parish, Killeentierna. But the civil registration, filed by her father on March 23, had something different to say about her residence. In this second report, the Kelly family was said to live in a place called Currabarnfield.

Worse, looking up townland listings for Killeentierna gave me neither alternative. No Barnfield, no Currabarnfield—but there was a place called Currabanefield. Do I take that as my answer? One would presume government officials would surely know the official names of their geographic designations—but so would the priests who lived among their parishioners in those same vicinities. 

I am only slightly encouraged to remember that when searching for another Irish ancestor in a different county, the spelling for a townland in Griffith's Valuation differed from the way the place name is currently spelled. Couple that with the propensity for British governmental overseers to prefer writing phonetically the names rendered with a vastly different spelling in the Irish tongue, and perhaps I have my answer.

Or perhaps this is a problem meriting closer examination. After all, there are far more than just one John Kelly in County Kerry. 

Taking the Slow Route

 

There's one thing to be said for choosing to slow down and do that "exhaustive" search for a missing ancestor: you can take in far more of the scenery when you take the slow route.

It's a "stop and smell the roses" kind of search. When we look up our ancestors' records using current-day search provisions, with one click of a button, our search terms are instantly translated into possibilities. Better yet, we don't even have to perform that search; handy "hints" pop up unbidden to beguile us away to a possible record set (which, mostly, serves up the correct answer). But go page by page through that same record set, looking with our own non-AI eyes? That's putting the research brakes on, benefitting us with a more leisurely, up-close review of the bigger picture.

As I looked, this past weekend, for any signs of John Kelly's own baptism, I noticed a few details. For one thing, "FAN Club" surnames back in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where John settled after emigration, popped up with regularity in the parish records I researched. This included Denehy, maiden name of the second wife of suspected Kelly relative, Timothy.

In addition, recalling Irish baptismal traditions, I watched not only for Kelly baptisms, but for any baptism in which a Kelly was named as a sponsor. With several such appearances, I'm noting the families connected to those Kelly godparents, as possible guidance in piecing together a Kelly family tree back in their homeland in County Kerry.

I also began seeing rugged evidence which might explain why I haven't found any record for John Kelly in Ireland. On the records I accessed at the National Library of Ireland, the earliest dates began with baptisms on June 14, 1801. That sounded promising, as I've had several proposed dates for John Kelly's birth reaching back to that time period.

However, by the time I had reached baptisms in August, 1809, I encountered a problem: the next microfilmed page skipped to July, 1823, without any explanation. Gone, suddenly, was my chance to extract any hints about my target ancestor's baptismal sponsors, let alone the names of his parents, if he was indeed born in those earlier years.

For the Kelly records I am finding, I'm taking notes on the implied relationships. At some point, I'll sort these out and see if any patterns emerge. Before that can happen, though, I've got more transcribing to do—not to mention, a thorough search to see whether the missing years of this record set turn up anywhere else in digitized records at NLI or elsewhere.

Yet Another Attempt

I confess: I can't give up. Trying every way I can to find any sign of the right John Kelly back in Ireland, I've backtracked to some original sources. In an old-fashioned way: microfilm.

Not that I've really resigned myself to cranking through records on a microfilm record. This attempt is the next "best" thing. (Admittedly, nothing is "best" about having to read handwritten records on a microfilm reader.) 

I've gone back—virtually, of course—to the National Library of Ireland, where lo and behold, there are some microfilmed records for earlier years of some of the locations in County Kerry where I first spotted John Kelly and his wife, Johanna Falvey. Keep in mind that the dates I've retrieved for John's birth vary wildly. Some of those dates reached beyond those available in a crisper, cleaner digitized form at either Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org. Believe me, these older records show their age.

Thus, I now enter the stage of a "reasonably" exhaustive search. While I'm not sure it can be considered reasonable, I'll be reading through the birth entries, page by page, starting with the early 1800s in the parish of Killeentierna.

Though the copy is fuzzy, it is still fairly easy to differentiate "Kelly" from all the other blurry surnames, so progress won't be too agonizing. Much time to search means little time to write about it, though, but if I find something significant, I'll come up for air long enough to tell about it. 

Looking for the Rest of the Family

 

In the quest to find the origin of an Irish immigrant named John Kelly—I pause while you laugh—I had hoped to find additional baptismal records for the rest of his family. 

In the decades following the Irish famine years, John Kelly had married and begun a family. His marriage to Johanna Falvey pinpointed the sacrament's location in County Kerry as the diocese of Kilcummin, and noted their residence to have been in Knockauncore. Baptismal records for two of John's children provided locations within the Killeentierna diocese: Barnfield and Currow. Other transcribed records mention Molahiffe, possibly a civil registration rather than a religious record.

The various locations given for the family have long seemed confusing to me. I remember pondering that very puzzle before leaving on our family's research trip to Ireland, over a decade ago. (Hint: the trip not only didn't help resolve the issue, but had some locals puzzled over the designated townlands, too.)

One way to resolve that issue about geographic designations was to simply graph the distance. My first stop was to the National Library of Ireland's entry on Catholic parish records, where I found a sketch of County Kerry's dioceses, from which I drew a close-up of the locations in question.

It was easy to see how close the three in question were to each other. Molahiff, mentioned in one transcribed record for daughter Mary Ann's birth, lies to the west of Killeentierna, diocese in which both Kelly daughters' baptisms were entered, and also to Kilcummin, where parents John Kelly and Johanna Falvey had been married in 1859. And as a point of reference, though it is not included in that map excerpt, Kilcummin lies directly north of Killarney, an easily-recognized name to many people.

