Mind Mapping Kelly

 

This month may have started out with the goal of seeking John Kelly's roots. That quickly changed. After all, even narrowing the search to an Indiana immigrant's homeland in County Kerry, Ireland, coupling such a search with a surname like Kelly didn't advance my position. I had to branch out to learn anything more about my father-in-law's family tree.

Thus entered the sideline of pursuing the history of Timothy Kelly, John's co-worker in the booming Fort Wayne railroad industry, and possible relative. Finding further information on Timothy then led to discovery of his sister Margaret in Toledo, Ohio. And that sister Margaret soon led to nieces and nephews in her home, recently immigrated from Ireland, with the surname Sullivan.

As the surnames piled on, the resultant search presented a case for the use of mind mapping the family connections. I'm not sure yet how John and Timothy Kelly were related—if at all. My plan, over the weekend, to review what could be found in newspaper mentions of the three Kelly names—John, Timothy, and Margaret—led to no more than I had found the last time I had revisited this research question.

This impasse convinced me to re-read all my posts on these Kelly connections, beginning with our family's trip to County Kerry in 2014, when we searched for the actual townlands which had been mentioned in Kelly baptismal records before their emigration. This tour through all I had written on the Kelly line reminded me of some rough times running in tandem with my intended research goals—recalling research collaboration with Kelly relatives now long gone, struggles to continue through Covid casualties and fire threats and serious family illnesses.

Despite the many detours on the path to finding that Kelly answer, I had discovered some connections which still could use additional verification—if there is any out there to find. Bottom line is that in County Kerry, I now have several linked surnames which beg for at least a dotted line of connection. From Timothy's sister Margaret, I had learned her reported parents' names from her death certificate: Timothy Kelly and Catherine Flynn. The reporting party on Margaret's certificate, Katie Sullivan, was a niece who thus provides us with another surname connected to the family constellation. And reviewing farther back in records, baptismal reports for John Kelly's oldest children provided godparents' names yielding a Fleming connection, as well.

With all these surnames swirling in my head, it's time to sketch out a mind map of their connections—and keep an eye out for their repeated mention in records drawn up, back in County Kerry.

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.

Possible Patrick Connections

Last week, I explored a possible connection between my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey Kelly, and someone in County Kerry, Ireland, named Patrick Falvey. Could Patrick Falvey and his wife, Anne Fleming, be related to Johanna's own line? It was time to explore what records I could find concerning this couple.

We had originally found the family in records of the Catholic parish of Kilcummin, beginning with their November 24, 1824, marriage record. Now, it was time to branch out to find any mention of them as parents in the baptismal records of their children.

While later records of their supposed daughter, Johanna Falvey, located her in the townland of Knockauncore, the first baptismal record I found for this earlier Falvey couple was in a townland called "Knockmanigh." The record was for the baptism of a son named John, dated June 1 of 1827. The godparents were listed as John and Catharine Connor.

The townland listed in the parish record is now actually spelled Knockmanagh, as I could see when seeking a map to identify the location (see entry #34 here). Checking maps again, I saw that the distance between this townland and the one traditionally established as the Falvey home, Knockauncore, was a bit over six kilometers, or a walk of about ninety minutes.

With the next appearance of Patrick and Anne as parents named in baptismal records, they had returned to Knockauncore. On May 24, 1835, they presented a son named Patrick for baptism in the same Kilcummin Catholic parish. The godparents listed for this occasion were Patrick Connor and Catherine Fleming—with Catherine likely being a sister of the baby's mother.

I was able to find a third baptism in this same church parish for a baby of Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming. Dated January 6, 1837, the record was for a son listed as Demetrius—not exactly what I had in mind as a distinctly Irish given name. However, knowing that Latin baptismal record traditions in Ireland's Catholic Church sometimes got creative with converting Irish children's names from the vernacular, I went looking for some assistance in "translating" this surprise. Sure enough, according to Claire Santry's (thankfully) still-available website, the "Latinised" name Demetrius in Catholic records could actually signify a child the family preferred to call Jeremiah, Jerome—or even Dermot or Darby.

