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.

Null Set

 

Sometimes, no matter how we jumble the terms and try new combinations, those family names simply refuse to appear in record sets. That's how it's gone with my search for John Kelly's roots in County Kerry. Though I have had better results looking for his wife's name—Johanna Falvey—I'm still missing baptismal records for two of their Irish-born children, Timothy and Catherine. And as for his suspected kinship to a co-worker in his adopted home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that Timothy Kelly has yet to appear in baptismal records back home in Ireland, as well. I'm drawing a null set here.

I tried jumping back to the original baptismal records in County Kerry without success—a search which not only yielded nothing, but took an enormous amount of time. If AI could search more successfully for these mystery ancestors, I might actually consider giving it a try.

In the meantime, I'm suffering research fatigue, a good sign it might be more productive to set this one aside, at least for a few days, and try an entirely different research problem. Sometimes, the mind needs some time to empty, and then breathe.

Tracking Timothy Kelly

 

Sometimes, being stymied with a brick wall ancestor means wrestling with a person for whom we can find no further documentation, especially concerning the earlier years of his life. When that happens, discovering a cluster of possible family relationships—or at least friends, associates, or old neighbors—can help us bypass the impasse. In John Kelly's case, my father-in-law's great-grandfather, that key connector would be his co-worker, Timothy Kelly.

Before we can even decide whether Timothy Kelly might have been the linchpin bringing John Kelly and his family from County Kerry, Ireland, to a job in Fort Wayne in the United States, we need to piece together what we already know about Timothy's life into a timeline.

We've already discussed some of the key dates from Timothy's later years, such as his marriage in Fort Wayne, late in 1860, or his death in 1901. What I'm keen to do now is push back the man's personal history to the earlier years of his life. For that, all we have so far is a note in his obituary mentioning his work on the "Fort Wayne Road" in 1857.

Pinning a date on the opposite end of Timothy's life proves difficult. Depending on which document we use, Timothy could have been born as early as 1827 or as late as 1839. His death record on September 21, 1901, gave his age simply as sixty two years. That would yield a year of birth in the fall of 1839.

However, depending on which census record we rely on, Timothy's year of birth could have been in 1830 (from the 1870 census), or 1828 (according to the 1900 census, taken right before his death), or even in 1827 (if we rely on the 1880 census). To complicate matters, Timothy's headstone added the inference of another date: 1829.

When he came to this country, on the other hand, is only provided by one date—so far. The 1900 census noted that Timothy arrived in the United States in 1854. That record also indicated that Timothy was a naturalized citizen—though that is an event for which I have yet to find documentation.

If Timothy Kelly did work on the Fort Wayne Road as a "very young man" in 1857, we'd have to take that phrase with a genealogical grain of salt. If the death certificate had his birth fixed accurately, that would mean the "very young man" would have been about fifteen years of age at the time. But if the earliest date held true, he simply would have been a worker aged about thirty, no age to be surprised or concerned with at all.

Regardless of how old Timothy Kelly was when working on the railroad, the real question—at least for me—is how I can find signs of the rest of his family, if they had also immigrated along with him. For a young worker of fifteen years of age, we might expect to see parents, or at least a sign of older siblings. If, on the other hand, Timothy did turn out to be closer to thirty at that point, it would be no surprise to find he had immigrated on his own as a single man, seeking a better life in a new country—not unusual for many young Irish immigrants at any time after the devastating Irish famine years.

Despite this date quandary, it still would benefit us to look for any further connections between our Timothy and that sister Margaret mentioned in his obituary. An exploration of newspaper mentions next week might help point the way for a next step in this search for a possible collateral Kelly line.    

Revisiting a Personal Track Record

 

One positive aspect of writing about our research progress is that, eventually, we build a track record detailing what we've already tried. Whether successful or a miserable failure in answering our research questions, the log of our research wanderings charts details we won't need to revisit. It also, thankfully, can point us to spots in our previous searches which do need to be revisited.

In the case of Timothy Kelly, the co-worker and Fort Wayne, Indiana, neighbor of my father-in-law's Irish immigrant great-grandfather John Kelly, I had worked on his line in the past. Part of my task now is to review everything I've already written on him, both back in 2016 and more recently in 2020.

