Sometimes, I Just Wanna . . .

 

...hop on plane and fly to Ireland and search for those ancestors' records in person. 

It's nearly the end of another month, and I've yet to make any breakthrough on my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey. I can presume that her sister was named Gobnait—or Gobineta, or Debora, or even Abby—but I'd feel more confident in that if I could find further documentation. I can also presume that Johanna had younger brothers named Patrick and whatever actual Irish name the family might have used instead of Demetrius. But find any further record that could reasonably be linked to those family members? Not really. Not even by a thorough search through microfilmed records online.

Even exploring the discovery of "Debora" and her husband, Daniel Cullinane, while leading me to a couple possible immigrant sons through DNA matches, has not yielded any further leads. For this family, too, I've searched through available Irish records to find any trace of the Cullinane children without much success. There is so much more work to be done on this collateral line.

And yet, those DNA matches taunt me to find a connection. There is obviously one there, even if I can't see it. 

Along the way, I've certainly built a list of resources to consult for similar research questions about Irish roots. As I explore Irish civil registrations post-1864, juxtaposing townlands and registration districts, I've found resources not only for my Falvey question in County Kerry, but for use in research in the other counties in Ireland. From an overall guide to finding registration districts at FamilySearch.org to some tools for looking up specific townlands and their corresponding overarching government jurisdictions—for example, the Falvey family's townland of Knockauncore—I've saved these resources, and more, for future projects.

There will be more such projects to come. After all, my father-in-law claimed one hundred percent Irish heritage, with three of his grandparents born in Ireland, as well as all eight great-grandparents. Even though this month is coming to a close—and thus, we'll need to set aside our quest to discover more about Johanna Falvey's roots—we'll have one more Irish ancestor to search for in the coming month.

The Nemesis: Name Twins

 

Independently building the family tree of a DNA match may seem a smart move—until, that is, we discover we have gotten swamped in the murky waters of unknown ancestries. In particular, my nemesis for this foray has been the realization that I've now been plagued with name twins. Time to move forward with caution.

My goal was to inspect Patrick, this supposed son of Daniel Cullinane and "Debora" Falvey, the supposed direct line ancestor of a DNA match. While I had found most of this couple's children baptized in the Catholic parish of Kilcummin in County Kerry, Ireland, I had not been able to locate such a record for any son named Patrick.

According to the tree posted for this line on Ancestry.com, Patrick had emigrated from his homeland bound for the United States, and showed up in records in the area around Boston. That's where I began my search.

As I mentioned yesterday, I had found Patrick's marriage record from May 15, 1890 in the city of Boston. I began tracing his descendants from that point, adding his wife and children to a floating tree I had set up on Ancestry's beta "Networks" tool. I quickly learned that Patrick's wife, though named Johanna, preferred to go by the nickname Annie. As I moved through the decades, census records enabled me to add the names of the Cullinanes' growing family.

A growing family, that is, until I realized one problem: there were apparently two families in the Boston area with parents named Patrick and Annie Cullinane. And, as you can imagine, each of those families contained some of the same children's names. My challenge was now to not take that left turn down the wrong family line.

Think about this for a moment. Patrick, born in the early 1860s according to the various ages he provided for documents, had moved to Boston from Ireland sometime before his 1890 wedding. Rather than focus on Patrick, for a moment, let's focus on the city which he adopted as his new home, and the time period in which he did so.

Ever since the first waves of Irish immigrants arrived at the port of Boston following the famine back in their homeland, Boston's population burgeoned. From 1850 to 1860, for instance, Boston's population grew by nearly fifty percent, and the phenomenal growth continued decade over decade until the turn of the next century. It's no surprise, then, to learn that people of Irish descent form the largest single ethnic group in the state of Massachusetts. By 1850 in Boston, those steadily-arriving Irish immigrants had already become the largest single ethnic group in the city.

It's easy to see, then, that name twins would be lurking in Boston's historic records. It doesn't matter whether the surname was widespread or less common. Couple that with a rather limited set of Irish given names, derived from saints and repeated through traditional naming patterns, and we still have reason to exercise research caution, even for a less-common surname like Cullinane.

I think I've found my way around this research hazard so far, but there are other challenges in piecing together this family tree. While Ancestry's ThruLines tool may have offered an explanation to lead me from the DNA match's supposed ancestor downwards through the generations, it may be prudent to return to that tried and true genealogical research advice: to begin, start with "yourself." I may just need to do that with this DNA cousin's proposed tree, in order to let the documentation lead me to the answer.  

Two Brothers Bound for Boston?

 

Discovering whatever became of the children of an ancestor's sibling can be a challenging prospect, especially if that ancestor lived in Ireland. While we can find baptismal records for many of the children of Daniel Cullinane and his wife Gobnait Falvey, tracing what became of those children after their birth in County Kerry in the 1860s and 1870s has not led to reasonable answers.

Then there is this question of whether any of the Cullinane children remained in Ireland. Though their birth post-dated the horrific famine, many Irish were still emigrating in hopes of a more promising future—which led me to a question to consider. Could two of the Cullinane brothers have been bound for Boston as young adults?

Though the reason which first prompted my question has to do with DNA matches to this line, on the other hand, there is substantial documentation to make me wonder. Take the Cullinanes' son Timothy. Someone by that same name showed up in marriage records for the city of Chelsea, just over the river from Boston in the United States. The 1883 register entry shows a twenty three year old Irish laborer by the name of Timothy Cullinane of Boston about to wed Margaret McCarthy of Chelsea. This would place his birth at about 1860, just a bit younger than what our Timothy's October 1858 baptismal record had noted. Coincidentally, this soon to be married Timothy claimed his parents were Daniel and Deborah.

A document only ten years later showed the unfortunate Timothy Cullinane yielding to death coming from pulmonalis phthisis—or tuberculosis. Though his age given at the time of his death would put his birth around August of 1861, and his parents' names as Daniel Cullinane and "Abby" Falvey, knowing what we now know about the nicknames for Gobnait Falvey, it is likely that we are still tracking the right Timothy Cullinane.

Or how about this other Cullinane immigrant to the Boston area. On May 15, 1890, this son of Daniel and "Debby" Cullinane married another Irish immigrant, Joanna Sullivan. He was likely the same immigrant, born in County Kerry, who filed his petition for United States citizenship in Massachusetts on September 26, 1889. And, of most keen interest to me, he was an ancestor of a DNA match I've been eyeing.