Whatever the Falvey family chose to call him at home, this 1837 addition to the family could look to John Dugan and Ellen Doody as his godparents.

So far, those three were the only children of Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming for whom I could find baptismal records. No sign of Johanna—which meant I was off to examine not the names of candidates for baptism, not even their parents' names, but solely the names of the godparents in search of additional Falveys in the Kilcummin parish. Yes, it's hard work, slogging through those handwritten records, but the payoff was that I did actually find something worth following up on, tomorrow.

Adding Anne and Patrick

 

What if Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming could be the parents of my current research target for this month? The documentation I found yesterday looks promising, but of course not sufficient to firmly clinch the relationship between this couple and my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey Kelly.

I decided to take the risk and enter their names in my father-in-law's family tree for a test run. Then, I jumped over to Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool to see what might materialize among the scant few DNA matches related to Johanna Falvey's line.

While not a stellar result, Patrick and Anne are now listed as the ancestors of eleven of my husband's DNA matches. Most of those matches actually connect through direct relationships to Johanna, of course, but there are now two other supposed siblings from whom some DNA matches descend. The majority of these new connections tie us to descendants from New Zealand, as I had discovered in the past. These are matches whose founding Falvey ancestor, whoever he was, emigrated from County Kerry in Ireland. We still haven't been able to discern the connection, though we've struggled with that for years. Hopefully, discovering more about Patrick and Anne may lead us closer to an answer.

However, since I now have Ancestry's ProTools to experiment with, I can use their "Shared Matches" provision, then sort the results for any given DNA match from closest to most distant relationship.

This approach expands the range of possible Falvey DNA matches from the original eleven proposed by ThruLines to a much broader set of cousins. And depending on the luck of the draw, as I move from one possible Falvey connection to his or her shared matches, I can sometimes find matches whose close relatives have also tested, helping me pinpoint the exact spot in the family tree.

Granted, not that these tools make sorting matches an automatic—or even streamlined—process. I am still bouncing between matches in the United States, in New Zealand and Australia, even in Canada, besides the expected descendants still living in Ireland. But by returning to the original church records in Kilcummin parish, and especially looking for residents of the townland of Knockauncore, I am beginning to piece together a network of parents, children, and even godparent relationships that might reveal a bit more information, despite lack of explicit documentation. Coupling that with a network of DNA matches may supercharge the effort.

The network which draws together these distant cousins from around the world may well be the tool which defeats the destruction of so many historic documents back home in Ireland.

Could This be the One?

There are some times when, seeking records of Irish ancestors, we stumble upon an old entry, stare at the miserable handwriting, and wonder, could this be the one? 

"Is it or isn't it?" That's been a question I've been asking myself repeatedly this month, while trawling through digitized copies of baptismal and marriage records from the 1800s in County Kerry, home to Johanna Falvey in her native Ireland. Despite her position as my father-in-law's great-grandmother, that near relationship could just as well have been several more generations removed, judging from the scarcity of Catholic church records from that century. However, I think I may have found something.

Examining the entries from the church parish of Kilcummin, the same place where we discovered the entry about Johanna's own marriage to John Kelly, I ran across one entry dated years before that, in November of 1824. Seeing the date, I nearly held my breath; it's been so hard to find records from that early in the century for the other branches of my father-in-law's family.

The entry named the groom as Patritius Falvey—Patrick—and his bride as Anna Fleming. Fast forward from that 1824 wedding to the 1853 entry in Griffith's Valuation, and perhaps we have discovered the maiden name for the Anne Falvey listed in that later record from the townland of Knockauncore. And though I haven't yet been able to locate a baptismal record for our Johanna, seeing her years later with her husband John Kelly in their immigrant household in the 1870 census in Fort Wayne, Indiana, reveals one encouraging note: their second-born son was named Patrick, just as Irish naming traditions would lead us to expect—if this marriage record for Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming is the correct couple.