I'm hoping to zero in on gaps in that research and look for signs of possible additional record sets which could add helpful pointers. After all, a lot of digitized documentation has been uploaded to websites both in the United States and back in Ireland in the past ten years. I'm hoping to spot those gaps, discover which newly-added record sets could fill in the blanks, and then recap what's been discovered with this iteration in researching Timothy Kelly. And that, in turn, will hopefully point out any further connections between the two Kelly families.

Thankfully, those clues about a sister for Timothy named Margaret and family connections pointing back to Toledo, Ohio, were details I had touched on in past years' posts. It's time to recap the family's story by reviewing that material, then step out to fill in the remaining blanks. From what I've reviewed of past posts, though, it looks like the journey won't be entirely straightforward. It's time to set out a timeline of what's already been found.

The Fort Wayne Road

 

Perhaps it was a mild form of presentism which struck me when pondering the early years of Timothy Kelly. Since he was a contemporary and co-worker of my father-in-law's great-grandfather John Kelly, I've been trying to discern whether there was any further connection between the two Kelly men. Finding information on Timothy Kelly, I hoped, could fill in a few blanks regarding how the two were connected.

Timothy Kelly's September 22, 1901, obituary in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette mention his work, back in 1857, on "the Fort Wayne road." Since I had been unable to find Timothy in census records before 1870, I was keen to locate his whereabouts. A sighting in the 1860 census, before his marriage to Ellen Hannan in October, might provide the names of his parents, or at least a mention of siblings.

Wondering what the "Fort Wayne Road" might have referred to—here I was thinking of something historic like Zane's Trace, admittedly a too-far stretch into the wrong period of history—I took my question about the road to the search engines. When the responses mentioned routes far too early for Timothy's participation in a construction project in 1857, I added that specific year to my search terms.

Suddenly, the results were no longer discussing the early roads of stage coach travel, but a far different kind of road: rail roads. Of course it made all the sense in the world, once my mind shifted to the realities of that era. Even more than that, putting it in context with a man who spent the rest of his working years employed by the railroads—oh, duh, how could I have missed it?

Stuck in my own timeframe.

The Fort Wayne Road, if you're curious, was part of the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Rail Road, later reorganized as the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railway. Fort Wayne, as a city, played a large role in the development of railroad lines through the midwest, something I should have surmised from my research visits to the city over the years. The Allen County History Center mentioned in a social media post that Fort Wayne was considered one of the most important railroad centers in the nation.

While it was helpful to get reoriented to what was considered the prime "road" in the city during that time period, knowing these railroad details didn't quite pinpoint where I might find young Timothy Kelly. The entire railroad operation extended westward from Pittsburgh through Fort Wayne and on to Chicago. In fact, researching the term, "the Fort Wayne road," I found one mention which identified the Fort Wayne Railroad Bridge as crossing the Allegheny into Pittsburgh—certainly far from Fort Wayne itself. If the entirety of the tracks was dubbed the Fort Wayne road, that would make pinpointing Timothy's location quite a puzzle.

On the other hand, mention of some of Timothy's family residing in Ohio might make more sense if the family had moved with the expansion of the work project. It might help to turn our attention to mentions of the Kelly family in various newspaper reports over time. 

Floating

 

When faced with charting an unexplained connection to a possible relative, my first step has always been to set up a separate family tree. On Ancestry.com, I usually created an entirely new tree, often making it private and unsearchable while my doubts yielded the upper hand. Once my sandbox experiment made it clear to me that I was on the right track, only then I might add the person as a "floating branch" in my own tree.

Once I caved and signed up for Ancestry's ProTools subscription, "floating" became a far easier proposition. While, yes, I could always create a floating branch in any family tree, the ProTools arsenal helped me tackle that a bit more easily. By creating a "network," I could link a person to a known relative in my tree, beginning the process by clicking on "Networks Beta" at the bottom of the "Relationships" column.

