In Early, Out Early

 

What to do when stuck on a research problem? In John Kelly's case, I'm afraid I've worn out all the alternative approaches to finding the roots of my father-in-law's great-grandfather, John Kelly. While I don't know where he was born—other than Ireland—I can say for sure that he was married in the parish of Kilcummin in County Kerry to a woman from Knockauncore named Johanna Falvey. After the birth of a few of their children (and the loss of at least one daughter), the family decided it would be best for them to migrate to America—to Fort Wayne, Indiana, specifically.

Following the trail into their future in America was certainly easier than struggling to find signs of their past in Ireland. After nearly a month of not having much to "write home" about, I've decided: since we entered this chase to find John Kelly on the early side, thanks to a peach of a research project in the previous month, we may as well close out this month's struggle early, too.

In the process of checking all the details I could find this month on John Kelly, I've noted every discrepancy between records—from the multiple years of birth extrapolated from various U.S. Census records to the varying names reported for the townlands where the family lived at the birth of each child. I've tried to see if godparents' names might guide me to clues on Kelly siblings. I've studied the Irish naming patterns to see whether that might enlighten me on possible parents' names. I've turned over every stone in the pathway, in hopes I'd find some fortunate clue somewhere—anywhere.

Nothing yet.

This may be one of those times when it's best to take a break and move on to the next of my Twelve Most Wanted for the year. John Kelly was a tough candidate. I had high hopes for breaking through that research barrier to find his family. But sometimes, setting a problem aside to give a weary brain some rest might be the best policy. John Kelly will be right where I left him, the next time we revisit this puzzle. Next week, we'll pick up with a fresh challenge.

Circles Leading Nowhere

Encouraged by the approach of double-checking documentation for every detail of John Kelly's life, I thought I would continue the trend. I certainly am still in need of finding records to identify my John Kelly from among the multitudes bearing that name in County Kerry, Ireland.

In addition to looking at any details for this John Kelly, I also looked for records involving his wife, Johanna Falvey. Unfortunately, it appears I am now wandering in ever-widening circles, and going nowhere.

I did realize that the places where I found the couple settled—at least long enough for the birth of a child—were in the parish of Killeentierna, rather than Kilcummin, the latter location being where I can at least say with confidence that Johanna Falvey once lived. Indeed, returning to Griffith's Valuation, I can still point to the entry for Anne Falvey, whom I'm certain was by then the widow of Johanna's father, living in Knockauncore, just as her daughter Johanna's marriage record had noted. 

Still hanging on to shreds of hope that I'll discover something more about John Kelly's origin and parentage, I thought I'd return to that old standby, the Irish Naming Pattern, to see if I could extract some guidance there. We'll see, tomorrow, whether that can shed any light for the search for John Kelly's roots.

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. 

Not Bad, for Being Stuck

 

It's time for my biweekly check-up. Being stuck on John Kelly—as in, I can't find word one about the man's roots in County Kerry before his marriage to Johanna Falvey—I suspected that the count this time would be underwhelming. Actually, it wasn't.

That fact can be credited to my habit, over the past several months, of not letting go of previous months' research goals. There are always loose ends to tie up into a tidy resolution, and I can't bear to let family history mysteries remain unsolved. So this month became the perfect excuse to pick up a former month's unsolved puzzle, and to continue building on to that branch of my mother-in-law's family.

Thanks to the effort there, 206 more individuals found their place in my mother-in-law's Jackson line, that colonial line from New England which migrated westward through upstate New York, then on to Pennsylvania and Ohio. Boasting a start with a family of thirteen children, that Jackson line is sure to provide our family with many DNA matches, so I'm keen to research all the lines of descent. It was no surprise to learn that a little effort over the past two weeks provided documentation for that many Jackson descendants—all while puzzling over my Kelly brick wall from this month's research puzzle. That brings my in-laws' count to 44,208 relatives stretching back multiple generations.

Needless to say, nothing has been accomplished on the 41,957 names in my own family tree, a task I won't pick up again until this coming October. Nor has there been much to augment the Kelly line. Behind the scenes, that challenge requires some background research. Hopefully, that will yield results over the next two weeks—or I'll face finding myself reaching back to this research goal in months to come, just as I've found myself doing with the Jackson line.

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. 

When in Doubt, Re-read Your Email

 

Yesterday, the wiser approach to my John Kelly impasse was to set the whole search conundrum aside to clear my mind and gain a fresh perspective. Did I heed my own advice? Of course not.