Though it seems promising that this, too, was a son of our Daniel Cullinane and Gobnait Falvey, there are several problems with this hypothesis. The first is that the man reported his occupation to be a marble worker—not a typical line of work for the son of an Irish tenant farmer. In addition, this man signed his name on his petition for citizenship, an unlikely ability for a Catholic raised during that era of religious discrimination in Ireland. But key to all this questioning is the fact that the name Patrick was not among those baptismal records I had found for Cullinane children, back in the Kilcummin parish in County Kerry where his parents attended church. Not, especially, for the date at which this man reported his birth: June 15 of 1860.

Whether that Patrick turns out to be a missing child of that same Cullinane family, I can't yet tell. But this is a call to go back to square one and examine the documents to build my own tree for this DNA match independently.

How Far Can Seventeen Stretch?

 

The number was seventeen—centiMorgans, that is. I wasn't sure how far seventeen could reach, so I had to take a look. Seventeen, after all, is the amount of genetic material shared by my husband and his most likely DNA match claiming Falvey roots. And that is not very much.

The possessor of that particular seventeen centiMorgan segment is someone who possibly descends from Gobnait Falvey and Daniel Cullinane of County Kerry in Ireland. Gobnait—or Debora, as she was listed in the many baptismal records of her children—was likely the sister of Johanna Falvey, my father-in-law's great-grandmother. If this DNA match is the same number of generations removed from Johanna and Gobnait's parents as my husband is, we'd be looking at a fourth cousin. Slim possibilities, indeed.

Just to make sure, I popped over to DNA Painter, the website which hosts an interactive version of Blaine Bettinger's updated Shared centiMorgan Project. There, I checked the possible reach of a seventeen centiMorgan match to see if it could indeed show up to connect fourth cousins.

As it turns out, sharing seventeen centiMorgans with a DNA match could indeed be a reasonable number for fourth cousins. And the connection could stretch in either directions. Probabilities are that both a third cousin and even a second cousin's child could be revealed by that amount of shared genetic material—and, heading in the other direction, so could a fifth cousin or even a more distant relationship than that.

With this particular DNA match, the assumption is of descent from Daniel and "Debora" Cullinane, but as often happens, there appears to be discrepancies in the proposed ThruLines line of descent. We'll take some time this week to examine whether this supposed son of the Cullinanes did indeed emigrate from Ireland. We'll also follow the route of another Cullinane son who supposedly did the same. Sometimes, in using DNA for family history, we learn far more about other people's family trees than we at first assumed.

. . . But the DNA Says So

 

Looking at all the baptismal records for the children of Gobnait "Debora" Falvey and her husband, Daniel Cullinane, in County Kerry, I now have a pretty good idea of who those children were. In order, I first have Mary, whose godmother was my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey. Following that, the list continues with Timothy, John, Hanoria, Ann, Michael, and Daniel.

Having the documentation to verify that lineup may be all well and good, but when I look to those few DNA matches descended from that Falvey ancestor, their path to the past doesn't agree with those hard-earned results from baptisms and civil registrations. The DNA may say that they are connected to my father-in-law's ancestor, but the paper trail simply hasn't yet gotten the message.

One sticking point is Daniel and Debora Cullinane's second-born son. According to the baptismal record, that son was named John. According to the DNA matches who descend from that second-born son, his 1860 baptismal record should have read Patrick, not John.

And can you blame them? If the traditional Irish naming pattern still held sway—and after the famine, it didn't always do so—the second-born son should have been named after the maternal grandfather. In the case of Daniel and Debora Cullinane, her father's name was certainly not John; it was Patrick.

Fast-forward to our modern age, complete with Internet access to digitized church and governmental verifications of our ancestors' life history, and add DNA into the mix. While I am still in the process of confirming the line of descent offered in DNA matches' family trees, one thing is obvious: these are DNA cousins who descend from a son of Daniel and Debora named—wait for it—Patrick.

Now what? Looks like it's time to start from scratch and build the family tree for some of these DNA matches, to check every step of the way from the match to the specific ancestor. At best, we'll figure out what the exact connection might be between DNA cousins. At the least, perhaps we'll learn something new in the process. 

Measuring the Distances

 

One word of advice I've always appreciated receiving about researching Irish ancestors was to cross-check any possible marriage records with the distance between the townlands where the bride and groom were said to have lived. The question to consider would be to determine how the couple met. Given the typical modes of transportation in rural Ireland in the mid-1800s, if young people were to get out and meet each other, it would most likely have to be by foot.

Thus, the question becomes, how far a walk is that? The advice I learned was: no greater distance than the round trip which can be accomplished in one day. 

The most likely scenario for such travel would be a trip to market, whether to buy or to sell. Even if the potential couple were to meet up at market from homes in entirely opposite directions, each would still need to return home at the end of the day.

With the challenges of knowing just where all those tiny townlands are in Ireland, I accidentally discovered that Google Maps shows specific townlands in response to a user's inquiry. Having learned that, I simply set the app to get directions between two townlands, then indicate the mode of transportation I prefer to measure. In this case, of course, it would be transportation by foot; no trolley car rides for these inquiries.

Thus, if I found a couple with my ancestors' names, but living in a different townland than where I had last found them, this extra bit of information could help me determine whether I had found the right people, or simply stumbled upon name twins who would lead me astray.

As I go through records for possible Cullinane relatives descended from Gobnait (or "Debora") Falvey, I've been constantly popping back to check distances on Google Maps. Even when considering if the couple had moved from one location to another, it helps to see the distances measured. Townlands, after all, are rather small sections of property, so moving from one to another may be within reason—but moving far enough away to entail an all-day hike leads me to doubt the familial connection. 

The Tedium of Incremental Steps

 

At this stage of the search for Falvey family connections, we've entered what I call the tedium of incremental steps. Not much action is taking place, but the step by step moves are necessary in order to make any progress on our research question.

We've been focusing on the family of one possible sister of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey of County Kerry, Ireland. This sister married a man named Daniel Cullinane and, for the most part, remained in the same townland, Knockauncore, where I had previously found Johanna before her own  marriage and migration to the United States.

Since the Cullinane family had at least four children born after the date at which Ireland instituted civil registrations for everyone—finally including Catholics—I decided to locate the government records of their birth. I found an entry for each of those four—Hanoria, Ann, Michael, and Daniel—noting the discrepancy between dates of birth noted in each child's baptismal record and that of the civil registration. Who knows which date each child would carry throughout life as a way of secondary identification.