Though the next step offers several options, I simply named the network, specified the person I wanted to add, and that was it. In this case, I named my network Kelly FAN Club, wrote a descriptor for the network's purpose, and entered my first candidate, Timothy Kelly.

While it is true that I will be duplicating some effort—after all, I already had set up a small tree headed by this same Timothy Kelly—it was effort expended several years ago. With all the improvements in accessible resources over that time period, I am hoping more digitized records will help point the way to Timothy's family. After all, he did not come alone. I want to know not only who his siblings were, but whether his parents also migrated from County Kerry. Such a discovery as that, alone, would be a gift, especially if he turned out to be a close relative of John Kelly, his co-worker and my father-in-law's great-grandfather.

The next step, then, is to find any new additions to record sets, both at American resources such as Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org, and also back in Ireland, and add them to this new floating branch. But first, I'll be following up on that newspaper obituary clue about Timothy's work on the Fort Wayne Road in 1857. I'll be looking, first, for signs of his residence right there in the same city where that other Kelly family was soon to arrive at their new home.

A Kelly Connection, Far From Home

 

When seeking clues on the roots of an Irishman with a name as common as John Kelly, any Kelly connection is tempting to follow. As it turned out, my father-in-law's great-grandfather John Kelly happened to move far from home in Ireland to a city in America where one of his co-workers turned out to also have the surname Kelly.

Imagine that.

This co-worker, by the name of Timothy Kelly, also happened to live around the block from where John Kelly settled in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with his wife and family of three surviving Irish-born children: a son who was also named Timothy, along with daughters Catherine and Mary Ann. 

By the time John and his family had arrived in Fort Wayne by 1860, Timothy had married Ellen Hannan and soon had a growing family of his own. Oldest daughter Catherine was welcomed by Timothy and Ellen in 1861, followed soon after by Mary in 1863, Andrew in 1868, Timothy in 1869, Richard in 1871, and Deborah in 1873, before Timothy's wife Ellen died in 1875.

A list of names like that was enough to also give me pause, as here was another Kelly whose namesake choices for his children echoed that of our John Kelly. Though there were many more years of life lived by Timothy Kelly before his own passing in 1901, what I had already found about this other Kelly man gave me much to ponder.

Unfortunately, Timothy died just before governmental record-keeping mandates sought the kind of additional personal information that makes genealogists do the research happy dance. Information on Timothy's death record, as reported by his son Andrew, did confirm he was born in Ireland, but as to any other details, Andrew was unable to say.

Fortunately, the wordy obituaries of the era helped to fill in a few blanks. The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette of September 22, 1901, explained that Timothy was born in County Kerry and that he "came to this country when he was a small boy." Though not fixing a date for his arrival, the obituary mentioned that "as a very young man" he "assisted" in the construction of the "Fort Wayne road" in 1857—three years before his marriage to Ellen Hannan.

The only other detail provided by the obituary, besides his work history and his regard as one of the senior members of the Fort Wayne community, was that he was survived by a sister named Margaret Kelly.

When I first attempted following Timothy's family line, it was likely a decade ago, if not earlier. I did try searching for Margaret Kelly, and through details provided in newspaper reports, I had traced her to a residence in Toledo, Ohio. At that point, inability to access archived newspapers from that location stalled my progress. It's certainly high time to pick up that chase once again, to see if we can isolate enough details on this Kelly man to pinpoint who his own family was, and where in County Kerry they may have had connections with our John Kelly—if any.  

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.

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. 

Meet Johanna

 

When it comes to stories, we often think of the quaint launch into the narrative: "Once upon a time." That may work well for fairy tales, but in the tales of our family's history, we sometimes must rely on the end of the story before we can learn about the "once upon a time" beginning.

That's the way it has been for my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey. Most of what I learned about Johanna came from obituaries published in local newspapers in Fort Wayne, Indiana, far from her native home in Ireland.

However, even in the obituaries, I ran into conflicting information. Delighted to learn she had other relatives who also emigrated from County Kerry, I then was stumped by their identity. According to the May 1, 1903, edition of the Fort Wayne Sentinel, Johanna was survived by "several sisters living in Ireland and one in New Zealand." Turning to the next day's edition of the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, however, I see she had "several sisters and brothers who live in Ireland."