I did, however, recall a file that might be worth revisiting: the one containing old emails I had filed away for future reference. When in doubt, re-reading old emails can sometimes re-invigorate flagging resources. 

Over the years, I've set up a filing system to help me re-locate old emails I had received which were useful to current family research questions and worth saving for future reference. Mostly, I had set up a list of surnames I had been researching, creating the folders by surname within my email program. While I hadn't specifically set up a file folder for Kelly—a much too common name, and one for which I've got at least three different family lines to research—I had set one up for John's wife, Johanna Falvey.

As it turned out, a reader here on A Family Tapestry had sent me a note about a database she had found which contained a clipping about a Falvey death in County Kerry. While I don't think the man mentioned in the clipping was related to my Johanna Falvey Kelly, seeing the note again reminded me to return and take a look at that website.

The website was RootsIreland.ie. Now apparently a subscription-only website, I wasn't sure it would be worth it to test the waters only after ponying up the payment. But it did remind me that there are other websites which might be worth exploring besides the usual states-side companies I'd been using. 

Of course, now I'm kicking myself for not setting up a folder under the label Kelly, after all. That system has helped out for so many other surname questions in the past. But it did give me a needed nudge to see if there are any other new resources out there which can open the door just a crack further to enter the Irish world of genealogical records. Our John Kelly has got to be out there, somewhere. And having a system to review old messages can come in handy, after all.

Family? Or Friend?

 

When researching a brick wall ancestor with a name as generic as John Kelly, we sometimes need to reach beyond the usual tactics. In this instance, not knowing for sure where in County Kerry our Irish immigrant John Kelly originated, nor having the luxury of any documentation on John's parents from his adopted home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I'd be at a loss in discovering his roots except for one tantalizing detail: John stuck close to another Irish immigrant by the name of Timothy Kelly.

There were some tantalizing parallels between John's family and Timothy's family. Each man had named their oldest daughters Catherine and Mary. Both had a son named Timothy. They both worked for the railroad in Fort Wayne, living around the corner and down the block from each other. And—I couldn't help noticing—Timothy lived next door to someone named Daniel Falvey who had the same surname as John's wife's maiden name. Could these folks be family? Or merely friends who coincidentally shared a surname, job, and other similarities?

The similarities reached farther than those details. I discovered that, in the aftermath of the unexpected loss of John's daughter Catherine after the birth of her son, she was buried in a family plot co-owned by John and Timothy, likely purchased in 1875 after the death of Timothy's first wife. Perhaps it's time to pull out some old notes drawn up when I visited the Catholic Cemetery in Fort Wayne to ascertain who else was buried in that family plot. 

Perhaps, too, it's time to revisit this unexplained connection between two Kelly men and their (coincidental?) neighborliness following a migration of over three thousand miles. It's likely been well over a decade since I last puzzled over this relationship. Though I can't yet tell whether these two were Kelly family members or simply good friends through thick and thin, the question warrants a closer look.

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.

John Kelly's Wife

 

To find an ancestor from Ireland with such a name as John Kelly means relying on a "F.A.N. Club" full of helpful hints about the man's whereabouts. That's why I was elated when I first discovered that John Kelly had married someone with the name Johanna Falvey. With a name like that, I reasoned, John Kelly's wife possessed a surname uncommon enough for it to stand out in the crowd.

Initially discovering John Kelly was not difficult at all. I relied on the oral reports of older relatives who had kept notes on such details. After all, John Kelly was my father-in-law's great-grandfather, a relationship close enough to have been held in the memory of relatives my father-in-law knew personally. And even though my father-in-law is long gone, his brothers—and then their children—have carefully kept those records.

But discovering where John Kelly came from is another matter. We already knew he died in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1892—and that was the problem. John Kelly's passing fell just a few years short of when government records expanded their reach to include pertinent details such as parents' names or place of birth.

John Kelly's wife, on the other hand, lived long enough to provide details which, preserved on paper, could be passed down through the generations. Johanna Falvey's passing in 1903 provided not only a death certificate but two different obituaries full of details. A more straightforward newspaper entry provided a place of birth as County Kerry, Ireland, and the news that "several sisters" still lived in Ireland, as well as one in New Zealand, while notes from another obituary mentioned that Johanna came from the Lakes of Killarney.