The tedium of it all wasn't necessarily in finding those four civil registrations. Where the true grunt work begins is in the next step: trying to locate each of these Cullinane children twenty to thirty years later in marriage records.

Such a task assumes a number of premises. For one thing, the assumption that the child lived to adulthood. A second assumption would be that the child, now grown, remained at home to be married in Ireland—not somewhere across an ocean in any of the locations where we've already found Falvey DNA cousins: Australia, New Zealand, or even North America.

The draw, though, is that it is possible to find such records, if those premises turned out to be true. If the children remained in Ireland, roughly in the same neighborhood as where they were born, not only might I be able to muddle through the many name twins who had gotten married, but I could theoretically push ahead yet one additional step: look for them in the death records of Ireland, currently available online from about 1871 until fifty years before our current year.

Finding marriage and death records is not a task limited to only those four youngest children of the Cullinane family. Though I can't find any birth entries in those civil registrations for the older Cullinane children, they might be discoverable in marriage or death records. Add even more tedium.

Still, considering the rare find of an ancestor in Irish records, wouldn't the tedium be worth the possible result? Though this process won't necessarily be something for which I'll write up the blow-by-blow details, if any surprises do show up, I promise to mention them. 

"All the Others Take Nine Months"

 

There is an old joke about newlyweds and expectant parents, with the snide remark that "the first one can come at any time; all the others take nine months."

Somehow, in noticing the discrepancies between baptismal records and civil registration reports for the Irish relatives of my father-in-law's Falvey family, I had been searching for possible explanations. I ran across one online observation the other day that noted the occasional entry of a birth even before a marriage.

Of course, now that I want to share that, I can't replicate that search. But noticing one comment to yesterday's post, in which reader (and blogger) Kat explained that dates given for a child's birth might be, ahem, adjusted so as to avoid any reporting penalties, I wanted to follow up. Hence the search for that missing article. (Where are these tidbits when you really need them?!)

Along the way, though, I did find some additional resources to support Kat's observation. As I had mentioned yesterday, beginning on January 1, 1864, all births, marriages, and deaths were required to be reported to government authorities in Ireland. The difficulty was in getting the word to the right location for an Irish family's jurisdiction. This registration process was overseen by Superintendent Register Districts (now called local civil registration districts).

The problem was that, especially in the earlier years, some Irish births were simply not reported. According to Claire Santry on her site, Irish Genealogy Toolkit, "Some estimates put non-registration as high as 15% in some of the vast rural areas of the west." The reason? It might be a long distance to the closest registration center.

That, in itself, incurred another problem: those who didn't report a birth in a timely manner may have faced a fine for late registration. That, in turn, might have somehow impacted the date of birth reported when the registration was finally made. As was observed in the article at Irish Genealogy Toolkit, "the longer the period between the birth and the date of registration, the more likelihood the date of birth is incorrect."

Being that young Daniel, son of Daniel Cullinane and Debora Falvey, was born in County Kerry—one of those "vast rural areas of the west" of Ireland—I'm guessing his father was almost one of that estimated fifteen percent of reporting parents who didn't quite get there as soon as they could. 

From Church to Civil Records

 

Seeking records for my father-in-law's Catholic ancestors in Ireland presented more than one kind of problem. The first problem was discovering the destruction of so many historic records in that country. The second one was navigating around the problem of the near-invisibility of adherents to the Catholic faith. Civil registration of births and marriages for Catholics did not begin until 1864.

Thus, trying to trace the descent of children in a collateral line related to my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey Kelly, has been challenging. While I have been able to access some baptismal records for the children of this collateral line—that of "Debora" Falvey and Daniel Cullinane of County Kerry—I'd like to also trace them through civil records.

Most of the Cullinane children I've found have been recorded in baptismal records prior to that 1864 date, so there would be no mention of their birth in government records. However, to test the process, I tried my hand at the youngest of the Cullinane children to see what I could find. 

Starting with the youngest, a son named Daniel, I first checked on the index at Ancestry.com, looking for all entries for Cullinane children in County Kerry, delimited by the mother's maiden name. That result was so huge as to be of no help, with the main problem being lack of use of the maiden name. Clicking on one of the specific entries for a Daniel Cullinane gave a readout with little more of use than the identifying number to look up the document in the FamilySearch.org collection.

I jumped over to the Irish Genealogy website, where my search for a Daniel Cullinane, born 1874 in County Kerry, produced three results. Clicking through, a readout of the indexed material indicated a disappointing entry for the item, "mother's birth surname," of "null."

I'm glad I happened to notice a line below that, "View record image." It was hyperlinked, so I clicked through to the actual birth registration image. There, on the top line, was the entry for Daniel Cullinane, son of Daniel Cullinane of Knockauncore, just as we had found it in the baptismal record. Baby Daniel's mother's maiden name was indeed listed as Falvey. The proud papa gave the birth report on the fifteenth of August, leaving for a signature "his mark," an "x" in the proper box.

The only puzzling part was that the date of this son's birth was listed as July 23, 1874—when the baptismal record had listed his birth as July 15 of that same year, and the date of baptism as the very next day, not July 23. Until I can sort out this discrepancy, I'll keep both reported dates in mind, if I can follow each of the later Cullinane children through their later years. I do want to track each of these Falvey descendants, in case any DNA matches turn out to connect with this same surname. I'll repeat this same process for each of the other Cullinane children to note their civil registration information, as well.

Documenting Daniel's Descendants

 

One of my prime reasons for documenting the descendants of collateral lines is to confirm connections to DNA cousins. In this month's research goal of determining the siblings—and, hopefully, eventually the parents—of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey, there are several possible DNA matches who might provide some guidance. That is if, however, I am able to document the line of descent for any of Johanna's possible siblings.

One such possibility would be the family of Daniel Cullinane, who married a Falvey. Daniel's wife was the woman whose distinctly Irish given name—likely Gobnait—we discussed this past weekend. She was the one who showed up in Latin baptismal records for her children with her own name listed variously as Latinized versions of the Irish Gobnait, or even Latin versions of English-language nicknames bestowed upon that Irish name.

The only sign assuring me that Gobnait—or Debora, as she appeared in some church records—was sister to our Johanna was the fact that Johanna herself was named as godmother for one of the Cullinane children. But if Gobnait and Johanna were siblings, now what? How do I proceed with tracing the descendants of Daniel Cullinane and his Falvey wife? The same difficulties plaguing anyone researching Irish roots also make their appearance as we move on to the next generation: missing census records, spotty Catholic Church records. The only positive sign was the beginning of inclusion of Catholics in civil registrations in Ireland after 1863.