Fortunately for all us Falvey researchers one hundred twenty-something years later, we now know it is far more likely that the Falvey connection in New Zealand was a brother, if a sibling at all. But even that will take time to puzzle out.

Slowly, I've been trawling through digitized microfilmed records preserved in Ireland, piecing together the story of the Falvey family in County Kerry. Though the specific townlands vary from record to record, it seems the documents are talking about the same family. We'll take a closer look this month at Johanna Falvey's earlier years, long before her arrival in the United States in about 1869. But even piecing that together may rely on more records stateside than across the "pond." And what is found in Ireland may need some additional conjectures as to whether they appropriately fit within Johanna's own family story.

What we know for now is that, back in Ireland, Johanna Falvey married John Kelly, and together they raised three, possibly four, of their children before deciding to move across the Atlantic for a better future. In America, the family headed for Fort Wayne, Indiana—not a typical immigrant destination, but likely in pursuit of a job, based on information already provided from relatives who had traveled there before them.

There in Fort Wayne, the couple welcomed two more sons into the family, and suffered the loss of two other children. There, after working in one of the railroad shops as a blacksmith, John Kelly died in 1892, and his wife Johanna joined him eleven years later in 1903. (Incidentally, never trust what's engraved on a headstone; always seek additional confirmation.)

From what's been preserved from the end of their story in Fort Wayne, we'll try to inch our way backwards through time to discover the earlier years of this couple in Ireland and, hopefully, to piece together names of possible close relatives in County Kerry. In the end, our goal will be to follow those lines of collateral relatives to reveal the connection with not only the DNA matches in New Zealand, but in all the other locations where Johanna Falvey's relatives eventually migrated.

Ancestor #8: Hoping for D N A Clues

 

There are some ancestors for whom we can handily point to several records in confirmation of our connection. Not so with this one of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025. My father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna Falvey, my choice for a research focus this coming August, had proven hard to find the last time I tried to pursue her story. That was five years ago. It's about time to see whether any further clues will turn up.

That said, I'm sorry to say it, but I don't think there will be much more in the way of paper confirmations. Johanna Falvey was an Irish immigrant who came to Fort Wayne, Indiana, with her husband, John Kelly. Now that's a name to try your research hand at. I would have just about given up the chase for John Kelly's wife, except for two things. One was that her obituary tantalizingly mentioned that she had left several sisters behind in Ireland—plus another sibling who had immigrated to New Zealand. The other detail? Well, I've found some DNA matches who lead to Falvey ancestors in New Zealand.

And yet, it can't really be just that easy. I've tried finding the connections before. Frustratingly, the chase always seems to lead back to the same records void in Ireland. Here's hoping that now, five years later, there will be more DNA matches leading to more possibilities of finding records pointing to the right location and family circle back home in Ireland. I may be clutching tightly to my positive attitude mantra for this ancestor, but I'll never know if I can find any more details on Johanna Falvey unless I give this brick wall pursuit another try.

A Serendipitous Find

 

It might still be August—and well over ninety degrees each day around here last week while I was away, wandering through upstate New York—but rainy weather upon my return (not to mention pumpkin spice lattes on the autumn menu already at the coffee shop) put everyone in the mood to fast-forward to the next season. Perhaps that's why I found myself doing some fall cleaning yesterday.

From a folio still containing old notes, I pulled three slips of paper which could be called a serendipitous find. Each of those three slips was dated from June of 2005, and as receipts, each showed that I had paid $3.75 for the privilege of borrowing a microfilm of records from the Family History Library. The receipts clearly identified the records I was viewing: from Saint Patrick's Catholic Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

That particular parish happened to be the home church for my father-in-law's grandfather, John Kelly Stevens, whose third wife became the only grandmother my father-in-law ever knew. Now that I have the identifier for those three microfilms I used so many years ago, I can go back and review them in digitized format, this time in search of Theresa Blaising, rather than her husband.