More to the point was the information that Johanna came with her children to America, inferring a marriage before that point in Ireland. Sure enough, there was a March 2, 1859, entry in the Catholic parish records of Kilcummin in County Kerry noting the marriage of one John Kelly and Johanna Falvey, noted to be from "Knocanscore"—likely the townland of Knockauncore.

Now that I've returned several times over the years to learn more about Johanna and her supposedly uncommon surname, the experience has taught me that Falvey is not an uncommon name at all—at least for that region of County Kerry. That, too, may complicate this month's search for more information on her husband's early years in Ireland.

There are, however, other possibilities for approaching this research question. Tomorrow, let's look first to the children born to the couple before they left Ireland. 

Looking for THAT John Kelly

 

Choosing to search for an Irish ancestor named John Kelly may end up being a hopeless genealogical battle, I'll admit. But here it is, nearly the beginning of July, and I'm ready to move on to the seventh of my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for 2026.

Yes, the Irish did love to give their sons saints' names like John, and sure, the family name Kelly has historically played the number two spot, behind Murphy, in Ireland's surname lineup. But this month, yep, I'll be looking for John Kelly. But not any John Kelly; I have a special one in mind. I'll be looking for my father-in-law's paternal grandmother's father. That John Kelly.

That John Kelly was an Irish immigrant to America. But not like the hordes of emaciated Irish, escaping the doom of starvation in their beautiful homeland in 1848. That John Kelly actually arrived late on our shores, possibly right before the 1870 census. And unlike the majority of Irish immigrants, that John Kelly came not to New York or to Boston, but to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where possibly a relative or former neighbor had sent a tip back home about available jobs in the railroads.

Following our John Kelly was his wife Johanna and their three surviving children: Timothy, Catherine, and Mary. To the rest they had bid a final goodbye beneath the Irish sod before their long journey westward.

Most of what I already know about that John Kelly I learned from researching his wife. She, the former Johanna Falvey, not only presented a surname which I thought might be unusual enough to provide helpful leads, but lived a life which stretched just long enough to attain the more modern record-keeping conveniences that enable descendants to better trace their roots.

To get started, tomorrow, on our search for our John Kelly, we'll take a look at what's already been discovered about his wife, Johanna Falvey. After that, we'll take a blind leap into the void and hope we can somehow find our way to that one specific ancestor named John Kelly. 

Finding Family, the Next Generation

 

When it comes to finding family to research, pressing backwards in time to the next generation gets harder and harder. Couple that dilemma with research in locations such as Ireland, and the lack of available records can bring research to a standstill.

Still, as I push through my Twelve Most Wanted for each year, microscopic breakthroughs do happen—occasionally. Even that sense of "getting closer" to a breakthrough is enough to encourage a researcher to press onward.

As I select the last of my three ancestors from my father-in-law's line for research in 2026, I was actually torn between two family lines. Each of these lines represents ancestors for whom I may actually identify the next generation. One choice was the line of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Margaret Flannery from County Tipperary, Ireland. The other choice was his Falvey line from County Kerry.

While I worked on each of these family lines as selections for last year's Twelve Most Wanted, it was on the Falvey line that I experienced more success, tentatively identifying the parents of his great-grandmother Johanna Falvey. 

I say "tentatively" because I'm not quite confident about the records I've found, and whether I haven't simply stumbled upon what might turn out to be name twins. So this coming September, I'll name Johanna's tentative parents, Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming, as my selection for the ninth of this year's Twelve Most Wanted.

This task will involve three aspects. One will be to scour available records in Ireland, where Johanna was born, raised, and married in County Kerry. The second approach will be to examine all possible DNA matches linked to this Falvey line—especially since I see many more added to the list since I last visited this research question in 2025. And—spoiler alert—since several of those matches currently live in either Australia or New Zealand, I'll explore what can be learned in general about family history research in those two countries, especially as it regards immigrant records.

With this bulging to-do list for September's research project, we'll be quite busy, indeed. Though the task will be international in scope, it will all point back to one small location in Ireland, where the Falvey family once called a rural townland in County Kerry their home. 

Targeting Those who Escaped Detection

 

It's a new year, once again. While most people spend this brand new day with forward-looking thoughts, instead, I took some time for a retrospective approach. In selecting yet another year's Twelve Most Wanted to research for 2026, I wanted to target the ancestors who somehow escaped detection in past years so I can focus on them in the coming year.

Not only is today a day we celebrate as New Year's Day, but for my Twelve Most Wanted, today is the day I shift from selecting ancestors from my mother-in-law's line to finding which ancestors from my father-in-law's family need attention.