Next, it was to Google Maps, to outline the distance between the locations mentioned in the records: the townland of Barnfield and the village of Currow in Killeentierna, the townland of Knockauncore in Kilcummin, and Molahiffe. If all locations were put into a circle route, it would mean a journey by foot lasting nearly six hours. However, I doubt Molahiffe was mentioned as a place where the family lived, but possibly where they needed to file a civil report of the birth. Eliminating that outlier from the map meant a trip of about three and a half hours to travel between the other locations, a very possible distance to travel by foot.

The key, I hoped, would be to find records for the rest of the Kelly children, but though I tried searching through the Irish Catholic Parish Registers collection at Ancestry, I was unable to find any further records for Timothy, Catherine, or even Patrick Kelly, whose birth has been listed in subsequent American records as both Ireland and the United States.

Lacking any further Irish records for John Kelly's children, I still have other ways to search for John's origin. One way, which I had tried years ago with little success, is to examine the one close associate of the family who had also migrated to the United States and lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, same as John and Johanna. Perhaps it's time to revisit that connection once again.

Map above courtesy the National Library of Ireland entry on Catholic Parish Registers.

Before the Journey Began

 

One way to trace the route of immigrant ancestors is to look to their children. Not just the locations where those children were born, but the year of their arrival can give us a sketch of their parents' meanderings.

Before the journey began for John Kelly, he had married Johanna Falvey and the couple had at least four children before leaving their homeland in County Kerry, Ireland. The baptismal records help pinpoint the family's whereabouts before their final decision to set sail for America.

John and Johanna were married in 1859, and by the next year, they had welcomed in their oldest son. They named their boy Timothy, and as practicing Catholics, the Kellys surely had him baptized, but where is the question. I've yet to locate that record, as well as that of the second-born child, a daughter they named Catherine, who eventually became my father-in-law's ill-fated paternal grandmother. 

For their third child, however, John and Johanna chose to have that daughter baptized at the Catholic parish in Killeentierna in County Kerry. The September 25, 1864, record noted that the Kelly family was residing in the village of Currow at that time. The only other bit of information was the note concerning the godparents, James and Margaret Fleming, surely one or the other of which would be a sibling to either parents.

From that discovery, we now have a Kelly couple named John and Johanna who have been said to reside in either Currow, as we saw for this one baptismal record, or the townland of Knockauncore, as we saw yesterday for Johanna's entry in her marriage record. At any rate, these two locations help us zero in on the vicinity where John Kelly and his wife once lived—or remind us that there could be more than one couple with a husband claiming a name as common as John Kelly, urging us to look further for more information on the family's whereabouts for the baptisms of their other children before they left Ireland.

What we Find When We're Looking for Something Else

 

Rabbit trails—those tempting deviations from our intended research goal—can be dangerous, but I can't say I'd advocate ignoring them completely. Sometimes, it's what we find when we're looking for something else that turns out to be the answer to another question that has stumped us.

Take this Flannery puzzle that has kept me at bay for the entire past month of September. Granted, that month I had a rough go of it, thanks to unexpected illness and other troubles. Yet into this new month, I've still decided to persevere for at least a few more days to seek information on Margaret Flannery's roots in County Tipperary, Ireland.

Having made a listing of all the known children of Margaret and her husband, Denis Tully, my next step was to list each child's godparents, based on their baptismal record.

From that point, the tedium began: searching baptismal records from that same Catholic parish where I had found the children of Margaret and Denis—the church at Ballina—to look for the families of each of those named godparents. After all, if Margaret and Denis had selected these named godparents because they were siblings or in-laws, that would help me identify collateral relatives for both the Tully and Flannery lines. Besides, perhaps I would uncover a reciprocal baptismal relationship where Margaret or Denis were named as godparents for these siblings' own children.

Yes, I did mention tedium. I can't say I made much progress looking for the few Flannery names among the godparents. Basically, that included Kitty, William, and Bridget Flannery. Most of the rest of the godparents were from the Tully side of the family, so I continued my search on that branch of the family next.

My next search candidate, then, was Thomas Tully. Surely with that surname, the relationship would be clear: Thomas should have been a brother to Margaret's husband, Denis, right? But I couldn't really be sure because, for example, Thomas could have been selected as a godparent because he was an in-law to the new parents; he could have coincidentally acquired the same surname because he was, say, a cousin who just happened to marry a sister of one of the parents.

It was worth the detour to discover what could be found about this Thomas. In an 1834 baptismal record in the same parish for a son named Denis Tully, parents Thomas Tully and Margaret "Wilkisson" named as the child's godparents none other than John Tully and Margaret Flannery.

It just can't get any better than that. While we already know who Margaret Flannery was, we can now add John's name as another possible Tully sibling.

This, of course, brings up another possible theory, which in turn requires me to search for all the baptismal records for Thomas' children. If this Denis, born in 1834, was Thomas' eldest son, another Irish tradition would mean that Thomas' father's name would also be Denis. Thus, my Denis would, by necessity, have been the eldest son of his father—and, as far as I can tell, my Denis had also named his eldest son by that same name, in honor of his father. Perhaps looking further for this newly-discovered brother John Tully might reveal a firstborn son whose name resonates with this evolving pattern.

Unfortunately, the chance of finding baptismal records before the 1830s is near impossible for this area of County Tipperary, so discovering the exact dates and details for brothers Denis, Thomas, and John—and their parents—just wouldn't happen. But we can extrapolate from known traditions and piece together possible collateral lines, if nothing else.

Though it doesn't help me move forward yet with any Flannery discoveries, for now, I can at least add two collateral lines to my father-in-law's Tully ancestors, all thanks to the wanderings in pursuit of the answer to a different research question. You can bet I stopped to write that answer down so I wouldn't forget what I found.