It just so happened that, in perusing all my husband's DNA matches, I did find a likely Falvey cousin among his test results. This one, in particular, was said to have descended from Daniel Cullinane and Debora Falvey. In fact, the line of descent was handily outlined for me by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool.

My appreciation of that fact, however, was short-lived: Daniel's son who was said to have been in that line of descent was someone born in 1860 by the name of Patrick. The baptismal record I had found for Daniel's son born in July of that same year was for a name recorded in Latin as Ioannes—or John in English.

True, ThruLines results, while partially based on actual DNA matches, are only as accurate as the family trees from which the suggested relationships are drawn. There may be something missing from the match's tree. Or John Cullinane's baptismal record could be for the child of a different Daniel Cullinane. Whichever way it turns out to be—and there could be other possible problems, as well—it shows me that we'll need to go back and take a second look. Or even more.  

Translating Gobnait

 

When we see a mother's name change from one child's baptismal record to the next, do we presume that the father listed in the documents had remarried? That, after all, was the situation we found when we assembled all the Catholic baptismal records for the children of Daniel Cullinane in County Kerry, Ireland. For some of his children's records, the child's mother was said to have been named Debora. In others, it was either Gubbenelas (for son John), Gubboneta (for Honora) or Gobinetta (for Michael). Where did that come from?

The actual name, as it turns out, should have been Gobnait—at least as far as the Irish are concerned. The trouble is, for those Irish families adhering to the Catholic faith, all church records were kept in Latin, not English, and certainly not in the Irish language. But not all traditional Irish names were translated into Latin—at least not easily. Indeed, translating a name like Gobnait even into English results in some unexpected options.

Indeed, one list found online of Irish given names and their anglicized equivalents—a helpful resource for those of us researching our roots back in Ireland—is quite lengthy and, I suspect, does not include the entire universe of possibilities. Another list provides the next step of translations between English names and their Latin equivalents. Somehow, we are stuck in the middle, juggling the two lists to figure out just whether the baptismal record we just found might indeed be the right one for our Irish ancestor.

In the case of a name like Gobnait—which, by the way, is officially supposed to be noted in Latin as Gobnata—it comes from the name of an early medieval Irish saint. Gobnait's long history, though, does not mean the woman has been forgotten over the centuries; to the contrary, there are regions in Ireland where she is still venerated, one of which is in County Kerry, the same place where my father-in-law's Falvey roots originated.

The difficulty is that, for whatever reason through the more recent centuries, the given name Gobnait attained a number of nicknames which, to an English speaking researcher, might not make sense. Take a look at this list of possible variants, said to include names as different as Abigail and Deborah.

Knowing this now, I can safely assert that Daniel Cullinane's wife, whether listed in church records as "Gubboneta" or "Debora," was indeed the same person. And since I discovered a DNA match who claims to have descended from a son of this couple, it won't surprise me to find more records with these variants for Daniel Cullinane's wife as I seek to verify how this DNA match connects with my father-in-law's family. 

Researching the Doppelgänger Family

 

At a local genealogical society meeting yesterday, I was talking with a fellow member about a research problem she was tackling. Apparently, she and other family members had traced back one line of her family to a possible tie with a key aide to George Washington. While that would make a fascinating connection, there was one problem with the story. When my friend looked more closely at the genealogical assumptions, she realized the son of that presidential aide—the man in her direct line—was listed as born two years after the aide's wife had died.

This is a problem.

We all know to keep an eye out for those genealogical gaffes. Children born long after their "parents" die are a telltale sign. But there are others, too.

I'm not entirely sure finding an ancestor alive and listed in a census record almost seven years after his death would qualify as a bona fide resurrection, but finding another Timothy Cullinane, complete with correct names for his wife and three of the four children I had in my records, certainly made me stop and take another look. Perhaps, incredibly enough, I was wrong.

Let's take a double-check of what we have found on our Timothy Cullinane, brother to the Patrick Cullinane who was ancestor of one of my husband's DNA matches. We learned from Timothy's 1883 marriage record that he married Margaret McCarthy, and that his parents were Daniel and Debora Cullinane. 

While we have, in looking at the many records for Timothy, his family, and even his brother's family, uncovered documents which recorded that Cullinane surname in many permutations—everything from the innocuous dropping of the final "e" to render Cullinan, to added vowels or chopped off syllables—we still have been able to piece together his history through to the next generation.

Double checking that next generation, we can see that eldest son Daniel had, for his May 16, 1884, birth record, a listing of parents with at least their given name listed: Timothy and Margaret. While I could not find a birth entry for second son Patrick, his death record, showing a birth in 1886, mentioned his parents' names as Timothy Cullinane and Margaret McCarthy. For daughter Margaret, while we need to rely on a digitized scan of a very faded handwritten record from Boston in 1889 listing "Maggie" Cullinane, the July 4 entry at least confirms her parents were Timothy and Margaret, though the mother's surname was missing from the record. Even the short-lived third son Timothy had, for his October 25, 1891, death an entry confirming his parents as Timothy Cullinane and Margaret McCarthy.

If we have the parents correct for all these children, and if we already have documentation showing us that Timothy Cullinane died in Boston on November 15 of 1893, why, when looking for what became of his widow and children in the 1900 U.S. Census, do I find another Boston family with almost the same details?

  

Admittedly, the surname listed was spelled "Cullane," not Cullinane, but I have seen that surname chopped up in similar manner elsewhere. While there also was one other person listed in this family—I omitted the line for a younger daughter in the household named Sarah, who was born in August of 1894, nine months after our Timothy died—the details on the rest of the family line up almost too close for comfort.

At his death in 1893, Timothy's age was given as thirty two years and three months, which would have yielded a birth in August, alright, even though the year would have been 1861—though such errors in death records are not unusual. While I don't have a date of birth for his wife, Margaret's age at their marriage was listed as the same as Timothy's, so a five month difference wouldn't be that far off. And the children? May of 1884 lines up perfectly for Daniel, and at least the year agrees for Patrick. July is spot on for Margaret, though the year misses it by one. Even baby Timothy, who died in 1891, was appropriately missing from the family constellation.

Think of all the records you've scrutinized for your own family trees. How many times have the census records reported ages a year or so off? Or spelling missing a few letters? Even the year of marriage lines right up.

The only problem: I've already found the death record for the head of the family. Not, apparently, the head of this family.