Finding these encouraging entries bids me take a closer look at what else might have been entered in that church register. After all, between pages fading over time and the challenges of deciphering handwritten entries, a surname like Falvey doesn't always make the transition unscathed in indexing processes. I've seen some entries listed as "Felvey," so I wouldn't be surprised at other variations which could foil the search process. Spotting the family's surname through a page by page search may be my only alternative, but at least there are some compelling possibilities, even on first glance. We'll review some of those next week.

Time to Regroup

 

When multiple inputs have the tendency to set one's mind spinning, it's time to step back and reassess the research situation. In this case, I'm running in circles, trying to push back the generation beyond the couple in County Kerry—Johanna Falvey and her husband with the typical Irish name of John Kelly—who are my husband's brick wall ancestors. That pair represent one set of his second great-grandparents, having children which bridged their 1869 immigration from Ireland to Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Try as I might, I have not been able to find documentation for the couple beyond a possible marriage record and baptismal documentation for two of their children. While the listing for godparents was helpful—adding the surnames Fleming and O'Brien to my search—it still didn't move me any closer to the goal of discovering the identities of the parents of either John or Johanna.

True, researching a possible collateral line—that of Timothy Kelly, co-purchaser of the family burial plot in Fort Wayne with our John Kelly—led me to possible Kelly parentage including a mother's maiden name of Flynn. It also plunged me into yet another family circle involving several Sullivan descendants. Checking with possible links in County Kerry, it seemed the Sullivans were everywhere! I could find them connected to Kellys. And then, there they were, connected to Falveys, as well!

Feeling the despair of wandering farther and farther from my original research intentions, I decided to double back and take a second look at all the amassed information. What started me off was a collection of DNA matches whose family trees included the surname Falvey. What were the possibilities that some of these matches also included the surname Sullivan in their tree?

I took an initial glance at possibilities by searching through the matches at AncestryDNA. I searched all of my husband's matches containing the name Sullivan—a risky proposition, considering the Sullivan surname is not only common in the United States (and widespread throughout the English-speaking world), but along with its more Irish variant O'Sullivan, the third most popular surname in Ireland, specifically in, you guessed it, County Kerry.

From there, I looked for all Sullivan matches whose tree also contained the surname Falvey. As it turned out, there were three—each having a husband-wife combination of those two surnames. Two of them, in fact, descended from the same Sullivan-Falvey couple. 

The difficulty with these matches, of course, is that their trees seem to end with the founding immigrant ancestor having arrived in the United States from, simply, "County Kerry." That, of course, is exactly the predicament I'm in. But where in County Kerry is my question.

However, taking a closer look at these matches, it appears two of the matches each share one, and only one, segment of DNA in common with my husband. The one has a segment of twenty nine centiMorgans, the other of twenty eight. As no other possible connection between their family lines and my husband's is obvious, it may be possible to designate that specific segment as a genetic signature of this Falvey line.

The only problem: the matches are at AncestryDNA, a company which has steadfastly refused to offer its supporters a chromosome browser. If I am to determine the location of that segment—if it is even on the same chromosome, let alone the same position—I will need to see whether these two matches have their genetic information posted anywhere else which offers a chromosome browser.

Something About Those Sullivans

 

If you feel cursed to have been consigned to searching for the most common surnames of Ireland as part of your family's history, consider yourself invited to join the club. Why does it turn out that, having found that immigrant ancestor from the Emerald Isle, he or she always turns up to be sporting the most popular name in Ireland?

Here I was, hoping that I could change up the game by switching from pursuing my husband's second great-grandfather John Kelly, to a less common name like John's wife, Johanna Falvey. Wrong. Oh, so wrong. Take a look at John Grenham's helpful map and listing of all Catholic baptisms of children surnamed Falvey in County Kerry. That's a graphic representation of what I'm up against, just looking for the innocuous name, Falvey. The Falveys were all over in County Kerry, during the time in which I was seeking Johanna's family.