To do this, I drew up a list, not by date but by each ancestor's identity. For each of my father-in-law's eight great-grandparents, I noted the date for which I had selected that ancestor as my focus for the Twelve Most Wanted research schedule, all the way back to the first year I had initiated this process.

For instance, beginning with my father-in-law's patriline, I noted that I had worked on John Stevens in August of 2022. I tangentially researched that line once again the next month while researching John's second wife, Eliza Murdock. And in July of 2024, I once again poked and prodded around records for John's potential brother, Hugh Stevens. Still, no headway gained.

I repeated this inventory process for the remaining seven of my father-in-law's eight greats. Each one had two or three entries among each year's Twelve Most Wanted along the route from July of 2020 through the completion of last summer—all, that is, except for one. That one lone ancestor lacking in-depth research as one of my Twelve Most Wanted was John Kelly, my father-in-law's paternal grandmother's own father.

Oh, groan, as a good friend of mine used to say. Looking for someone named John Kelly in Ireland? Why not try launching a needle into a large haystack and see what can be found? With one of the most common surnames in Ireland, coupled with one of the most popular given names for Ireland's sons, this quest of seeking John Kelly's roots is surely doomed to failure. However, I can't not at least give it my best go.

This year, I've promised myself to make those Irish ancestors a chief focus. Though I'm still awash in doubts, I'm willing to sail in that direction and make July the month I'll focus on Irish-born American immigrant John Kelly. This time, hopefully there will be some clues over there in County Kerry, where John apparently met and married his wife, Johanna Falvey. If we never try our hand at smashing through those brick walls, we're sure to never make it to the other side.

Celebrating the Small Stuff

Sometimes, you just have to celebrate the small things in life. 

It's time for my biweekly count, and this time, I can't say much has been accomplished in my search for Johanna Falvey's roots in Ireland. The numbers bear that out. I've only been able to add seventy six new names to my in-laws' family tree. While that may sound like a good number of people—complete with documentation, I might add—the great majority of them are residual discoveries from last month's research. Finding the previous Falvey generation in County Kerry has been challenging. 

Most of this month has been spent trawling through baptismal records, one by one, looking for mothers' maiden names, and even names of godmothers, in hopes of finding a cluster of Falveys who might turn out to be family. There's not much to write about in that routine search—certainly not to put into my database of family connections.

Granted, that family tree now has 41,339 documented individuals included, so I guess I can take a pass for one report. However, I know that the going will be just as glacial in the upcoming month, as I battle the invisibility of more Irish ancestors of my father-in-law. 

On the other hand—and here's where I can celebrate the small stuff—I noticed that, despite adding not one single additional person to my own family tree in these past two weeks, I suddenly received a sizable uptick in DNA cousins at Ancestry.com. After gaining absolutely zero new DNA matches since the beginning of the month, I suddenly have eleven new matches to consider. I'm not sure what prodded such a jump; I don't recall any spectacular sales announcements...although I have noticed somewhat of a price war brewing between DNA companies lately. Could that be the inspiration? I now have 2,675 DNA matches on my side, and 1,442 matches to consider on behalf of my husband's family.

Tomorrow, we'll move on to a new Irish ancestor to mull over—and likely spend another month trawling through baptismal records and other document sources. One thing's for sure: if we don't look, we'll never find the answers—even the small ones. But there's always the hope for a big discovery. Besides, the small stuff eventually adds up.

Drawing Up a List for Next Time

 

At the end of the month, it's hard to move on from what is, essentially, an unfinished research project. While I did find possible parents for my father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna Falvey, I'm still not convinced about her family constellation. Having DNA matches whose lines—at least at this early point—still don't seem to line up with my recent discoveries gives pause to reconsider.

At this point, as I do for all my month-long research projects for my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors each year, I draw up a list of what I'd like to find next. Though the idea is to provide myself a shopping list of what to do the next time I tackle this ancestral puzzle, sometimes, I can't help but continue working on that list, even well after the close of a month. Kind of like an addict to "whodunnit" novels, I have this compulsion to stay on until I discover the resolution to the mystery—but sometimes, the amount of work left undone becomes too unmanageable in the face of the next month's project. The "what's next" list reminds me to quickly return to the task, the next time I revisit this ancestor—and to tuck it away for now.