While it may seem I've belabored the point, a discovery like this points up a valid consideration. What are the chances that the ancestor you are researching has a doppelgänger family, as well? You might not need to worry about exposure to such a risk if you are researching, say, the Aktabowski family in New Jersey, but when it comes to Boston at the cusp of the twentieth century, the influx of Irish immigrants yielded that city multiple Patricks and Margarets who all claimed the same surnames. These are genealogical waters through which we must tread cautiously.

While I could argue that I've seen more than my fair share of city directories in which the widow was too timid to have herself listed as a woman living alone—forget then, I know women who do this now—I tend to doubt that our Timothy's widow Margaret would have reported her husband still alive and well for the 1900 census. 

I dunno...I may be a bit unreasonable in some of my assertions. But I wouldn't be surprised if I just stumbled upon yet another of a multitude of Irish immigrant families who chose to name their children with the same Daniel, Patrick, and Margaret pattern of this family, whoever they turned out to be.

Above image excerpted from the 1900 U.S. Census for the Boston, Massachusetts area; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

Seeking Falvey Descendants

 

It is sheer serendipity when someone who takes a DNA test happens to match up with a family line which has had our own research work stalled. If the match is close enough, and the person's own tree complete enough, it is possible to make some connections we hadn't seen before.

In the case of my husband's DNA matches who tie into our mutual Falvey line from County Kerry, Ireland, my hope to find the Falveys' way back home has not yet materialized. We've already traced the line back through several iterations of Falveys—from Indiana, from Michigan, and now, for the second go-round, from Massachusetts. Still nothing to point the way back home.

We had a possibility with the line we examined last week, that of Timothy Cullinane who settled in the Boston area. Though he and his wife, Margaret McCarthy, had at least four children, that younger generation either died young or didn't marry. Of the one child whom I could trace, though she married, I couldn't find any descendants, and thus, no further possible DNA testers.

Timothy's brother Patrick, on the other hand, already was the ancestor of one of my husband's DNA matches. Though the match wasn't close—only twenty six centiMorgans—it could have represented a relationship as close as third cousin (a stretch) or as distant as sixth cousin. Or beyond. It all came down to how much Falvey DNA from Patrick's mother any of Patrick's descendants would carry in his or her own genetic makeup.

To find an additional Falvey DNA match from this same family line, at first glance, wouldn't seem difficult. Patrick Cullinane and his wife, Johanna Sullivan, had at least eight children whom I could find. On closer scrutiny, though, finding any children of their children was a challenge.

There was one option, though. Patrick and Annie's second daughter, Helen, married a man formally known as Cornelius Francis Lyons—Frank to his friends—and they raised a family of at least five children. I am still working my way through documenting that family line, seeking other Ancestry subscribers who are working on that line and who may also have tested their DNA. I haven't found any possible candidates to approach about considering testing yet, though.

In the meantime, having repeated the same process for Patrick's brother Timothy's line, I ran into a bit of a surprise. After finding a death record for Timothy and his son before the 1900 census, what should I stumble across in that very census but a family in the same area looking suspiciously like the Timothy Cullinane family I had just been working on.

Tell me it isn't so.... 

Tracing the Cullinane Descendants

 

It was one lone segment on chromosome two—a tiny one, even, with only twenty six centiMorgans—which tied my husband with a descendant of Patrick Cullinane of Boston, Massachusetts. From ample documentation, thanks to those record-keeping Bostonians, we could determine that Patrick's parents were Daniel Cullinane of County Kerry, Ireland, and his wife of the many names, Gobinette or Debora or Abbie Falvey. From that small start, we could spot Patrick's brother who also made the immigrant journey to Massachusetts—Timothy Cullinane and his own wife, Margaret McCarthy.

That, of course, was before Timothy's untimely death from tuberculosis. Since he apparently arrived in Massachusetts after the 1880 census and died before the 1900 census, it seems we have very little to determine whether he left any descendants. After all, his funeral notice gave us no information on who survived him in 1893.

There was, however, one clue, again from those New England record-keepers: Timothy and Margaret had a son whom they named Timothy. Yet the only record I could say for certain belonged to him was his death record. Unfortunately, like his father, the junior Timothy died young. Very young. In the city of Boston in 1891, the entry for Timothy Cullinane's death showed his age as only twenty eight days, having succumbed to pneumonia.

Just to be sure I read the register entry correctly, I looked for a recording of young Timothy's birth earlier that same year, but found only a segment of a record showing a Timothy Cullinane born on September 27. Only the fact that the page was not cut off before the first few letters of the Cullinane address kept me from wondering whether I had found the wrong record. The "15 Thac" was enough for me to see it agreed with the same address in the death record,  15 Thacher Street.

At first, seeing that entry for a life so soon snuffed out—and that of a son whose father died soon after from lung complications, himself—led me to conclude this Cullinane line had no further children to carry on their father's name. How wrong I was.

It took a little bit of reverse searching to flush out a fuller picture, as my first attempt—the direct approach of finding widow Margaret Cullinane in Boston for the 1900 census—wasn't working. By reverse searching, I mean filling in all the blanks other than the supposed child's name.

When I looked for an unnamed child in the Boston area whose parents' names were Timothy Cullinane and Margaret McCarthy, then I began seeing a fuller picture of the family constellation Timothy left behind at his 1893 passing. Expanding my search beyond Ancestry.com to FamilySearch.org provided even more documents to help build out a family group sheet for this couple.

From what I was able to locate, Timothy and Margaret had at least four children. True to his Irish roots—or at least the customary Irish naming pattern—shortly after the Cullinanes' first anniversary, on May 16, 1884, they named their first-born son after Timothy's father, Daniel. Two years later, the couple welcomed a second son, whom they dutifully named Patrick, after Margaret's own father, though he was not destined to live long enough to marry or have a family of his own, succumbing to a lung malady himself in 1915 at the age of twenty nine.

A third child I found for the Cullinanes was their daughter Margaret, whose marriage only months before her brother's death provides the details to help us look for descendants with her husband's name, Edward J. Connarton.

Despite being able to find all these other records by going about the search "backwards," there was much more to learn about this family. My question is whether there are any others in this branch of the Cullinane family who, as direct descendants, might also have tested their DNA—more importantly, whether that test might lead to a match with any other branches of this extended Falvey family from County Kerry I'm seeking.

Besides this now-expanded line of descent, though, we still have Timothy's brother Patrick's family to explore, a task which we will pick up when we continue on Monday. 

