Quest for Collateral

 

When stuck on the line of a direct ancestor, a suggested work-around is to examine what can be found on that individual's collateral lines—the lines of siblings or other relatives. Our quest seeking the roots of our many Falvey-surnamed DNA matches has led us from Ireland to New Zealand to, in this instance, the in-laws of Mary Falvey O'Leary.

Apparently, some people's obituaries are more equal than that of others. For all the accolades we could find for Mary Falvey's spouse Humphrey O'Leary in New Zealand newspapers, there are comparatively few for the father-in-law of his daughter, an immigrant by the name of Garrett Barry. So much for my idea of tracing that Barry connection back to Ireland, where a possible baptismal record for Humphrey also included a mention of that second surname, Barry.

Still, for the record—and since I went through the steps to find this—here's what we can learn about the direct line of a DNA match whose Falvey ancestor was connected by marriage to relatives with that Barry surname.

The nexus is Mary and Humphrey O'Leary's daughter Ellen. The third of the O'Leary daughters, Ellen was generally known by the nickname Nellie. In 1914, Nellie said "I do" to a young man by the name of Patrick James Barry—that Barry surname echoing the name of a sponsoring relative named in a possible baptismal record of the bride's own father, back in County Kerry. Could Nellie have married a cousin? Could that connection help us confirm whether we had identified the right record? 

From her untimely death in 1937, we can glean from Ellen O'Leary Barry's several obituaries the details of her life. For one, we can verify that we are indeed talking about the right Nellie Barry, for her siblings are mentioned in reports of her death. Other details of her history come out in, for instance, this 23 August, 1937, insertion in the Wairarapa Daily Times, which mentioned that the late forty seven year old woman was once a "noted Wairarapa hockey player" active in many tournaments with her champion team.

For our genealogical purposes, though, we are keenly interested in any listing of her children, and find them in an obituary dated that same day in the Manawatu Herald: surviving were daughters Joan, Molly, and Helen, plus sons Frank and Pat. But for our pursuit of the origin of that Barry connection, we need to push still further.

A Foxton cemetery transcription shows us not only the inscription for Nellie's headstone, but indicates that a contiguous plaque provides the date of death for her husband, Patrick James Barry, in 1950. That later date, of course, makes it difficult to obtain any records or even newspaper reports, but there were still some details I could glean on the Barry family tree. 

Let's see what can be found for the new son-in-law of Humphrey O'Leary. Turning to New Zealand birth records, which fortunately are available for the beginning of his life's story, we discover that Nellie's husband, Patrick James Barry, was born to Hannah and Garrett Barry in 1883. That documentation of a New Zealand birth, of course, requires us to push back another generation before we can find the Barry family's origin in Ireland. 

Unfortunately, I was unable to locate any passenger record for a reasonable date range for the elder Barry, but lack of such record was nearly compensated by the discovery of a mention in a newspaper of Garrett Barry's arrival in New Zealand. Though not as much could be found of newspapers mentioning the senior Barry man, the Marlborough Express on May 10, 1894, reported, following his sudden death, that Garrett Barry had lived in Blenheim in the South Island for the past thirty years, and that he first arrived in Nelson in 1859. His origin in Ireland? No other detail but County Kerry.

Interestingly, the newspaper article also mentioned his brief business partnership with a "Mr. Humphrey O'Leary of Redwoodtown," likely the other Humphrey O'Leary I had found in passenger records. Whether that was strictly business, or a hint of a family connection, I can't tell.

From this point, it was to searches of records in County Kerry in which I tried, in vain, to locate a reasonable document indicating Garrett Barry's own origin. Based on his 1894 death record and mostly brief newspaper reports, he had died at age fifty, pinning his birth date around 1844. Once again, however, tracing a collateral line has failed us in leading to the vicinity of the extended Falvey, O'Leary, and Barry families' origin.

That said, though it may still be possible that Nellie O'Leary chose as her spouse a cousin—if the Barry line were indeed connected to her father's line, back in County Kerry—we have no way to document such a possibility.

With all that exploration, we now need to step back, dust ourselves off, and reassess the research situation. It's possible that, for now, we may need to set aside this pursuit of New Zealand Falvey connections and await further availability of documentation.

 

Relentlessly Circling the Drain

 

Does it seem, in some genealogical tasks of identification, that the effort seems to repeat, ad nauseam, the same iterations with only the slightest of variation? We test one hypothesis, then another ever so slightly updated, and then still another—and are still left with the same doubt. Perhaps this is the fate of anyone attempting to circle the specific family origin of their Irish ancestor.