Having the actual microfilm number so clearly printed on the receipt became a shortcut to finding the records on the current FamilySearch.org website. Of course, I could have looked them up in the catalog by location, then drilled down to the category—church records—and hope to find the right entry. Having found these old receipts, you can be sure I'll be saving the link to the online resources for ongoing research. This time, the perspective will be the other side of the family: finding another way to trace Theresa Blaising's own heritage. Perhaps the church records will tell us something more than what's been found on civil records.

That research, however, will have to be at a local Family History Center, for the digitized microfilms are not currently available online for viewing at home. That, however, is a small price to pay for the ongoing ability to glean information on that ever-expanding family history quest. 

Rewind: Theresa, From Finish to Start

 

You know genealogists: when we want to know the story of a relative's life, we start at the end and work our way back to the beginning. It's no different when we look at the life of Theresa Blaising Stevens, step-mother to Will Stevens and grandmother to Will's children, including my father-in-law.

The document left to us at the finish line of Theresa's life tells it all—sort of. The main problem with death records is that we must rely on the accuracy of cool-headed memory to record key bits of information—information like where the deceased was born or what her mother's maiden name might have been. And those are precisely the kinds of details most likely to slip a distraught relative's mind at the moment of a family member's passing.

In the case of Theresa, who died at eighty one years of age, her husband—John Kelly Stevens—had long been gone, predeceasing her by eighteen years. He certainly wasn't around to report what he knew of the twenty-one year old bride he had married in 1887, back in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That task, if it fell to any family members, would have been the job of Theresa's step-son, Will—except that he, too, had died before her.

Best I can piece together of Theresa's last days was that though she still lived in Fort Wayne, she was likely visiting her step-son's family in Chicago when she died, as the address given on her death record is on a street where the Stevens family once lived. The informant's name, though, is not one of a family member. Possibly that informant's name given on the record was for a caretaker or medical assistant.

Still, the details can provide us some guidance. We just need to keep pressing onward until we find better information, which we'll do bit by bit this week. So far, what we can see from Theresa's record is that the informant did not know Theresa's father's name, other than giving the surname as "Blasing." However, her mother's name was provided as Mary Hirshberg, and Theresa's own place of birth was given as "Alsace Lorraine, Allen, France."

Lest you wonder whether the "Allen" in that given birthplace might have signaled confusion with Theresa's resident county in Indiana, let's save these determinations for such time as we find secondary verifications. This, at least, was a start—and we need to remember that, no matter how old a relative might have been, or how expected her time of death, her passing still would have brought on stressors to the rest of the family, pressures that may have caused people to blurt out misinformation unintentionally.

After her passing, the family's plan was to return her remains to Fort Wayne, where she would be buried in the mausoleum at the Catholic Cemetery, right next to her husband, John Kelly Stevens. There, the simple etching of her dates tells us that Theresa was born in 1866, though far from the "Fort Wayne" entry given at Find A Grave. Rather than rely on that well-meaning volunteer's entry, we'll need to rewind Theresa's story even further, and look to see what we can find on either her as-yet-unnamed paternal side, or through the maternal side of a woman whose name we now have as Mary Hirshberg.

What We Know About Theresa

 

My father-in-law's only non-Irish relative was the only grandmother he ever really knew. Her name was Theresa Blaising. Though she was an immigrant, she definitely didn't come to Fort Wayne, Indiana, from Ireland.

Theresa entered the Stevens family as step-mother to my father-in-law's father, Will Stevens. She was actually the third wife of Will's father, John Kelly Stevens. John had lost the previous two wives to complications of childbirth, a much more prevalent condition during the time period when Will was born in 1884.

Theresa had no children of her own. Whether that was a wise move of self-preservation on her part or an unfortunate situation of childlessness, I can't tell. But she did raise Will, the only son of John Kelly Stevens' second wife, Catherine Kelly, and his older sister Kathryn, daughter of John Kelly's first wife Mary Clara Miller.

While Theresa's relationship with her step-daughter seemed rocky at best—Kathryn seemed all but estranged from the family as an adult—the many letters kept by Will, and ultimately handed down through the family after his passing, show an ongoing connection with Theresa up until her own death in the summer of 1947.