Connecting the Trans-Atlantic Dots

 

What are the chances that the information we discovered in Massachusetts on brothers Timothy and Patrick Cullinane can lead us back to the land of their birth in Ireland? After all, other than a few document discrepancies, we have the names of their likely parents: Daniel Cullinane and Deborah—or Abbie—Falvey. And we've already seen from Patrick's ample paper trail around Boston that he claimed to have been born in County Kerry. That seems like a sufficient supply of facts to help us connect the trans-Atlantic dots. Right?

Of course, you already can sense that, by my asking such a question, the answer will be, ironically, more likely a "no" than a "yes." You know me well, by now.

As it turns out, we will be more successful with the trail back home when we follow the scant listings we can find on the short-lived Timothy than those for the amply-documented marble worker, Patrick. From Timothy Cullinane's 1893 death record, we can calculate that his birth occurred, back in Ireland, around 1861—possibly in August of that year. That, approximately, is what was indicated on his marriage record to Margaret McCarthy in January of 1883.

Though it was not quite the same year—nor even the right month—we can find a baptismal record back in County Kerry for a "Timotheum," legitimate son of Danielis Cullinane and Debora Falvey of Clashnagarrane, dated October 7, 1858.

 

Though we can tell nothing from the listing of the sole baptismal sponsor—apparently Daniel's sister, Mary Cullinane—we can find several other listings for these same parents in the Catholic parish of Kilcummin. An earlier baptism on August 10, 1856, for a daughter named Mary lists the same parents, although with a different townland residence: Knockauncore. Bonus discovery: the girl's sponsor was named Johanna Falvey. If that sponsor, who was Mary's mother's sister, is one and the same as our Johanna Falvey, we have made a valuable discovery, indeed.

There were, of course, other children. Some had baptismal records which included the mother's name as Debora. Others—like that of James in 1860 or Hanora "Callinan" in 1866—had an entirely different given name for that Falvey mother: Gubbenilas or Gubboneta. Fortunately, we've already located a reasonable explanation for the discrepancy: Gobnait (or its many variants) was an Irish given name, not readily translated into the required Latin of Catholic records, and thus sometimes substituted with a more "appropriate" choice by church leaders, such as Debora.

But what of the two different townlands listed? Could it be possible that there was a Daniel Cullinane living in Knockauncore, and a different Daniel in Clashnagarrane? Possibly, except that we can find one of the baptismal records in each townland including the same wife's name: Mary's record showing Debora Falvey in Knockauncore, and Timothy's own in Clashnagarrane.

That said, we are still missing one key element: any baptismal document for Patrick Cullinane, the Boston area marble worker whose descendant became the DNA match to our Johanna Falvey's second great-grandson, my husband. Based on dates, we might be able to assume that Patrick's birth record was inadvertently listed as James, as the year matches in both cases. Or we can just assume that, seeing American records matching the parents' names for both immigrant Cullinanes, Patrick's record simply got lost in the scramble to preserve aging records.

Of course, I'm not comfortable relying only on that last assumption, and certainly will be searching further. In the meantime, there is another avenue open to us. While seeing Timothy's untimely death, not long after his marriage in the Boston area, we need to realize that there were nearly ten years between his marriage and his passing. What if there were other descendants? And Patrick, his brother: what other descendants did he have? Let's take some time to explore whether there are others out there who either can collaborate with us about the connection between Patrick's and Timothy's line, or who might even be willing to take a DNA test. Perhaps some have done so, already.

Image above: the baptismal record for Timothy Cullinane, from the Irish Catholic Parish Records collection for the parish of Kilcummin in County Kerry; image via Ancestry.com.

The Other Brother

 

It is always helpful, in sorting out potential documentation to confirm we're on the right track in tracing our ancestors, to follow the trail of siblings as well as our direct line. So it goes with those DNA matches I'm tracing, in the hopes their ancestral lines will lead us back to the Irish homeland of our own umpteenth-great-grandparents.

I'm now finding myself following the trail of two brothers by the name of Cullinane, all in the hopes that their mother—of a Falvey line from County Kerry—was somehow related to my husband's second great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey Kelly. With one segment of only twenty six centiMorgans shared between them, my husband and this particular Falvey DNA match are distant cousins, indeed. The question is: are they still close enough in relationship for their respective family trees to lead us to our Johanna's own parish in County Kerry?

Looking at the first of the two Cullinane brothers yesterday, we saw the paper trail left by Timothy was not long enough to leave us many clues, but we did at least garner the fact that his mother was a Falvey. But whether her first name was Deborah or Abby, we couldn't tell; the records seemed to contradict themselves. While his brief lifespan cut short any hope of discovering more about Timothy, we will revisit his story later this week when we search for other possibilities from his family's story.

Today, though, we'll look at the other brother, Patrick, and see what can be gleaned from his personal history.

As Irish immigration trends went, Patrick was a late arrival on American shores. Born in County Kerry about 1860, we don't find him in American records until his marriage in 1890. And there, in the city of Boston on May 15, we find another occasion to interject yet one more Sullivan into the giant family hairball. On that date, Patrick took as his bride Joanna Sullivan, Irish immigrant daughter of Daniel and Ellen Sullivan.

The key to our search, though, lies in what was reported for Patrick's own parents. There, just as we saw for his brother Timothy's reports, Patrick gave the name of his father as Daniel Cullinane. For his mother, agreeing with at least one of Timothy's records, Patrick provided her name as Debby.

At this point, we need to interject a word of caution. Just as you might suspect in researching Irish arrivals in Boston, there was apparently another couple married at about the same time with similar names. That time, though, the woman's name was recorded as Annie, not Joanna. It was helpful to discover that entry, though, for in later records on our couple, Joanna often was recorded as Annie, as well.

There was one key detail that helped differentiate between the two couples: our Patrick's occupation. Fortunately, his was a line of work much more specific than, say, a laborer—or even than his brother Timothy's work as a teamster. Patrick was a marble worker.

That occupation was reported consistently in all the records I could find on Patrick and his family, protecting me from veering off in the direction of the wrong Patrick. In the next record I could find on the Cullinanes after their marriage, the 1900 census showed Patrick and, yes, "Annie" with their four daughters and—finally!—one son in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Patrick was again affiliated with that telltale profession, this time as a "marble polisher."