Yet, with the case of Mary Falvey—whose descendant is a DNA match to my husband, leading us back to County Kerry, Ireland, from Mary's final resting place in New Zealand—she may have left us some sturdy hints with the identity of her own children. If that is so, we may also be able to confirm the identity of her husband's parents through a possible baptismal record for him—Humphrey O'Leary—back in that same County Kerry location.

From Humphrey O'Leary's 1934 obituary, the listing of his surviving sons provides their birth order: John, Joseph, Humphrey, and Mark. While we are unable to place the deceased son Patrick in that sequence, based on what I can find from other online trees—I know, a risky proposition at this point—he may have fallen into line as the second of the sons, between John and Joseph.

As for the daughters in this O'Leary family, their birth order may have been Margaret, Mary, Ellen, Kathleen, Annie, and Ella Josephine—the anonymous "Mrs. J. Brophy," whose given name surfaced after I located her record in the New Zealand database of marriages prior to 1940. I emphasize "may have been" as the previously-deceased daughter Mary was not included in the obituary in birth order.

Now that we have this data laid out in an order we can study, a few details surface. Recall that there were two possible baptismal records I could find for Humphrey O'Leary back in County Kerry, Ireland. One was from a digitized copy of the actual parish record for a son born in December of 1854—a bit late for the details gleaned at the opposite end of this man's life—citing "Dionysii Leary" as the father and Anna Sullivan as his mother, with two "Leary" relatives listed as sponsors. The other baptismal record was a transcription for a Humphrey O'Leary born in September of 1853, agreeing more closely with the date suggested by later reports.

Admittedly, there are difficulties with assuming that our choice lies with one or the other of these two records. The possibility is there that other baptismal records might also have existed at that time for someone with that same name in County Kerry, but which unfortunately did not survive to the present day, or have not yet been included in either scans of documents or transcription projects. Who knows? Perhaps another such record does still exist, but because of abysmal handwriting, the details were incorrectly transcribed or indexed, and thus will not come to our attention without a deeper search. We cannot simply assume there are no other choices.

However, given these two possibilities, we may have enough information solely from the names of Humphrey's own children to deduce which of those baptismal records might be the more reasonable choice. It all comes down to the question of whether Humphrey and Mary, being immigrants in a new land, chose to carry forward to a new world the naming traditions of their Irish origin.

One cannot help but notice that Humphrey's obituary featured as his oldest son a man by the nickname of Jack—typically a substitute for the more formal John. Likewise, the transcribed baptismal record from the parish at Tralee declares the father's name to be John.

Granted, this naming pattern does not always hold fast, as one website devoted to researching Irish ancestors explains. If we turn to the listing of Humphrey's daughters, we now know that the oldest daughter would appropriately receive the name of her mother's mother—which in this case would indicate that Mary's mother was named Margaret, not Humphrey's. And yet, that same article on naming patterns in Ireland explains that sometimes the sequence is set aside for extenuating circumstances; the recent death of a close relative might call for the naming of the next child in that relative's memory.

All that to say, it is not lost upon me that Humphrey's mother's name in that transcribed baptismal record—same as for his oldest daughter—was Margaret.

The other troubling detail about that possible baptismal transcription is that the mother's name is listed as Margaret "Leary," not O'Leary, which would be her married name. Baptismal records generally used a woman's maiden name. Was hers actually Leary? Or was the priest—or the transcriber—in a rush, inadvertently substituting the wrong surname?

Looking at the names of the sponsors to this baptism brings up another question: how are they related to the parents? According to that same Irish naming tradition article, each godparent was either a sibling to one of the parents, or a sibling-in-law. With this Humphrey's sponsors listed as James Barry and Elizabeth Hurley, we wonder how each of these were related to the parents. James Barry would either be the husband of Margaret's sister, or the husband of John's sister, for instance. Likewise, Elizabeth Hurley would need to be an in-law, as her name as given in the record would have used her maiden name.

The curious detail is that, looking back to Humphrey O'Leary's obituary, we spot that same Barry surname echoed in the married name of one of his daughters. Could she have married a cousin? Can we trace the roots of daughter Ellen O'Leary's husband, Patrick James Barry, back to County Kerry, as well?

And, once again, we take another lap around the question of where, exactly, Humphrey O'Leary and his wife Mary Falvey originated. Perhaps, in circling this research problem one more time, we will find a clue to lead us to answers.

Or not.