Tracing Theresa's roots has its ups and downs. She apparently arrived in the United States as a young child—four years of age or possibly younger—but where she actually came from is given to political interpretation. For instance, when I found her family in the 1870 census in New Haven, Indiana, they were listed as originating in France. By the time of the 1900 census, long after her 1887 marriage to John Kelly Stevens, her national identity was listed as Germany.

Making a practice of checking an ancestor's entry in each decennial census record pays off, for in the 1880 census, an enumerator fortunately made one of those greatly-appreciated mistakes and instead of recording the current geo-political designation, had entered the name of the actual region where the family originated: Lorraine. Checking a brief history of the Lorraine region reveals the explanation for the vacillating answers; it was not a moment too soon that the 1870 census had shed light on the Blaising family's ethnic origin, for the very next year saw the takeover of that embattled region by the Germans.

Checking each decade's census entry for Theresa and her family has a corollary benefit: I now have names to help build her family constellation. This, too, becomes a way to more securely trace the right family line, a project we'll begin working on with the beginning of the upcoming week.

"The Only Grandmother I Ever Knew"

Sometimes, our work in digging up family history can unearth some details which upset our relatives' understanding of their relatives. As much as I appreciated my long-deceased father-in-law's brother Edward, who as "Uncle Ed" guided me through the generations of the Stevens family, once I began researching in earnest, I uncovered some conflicting details. 

My first step in such cases, of course, was to consult him. After all, he was my guide through all the names and dates, thanks to all the records, letters, and other memorabilia that family had stored for decades. But when I asked him about his grandfather John Kelly Stevens' wife—on paper, Ed's grandmother was named Catherine Kelly, another confusing detail—he mentioned the name of another woman: Theresa Blaising. "She's the only grandmother I ever knew," he reminisced.

That indeed was true, for Uncle Ed's maternal grandfather was long gone by the time he was born, and his maternal grandmother died when he was still an infant. Even his paternal grandfather John Kelly Stevens died when Ed was a young boy, so the only grandparent left to him was Theresa.

As it turned out, Theresa, living in Fort Wayne, Indiana, wrote many letters to her step-son and his family over the years. In the family's true packrat tradition, several letters—if not all—were saved in a special keepsake drawer at the Stevens home in Chicago until years later when Ed's widow gifted them to my husband.

Knowing the techniques of family research, it wasn't hard for me to find Theresa documented in several of the usual resources genealogists frequent, so I've already found much on this woman. I selected Theresa as one of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year because, despite not being a "blood" relative, she played an important part in the lives of my father-in-law's family, and I'd like to learn more about her own roots. This month will launch us into that journey of discovery, beginning with a review tomorrow of what is already known about her, thanks to family memories. 

Getting Possessive About "My" Johanna

 

When researching ancestors with puzzling matches of almost identical particulars, do you ever get possessive about the one you feel is surely "yours"? 

Next week, when we delve into examining an Irish immigrant named Johanna Falvey, keep in mind that the only reason I am doing so is that I'm trying to trace the origin of my Johanna Falvey. See? I'm already getting possessive about this.

The Johanna who got me started on this wild chase was my husband's second great-grandmother. I already know quite a bit about her: that she was born in County Kerry, Ireland; that she married John Kelly at the same location; that she and John had at least two children, possibly three, before emigrating from their homeland about 1868; that she left behind siblings in her homeland; and that, while she headed to the United States, she had at least one sibling who went in the other direction, ending up in New Zealand.

While the lack of Irish documentation leaves me without any verification of her birth, based on reports given in her adopted home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we can estimate that she was born about 1826. Thanks to the paper trail in America, we know for a certainty that she died in Fort Wayne in 1903.

Now that we've stumbled upon this other woman with the same name—Johanna Falvey, whose sister and brother are ancestors of two of my husband's DNA matches—we will begin examining the particulars next week. Right away, I can see that this Johanna was born later than "my" Johanna. She certainly ended up in a far different location in the United States than our Johanna's Indiana. And we'll even be able to see from her marriage record that she married a man who was not named John Kelly.