And then, following the lead of advice from Ireland Reaching Out, I'm assured that the names of baptismal sponsors are an important clue in my quest to push back yet another generation on this Falvey-Kelly brick wall. I find the two children from this couple were baptised with sponsors' surnames listed as Fleming. Wondering who that might be, I then went searching for Fleming baptisms, hoping to find reciprocal sponsors listed as either Falvey or Kelly, to break the code and show me which side of the family to seek for that Fleming connection.

What do I find? Sullivans! Not just Sullivans like the ones we saw yesterday, surrounding John Kelly in the Griffith's Valuation records, but Sullivans who also appear to be related to the other side of that family, the Falveys. How does one go about sorting that out?

Flemings, Sullivans, Falveys, and Kellys all seem to be connected in multiple ways. Perhaps that is the story of families who lived together in the same rural areas for generations. When I saw that same situation unfolding in Perry County, Ohio, on my mother-in-law's lines, I dubbed that case endogamy-lite: not so much as to qualify for the official label as endogamy, but on account of an example with enough inter-connection to create pedigree collapse of one sort or another.

Perhaps that is why some of these DNA matches sharing Falvey connections with my husband's family lead to different founding Falvey ancestors: I am looking at root people who are not siblings claiming a most recent common ancestor, but cousins for whom I'll have to muddle through yet another generation.

This tangle seems to get more messy with every attempt to straighten the records out. 

Stabs in the Genealogical Darkness

We may say we are taking a stab in the dark when we are making a wild guess about something, but when the search for Irish ancestors leaves us little other choice, we may as well build strategies to evaluate those wild lunges into the dearth of records.

As it turns out for my father-in-law's Irish brick wall Kelly and Falvey ancestors in County Kerry, it might turn out that we will have plenty of material to stab at: the parish where I found their daughter Mary baptised has records still in existence dating back well before the 1850s. Talk about an unexpected gift. I had been manually searching, page by page, from the date of the earlier Mary Kelly's baptism in 1864 to see if I could find any entries in which her parents, John and Johanna, had served as sponsors for a relative's baptism—and the records kept going and going.

Back through the years I kept paging, with no results for that search last week. And then another strategy occurred to me. Why not just search for potential marriages or baptisms in County Kerry linking the surnames of Mary Kelly's sponsors with either Kelly or Falvey?

The difficulty in trying to locate our target parents' names in the entries for sponsors, as I had been trying last week, is that digitized records will assist in locating a child's name or the parents' names, but there is no search option to locate the sponsors' names. Of course, according to Irish traditions, it could generally be assumed that the sponsors for a baptism were either siblings or in-laws to the parents—but what if that tradition didn't hold true in our case? Such assumptions could certainly lead toward incorrect conclusions.

Despite that, on the chance that our couple were just average common people after all, I tried seeing what other records could be found, combining the names of Mary's parents with the surname of each sponsor, in turn. I started out with the Fleming surname—that surname which showed up in one form or another for both of the baptisms found for a Mary, daughter of John Kelly and Johanna Falvey. Because I wanted to avoid as many false leads as possible, I chose to start first with combining that Fleming sponsor surname with Johanna's maiden name, using the record search at Ancestry.com.

That was when I discovered two things. First was that the records for the Falvey family were more plentiful in a neighboring parish to Killeentierna called Kilcummin, the same place where—if I have the right couple—John Kelly and Johanna Falvey were married. Second was that those records reached back to at least the 1830s.

Of course, there is no guarantee that I'm on the right track. But since I really have no other streamlined, sure-fire options, I may as well stay the course with this new experiment. At the very least, I can create a database of all the marriage and baptismal connections I can find between the Fleming, Falvey, and Kelly families in that earlier time frame. Combining that sort of stab in the dark with another tried approach—using the naming traditions adhered to in those earlier years in Ireland—may yield some promising possibilities.

Perhaps. Or otherwise, I'll just have a rather complete listing of all the Flemings and Falveys who once lived in a small cranny of western Ireland.