The 1900 census also indicated that Patrick arrived from Ireland in 1885 and was now a naturalized citizen of the United States. Checking on any naturalization records, we can find two separate documents which detail that citizenship process. From those records, we can see that Patrick reported his date of birth as June 15, 1860, and that he was born in County Kerry, Ireland. We also discover the approximate date of his arrival—May 23, 1881, thus explaining his absence from any earlier census records. We also learn that his immigration route brought him to Boston.

Helpfully, once again, to confirm we are following the right Patrick Cullinane, we can spot that telltale occupation, this time stated as "a marble worker." Patrick and his family could be followed through the decennial census through 1940, all the time remaining in Cambridge. Only a brief entry in the death notices in The Boston Daily Globe provide us the date of his passing on July 7, 1942.

The real key, in this quest to trace all these Falvey DNA matches back to their homeland, is to see whether brothers Timothy and Patrick can lead us back to any Cullinane records in County Kerry, and then, whether any of them include a mother by the name of Deborah, Debby, or even Abbie Falvey.

 

Image above: From marriages registered in the City of Boston for the year 1890, the May 15 entry of Patrick Cullinane and Joanna Sullivan; image via Ancestry.com.   

Two Brothers to America

 

Sounding very much like the quintessential genealogy legend, there were two brothers from County Kerry, Ireland, who set out to sail to America. Both of them—well, at least for a little while—made it to Boston, but that's where the path in our story diverges. One of the brothers encountered difficulties and met with an unexpectedly early end; the other went on to become the immigrant ancestor of one of my husband's DNA matches on his Falvey family line.

Neither of these brothers claimed the surname Falvey for themselves, which makes tracing this line somewhat challenging. However, it is not the last name which introduces any doubt, but the first name of their mother. Was it the paper trail which seemed to show a certain fickleness, or were these two not, indeed, actual brothers?

We'll begin with what we know about the brother with the shorter paper trail: Timothy. For starters, the surname he and his brother claimed seemed destined to be recorded incorrectly. I did manage to trace his family back to County Kerry, where more often than not, that surname was written as Callinan. When Timothy and his brother made it to Boston—at least, if I am trailing the right Timothy—they were more likely to show up in records as Cullinane. We'll trace the American spelling right now, as that provides the most recent sightings of our unfortunate subject.

According to The Boston Daily Globe, the most recent detail we have for Timothy was a notice of his funeral. That brief entry appeared under the heading, "Deaths," for Friday, November 17, 1893.

CULLINANE—In this city, Nov 15, Timothy Cullinane, 32 yrs. Funeral from his late residence, 7 Stillman pl, Friday afternoon, at 2 o'clock. Relatives and friends invited to attend.

 

Not much to go by in that brief entry. Fortunately, there was a bit more to be found in his death record, extracted from the register of the City of Boston, which confirmed his November 15, 1893, passing. Added to that was the cause of death, "Pul. Phthisis," a hundred-plus year old diagnosis which sends the diligent genealogist scrambling to locate a translation. (As you might suspect, the "Pul." was abbreviation for pulmonary, and phthisis an old-fashioned term for tuberculosis.)

As every family historian knows, the end is merely the beginning of our search, and that same record can provide clues for our next step. We learn from that same record that Timothy worked as a teamster, and that he was born in Ireland. Although that latter detail is unhelpfully vague, the record also—thankfully—provided the names of his parents. 

This is where we obtain confirmation that we are indeed on the right track, for not only do we learn that Timothy's father's name was Daniel, but that the record provided not only his mother's first name, but her maiden name, as well—something we hadn't seen much of with some other records we had been exploring in Massachusetts.

As you may have guessed, Timothy was son of a Falvey mother—else we likely wouldn't have been interested in his tragically brief life. Her name, as given in her son's death record, was Abbie Falvey. Predictably, she and Daniel Cullinane were both listed as having been born in Ireland, as well.

There was more to be found about Timothy. Moving backward in time, we learn that Timothy, at the time of his passing, had been married and also had a son, whom he had named after himself. Finding the record of his 1883 marriage to Margaret McCarthy in the nearby city of Chelsea, we realize it is a good thing that the marriage record was also preserved by the Catholic Church, for the city documented only that Timothy's parents were "Daniel" and "Deborah," rather than including, as did the church record, that mother's maiden name of Falvey.

Still, we can already see a problem: Timothy's death record stated his mother was Abbie, while the marriage record showed Deborah. There is, of course, an explanation we've already noticed for that discrepancy, but before we belabor that point any further, tomorrow, let's compare Timothy's records with that of his supposed brother—and progenitor of our Falvey DNA match—Patrick.

 

Staying in One's Place

It is hard for us to imagine anyone staying put in one location for not only an entire lifetime, but for generations preceding that life. And yet, that is exactly how we imagine our immigrant ancestors' families, prior to their life-changing decision to flee their homeland for a new world across an ocean's expanse. But did they really stay in their place, back in the land where they were born?

I'm beginning to wonder that very thing, as I chase the Irish surnames Kelly and Falvey—and now, adding the surname Cullinane to the search—across the Catholic parish of Kilcummin in County Kerry. It's beginning to look quite convincing that Debora—or Gobinette, as she was sometimes registered—was a sister of my husband's second great-grandmother Johanna Falvey Kelly. Thus, I am now building the family tree of this Debora and her husband, Daniel Cullinane.

In the process, I ran across the baptismal record of another of their children, someone named Michael Cullinane, who was born 25 November 1871, and baptised the very next day—not an uncommon practice during that time.

Adding young Michael to our provisional—and well hidden—Falvey tree, that triggered location of another record online, a transcription only, which seemed to be of the same birth.

This record, however, was not dated until 15 December of that same year. Same names for the parents, mind you, it nonetheless threw a curve with the stated location of the birth and baptism: Molahiffe, not the "Knuckancore" listed as the family's residence.

Since this 1871 birth, unlike the 1860s records of our Johanna Falvey's own children, occurred well after the institution of civil registrations in Ireland, I suspected the case was that Molahiffe was the location where the parents needed to file for the civil registration. Furthermore, though there was no digitized version of the actual document available for inspection online, I know from other such records I've seen that the date for civil registrations often was given as part of the quarter of the year in which the record was created—in the case of Michael's late November birth, the last quarter, ending in December.

That, of course, is my guess, not knowing by any personal experience what an Irish Catholic parent might have done in 1871, remembering how it was only a few years prior when such a registration would not have been made at all.