Still, tracing the narrative—and especially considering the reason I'm pursuing this other Falvey—it might be easy to assume otherwise. So I revert to that very possessive-sounding phrase, "my Johanna," when I talk about my husband's second great-grandmother. While I certainly don't mean to sound exclusionary, it is important to delineate just who is who—and who is connected to which line. With these Falveys—and their ever-present relatives, the Sullivans--it is apparently important to make that distinction.

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.

Missing Researchers Long Gone

 

It was late on New Year's Day in 2003 when I took a look at my email notifications from GenForum, an old messaging system used by family history enthusiasts. It was there that researchers could post their requests for help and connection, specific to either surnames or local geographic areas. 

Earlier in the previous year, I had gone wandering, much like I have this month, in an attempt to figure out the connection between my husband's second great-grandfather, John Kelly, and a man by the name of Timothy Kelly. The two Kelly men surely were related in some way, as they had gone in together on the purchase of a family burial plot at the Catholic Cemetery in Fort Wayne, Indiana. But how, I couldn't figure out.

I had gone from John Kelly's family tree, to constructing a private unsearchable tree for Timothy Kelly's family, to tracing the line of Timothy's second wife, a woman by the name of Mary Danehy. As she had brought a daughter into the Kelly marriage, I was in the midst of even attempting to discover the origin of that step-daughter—of whom all I knew was her name, Margaret Sweeney—when I got a reply to my query.

The answer said simply,

Timothy Kelly married my GG Aunt in 1880. Her name was Mary Danehy. Timothy and his first wife Ellen...had six children.

 

This, of course, I already knew, but perhaps it wasn't evident to my respondent. After all, having gone so far afield of my original research goal, I had posted my request in the forum for Sweeney family researchers, not in the Kelly department. However, this respondent followed up with one irresistible question: "Where do you fit into the picture?"

There began a long volley of emails, as two researchers traced the various paths leading to their nexus, a man in Fort Wayne who himself somehow got there from some place in County Kerry, Ireland. We exchanged notes. Shared most recent discoveries. Even traded photocopies of newspaper clippings and documents by snail mail from one end of the country to the other at a time when not everything was at our fingertips online. Yet, despite all our earnest efforts, we still couldn't make the connection or trace the Kelly family back to their place of origin.

Eventually, my corresponding researcher sent me a note. It was following the time of the second Gulf War, and he had decided to use his experience in the construction industry to serve as a contractor in Afghanistan to rebuild schools in that country. Promising to pick up on our joint research venture upon his return home, he was off to a land where genealogical pursuits were not highest among their priorities.

Several years passed, and I began to wonder how he had fared on his adventure. I tried updated emails without any answer. Finally, because this researcher had such an unusual name, I tried googling it. Sadly, I found my answer through a lovingly crafted obituary posted on Find A Grave.

Even though it's been nearly two decades since that first email opened up the opportunity to share a research project with a fellow family member, I still think about endeavors like that. Of course, on the easy side, now knowing what I've been able to discover about Timothy Kelly, I wish there was a way to utilize DNA testing to see whether that venue would provide corroboration. But more important than that, experiences like the many research connections made in those past genealogy forums remind me of the value of connecting with other researchers—and continuing to work together to find answers to our family history questions.

Some research questions simply cannot be answered without sustained effort, persevering through many steps until we find the answer we need. Sometimes, such efforts are better achieved in partnership with others pursuing the same answers. Yet, it seems it has been a long time since I've met up with others willing to collaborate to that extent. I've seen some people complain that they are lucky to even receive just one reply to an emailed inquiry. Were such diligent researchers just a product of a bygone generation? Where have they all gone?

Of course, I'll still plod onward with my Kelly questions. There are, after all, encouraging signs linking Timothy Kelly to Abbie—or Debora, or Gobnait, or whoever she turns out to be—and they, in turn, seem to be linked to someone named John Kelly. And yet, on the other hand, there are confusing signs that just don't seem to add up right.

Whatever the conclusion of the matter, though, it will likely be through some solitary effort that I'll arrive at an answer—no matter how much I yearn to find those research partners of decades now gone. But I can still hope there are others out there who realize it is certainly more fun to share the research adventure together.