Struggling with Johanna Falvey's own family tree may be a guaranteed part of future research, as well. Due to her date of birth, some time during the early 1830s, this put her toward the earlier time period of availability of Catholic Church records in the more rural parts of Ireland. And yet, fast-forwarding to her likely sister "Debora" (Gobnait) and her marriage to Daniel Cullinane and the arrival of that couple's children into the 1860s puts us at another research disadvantage with so many Irish people of their age fleeing the country for the promise of a better life elsewhere—disrupting the age-old naming traditions and baptismal sponsors' selections.

With those disruptions in Irish traditions, the ability to build a tree's collateral lines, for instance, puts us on more shaky ground as we move beyond the famine years. While I will certainly examine the names of godparents for Johanna's siblings and search for those names also appearing in other family baptisms to build a theoretical tree based on those age-old traditions and the network of names linking the community together, that tactic won't hold quite so reliably in the next generation as emigration took its toll on the local population.

Of course, I can always hope for additional Falvey cousins to test their DNA. With the passing of time, however, even that wish may be weakened. After all, any descendants of Johanna's siblings would be my husband's fourth cousins, at the closest. As younger generations step up to test, that relationship level becomes even more distant—or vanishing.

Whether continuing to build the family trees of DNA matches, or exploring the handwritten baptismal records of 1830s County Kerry, Ireland, I still have plenty to do before I exhaust the possibilities for discovering more about Johanna Falvey. We will, in a few years, revisit her research challenges. For now, though, it's time to wrap up this month and move on to the third of my father-in-law's Irish ancestors to research for this year.

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.

Sloppy Handwriting and Line by Line Searches

 

Finding "Debora" Falvey's baptismal record happened quite by accident. Thankfully, I already had found evidence that her name certainly wasn't "Debora," though that was the name provided for some of her own children's baptismal records. Nor was it Debby or Abby or any other nickname I had run across in documents. When she was born in 1830, her parents' intention was apparently to give her the traditional Irish name Gobnait—hard to translate, but a name that resonated with her heritage, especially in her home in County Kerry.

And yet, I couldn't find her own baptismal record. Granted, reaching back to that early date can be a challenge for Irish records from the Catholic Church, given the history of that era. But what I hadn't counted on was a case of sloppy handwriting and the resultant indexing challenge.

Somehow, "Gobineta" Falvey turned into Gobineta Faley—not quite what the parish priest had entered, but an understandable misreading in the indexing process. The actual entry for the child's surname looked like Falevy—though her father's name came closer, looking like "Folvey."

Taking my cue from that experience, I decided to search those church records backwards from the point of Gobineta's 1830 baptism to see if I could find any record for her sister Johanna Falvey, my father-in-law's great-grandmother. While on that trail, I also looked for any other entries which included the family name Falvey, whether for the parent of a child or a godparent. I'm still trying to piece together a reasonable family tree for this line.

Well, I made it back to 1823 with only three mentions of that Falvey name. I know, I know, that even predates the 1824 marriage of Patrick Falvey and Ann Fleming, the supposed parents. But I had to do a thorough search, just in case.

Still no Johanna, making me wonder whether the not-unusual case of clerical error may have struck, making Johanna into the Latin "Joannes" by mistake, rather than using the feminine form of that name. The format used by this parish for baptismal record keeping didn't help. Instead of incorporating the usual Latin wording for "legitimate son/daughter of" to complete the baptismal statement—which would have indicated gender of the child as well—this record was laid out in a more chart-like fashion, giving solely the names in the required columns.

However, in this perusal of the baptismal register, page by page, I noticed a few details. For one thing, there was a multitude of Fleming relatives mentioned in that church's records. Gobineta's mother must have been from a large extended family, indeed.

The second thing I noticed was that the mention of the Falvey name—even if morphed into something else due to sloppy handwriting—was quite scarce. I did find one godfather by the name of John Falvey mentioned for a Sullivan child. And though I couldn't read the abbreviation for the godfather's name on an earlier record in 1823, it looked like Cos-- Falvey. Who knows? Perhaps the Falvey relatives were not from this area.

I'll continue this line-by-line search through the Kilcummin parish records to look for more Falvey connections, just in case—but I doubt I'll find many more. Though it will be more difficult, it may be worth my time to return to Gobineta's entry and follow that same path backwards through the years to see if this time I can reconstruct the Fleming family connections.

Or I can return to the DNA connections and start to pull my hair out in frustration over those missing pieces of the puzzle.