There was, however, one more thing that caught my eye, when comparing these two records with obviously different dates: the list of townlands was different. Molahiffe, as a civil parish, would contain a long list of townlands, just as would the civil parish of Kilcummin, of which the townland Knockauncore had already figured in our Falvey searches for Johanna's own children. I was slightly concerned about why the civil registration for Michael Cullinane, son of Debora Falvey, would have been in a different civil parish than those for her sister's children—until I noticed the name of a townland entry I had seen before.

Taking a look over the listing of townlands for the civil parish of Molahiffe, I recalled two things. The first was that, of Johanna Falvey Kelly's only child to have had a civil registration for her birth, the civil parish had also been transcribed as Molahiffe. The second item was recalling the name of one of the townlands I had seen, in past research, which rightfully belonged in the Molahiffe parish.

The name of this townland has been listed in the various online records I've found, but with one annoying quirk: it comes with a spelling often varied, apparently by whim of the scribe attendant at record-keeping duties, and thus misspelled, sometimes not showing up on search results at all. The townland name is Lisheenacanina—at least as it shows in John Grenham's website—but if you care to find it in the online record of Griffith's Valuation, you best be spelling it "Lisheennacannina" if you wish to find it.

And find it, I did—at least, an entry for one man named John Kelly. Whether that was one and the same as our Johanna's husband, I can't say. Consider the many people who must have claimed such a name in that region. Still, the other surnames in that townland—especially Sullivan—align nicely with some of the surnames I've found on Falvey-related baptisms, the next parish over.

Lisheennacannina was one of those places which was hard to find, and probably capably illustrates the frustration, for a foreigner, of researching anything having to do with the concept of townlands. Even when we traveled to County Kerry and stayed at a local bed and breakfast, our otherwise helpful host could not for the life of her tell us the location of that nearby townland. She did call all her relatives—aptly also named Sullivan—inquiring as to directions to give us, so we could drive there and say we stood on the very spot where our ancestors once lived. But, other than deciding we had, indeed, gotten lost on our way, we realized that there was little but green grass and rolling hills left of what one long ago had called home.

This all brings up questions, of course. Prime among them is questioning the notion that, unlike us in our modern times, those ancestors truly did stay put until something horrific budged them from their centuries-old homeland. I am not so sure of this now. While it surely is possible that I might be researching the wrong John Kelly, it is slightly less certain that I've confused the wrong Johanna Falvey and her (possible) sister Gobinette/Debora Falvey who also seemed to move from one parish to its neighboring parish with regularity.

At any rate, I'm now searching for any indication that, yes, it might have been possible that, in the 1860s and 1870s, two different couples from the same extended family would have had their children baptised in a church in one civil parish, yet made the trek to the center of a neighboring civil parish to register those children's birth in the governmental records.

Whatever patch of green grass did turn out to be Lisheennacannina, I suspect more than one couple in the family called it home at one point or another.


Above: Excerpt from the 1871 baptismal entry for one Michael, son of Daniel Cullinane and Gobinetta Falvey from the records of Catholic parish Kilcummin in County Kerry, Ireland; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

A Rose by any Other Name . . .

...would still be translated into Latin for church records.

As if I and my husband's DNA matches weren't having enough trouble determining who their Falvey ancestors were, back in County Kerry, we need to consider yet another research stumbling block: how Catholic church clerics handled record entries for Irish names of children growing up in their anglicized homeland.

In my search to discover more about the possible family constellation for my husband's second great-grandmother Johanna Falvey, I've been reading the pages of two Catholic parishes' baptismal and marriage records. The goal of this search—did I say exhaustive?—is to spot any mention of the Falvey surname in either the mother's maiden name or that of the child's sponsors, no matter what the child's own surname.

Within the right time frame, I ran across this entry for the baptism of one Mary, daughter of Daniel Cullinane and his wife, who was listed as Debora Falvey. The family was noted—if I can read the handwriting correctly—as living in Knockauncore, encouragingly agreeing with some other Falvey records I had spotted. Best part, though, was the sole sponsor listed for baby Mary: Johanna Falvey.

We've already discussed the likelihood of that sponsor being either a sibling or in-law of one of the parents, so this is a promising sign. Even more exciting to realize is that the Cullinane surname has shown up in one of the DNA matches I and my research partner have spotted.

The difficulty with this baptismal entry is not readily apparent, though—until the researcher tries to piece together any other records for this family group. Mother "Debora" apparently found herself a victim of the tendency of priests to record Irish names as Latin ones—even if there was no corresponding form for that name in Latin. Either that, or her husband Daniel had several different wives over the course of a few years of his life.

Delving into this possibility, we can already guess the source of some of the confusion. Have you ever noticed place names in Ireland which cause you to wonder about just how to pronounce that letter combination? Take, for example, the seaport of Cobh, site of the last stop of that fateful Titanic voyage. Or names of Irish notables, such as the legendary Queen Maedhbh (okay, so they reduced a few letters to result in Medb). There is a reason for those awkward combinations: the Irish alphabet does not include all the letters that come with the English alphabet. Thus, inventive combinations to represent specific sounds.

In addition to that problem, though, is the interface that gets added on when Catholic priests needed to translate names into Latin. Some Irish names simply do not have corresponding Latin equivalents. So priests got inventive—but, unfortunately, not standardized in their approach. Even within the same parish, if records were kept by more than one priest, the same name could be creatively morphed into two or more Latin "equivalents."

That, apparently, was the case with the woman entered as Daniel Cullinane's wife Debora. Through the years, she was identified with a number of different names, including, at one point, the name Gobinette, which baptismal record I shared in a post last week. True, even her maiden name Falvey had been mangled, but would you have guessed her first name, just by reading that record?

Thankfully, we now have several aids to help us navigate those Latin records while we search for those elusive Irish ancestors—everything from quick lists of common Latin terms in church records to more extensive lists by categories, to even a searchable index of Irish boys' names (or this more complete list which includes both male and female names).

As for the name Gobinette, it turns out the priest wasn't entirely off track when substituting the more recognizable Debora for us English-speaking researchers. Gobinette is apparently itself an anglicized form of the Irish Gobnait, a name common in the region around County Kerry, which in turn can be further anglicized into the more recognizable names Abigail or Deborah.

Thus, depending on the priest recording the various baptisms of the Cullinane family from Knockauncore in County Kerry, Daniel's wife Gobinette might reasonably have been listed as any one of those versions of her name. But whoever she really was, she was sister to someone named Johanna Falvey—of whom I'm keenly interested to learn more.


Above document from the Catholic parish records from Kilcummin, County Kerry, dated August 1856; image courtesy Ancestry.com.