Nooo, Not Another Sullivan!

 

As promised yesterday, our purpose today is to meet someone new in my quest to ascertain the roots of my husband's second great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey. That someone new, as I've already mentioned, was Catherine Falvey, and I found her in Detroit. 

The reason I'm interested in this particular Catherine Falvey is that somehow, one of her descendants shares a minute segment of DNA matching the exact pattern claimed by my husband. A Falvey match, I presume. My goal, if I can't trace Johanna Falvey's family line back to Ireland, is to see whether I have any better results in following the immigrant line of this other Falvey descendant. Let's take a look and see what can be found about this other Falvey family.

For one thing, unlike Johanna Falvey who was already married to John Kelly before leaving Ireland, this Catherine Falvey did not immigrate to America as an adult. Rather, she was born here to immigrant parents. She can easily be found in the 1860 census, living in Detroit along with her immigrant parents, older brother, and younger siblings. All the children in this Falvey household were born in Michigan, beginning in the early 1850s.

While it is true that I might face the same research challenges seeking the marriage record of her parents, Daniel and Mary Falvey, as I have with the other related lines I've attempted to follow back to Ireland, at least I have six additional Falvey names to pursue in hopes of at least one mention of connections back to the home country or relationships with other Falvey members.

While I will also pursue Catherine Falvey's siblings' lines for clues, our first step is to see what can be discovered about Catherine, herself. She is, after all, the direct line ancestor of the person whose DNA matches that of my husband. We'll need to rule out any unforeseen alternate family connections—after all, we need to make sure it is Falvey, and no other surname, which is the connection tying these two DNA matches together in their one shared segment. From that point, the rest of the story needs to be to examine Catherine's line to assure us that she is indeed the Falvey ancestor of the DNA match, and not another Falvey second great-grandmother—although, in that case, since it involves examining connections to living individuals, I won't be posting about that portion of my research.

So, what can be discovered about Catherine Falvey, herself? Step one is to trace her parents' household through each decennial census record I can find—all, thankfully, remaining in the Detroit area. It isn't long, though, until the expected happens. After finding Catherine in her parents' home in the 1860 and 1870 census records, she is in a new home for the 1880 census as, yes, she, too, has married. Her husband? A Michigan-born child of Irish immigrants, same as Catherine.

Though I can't yet find any marriage record, I can infer from the 1880 census that Catherine and her intended were married about 1879 in Michigan. In time, "Kate" and her husband would become proud parents of seven children, all carrying a surname which seems vaguely familiar to me, after all my attempts at taking another alternate route to discover the parents of my Johanna Falvey and her husband John Kelly: another Sullivan connection!

What is it with these Sullivans? Am I forever doomed to keep bumping into them in this research maze? They seem to be everywhere, intertwined into the life stories of both my Falveys and my Kellys. Let's hope this time, that Sullivan name leads us back home to the right destination in Ireland.

Seeing the Air

 

Yesterday was one of those unfortunate days we've lived through lately, here in northern California, in which we could actually see the air we were breathing. The smoke from fires near and far was, once again, descending upon us, swirling around us, and reminding us of components we wouldn't normally expect to include with our every breath.

Breathing that kind of air is not a habit I'd advise for anyone, yet it did prompt me to think about other invisible materials which, not normally seen yet once rendered visible can, instead, help our situation. If there is anything invisible in the world of genealogy, it would be those untraceable links from one mystery generation to another, hidden behind those insurmountable research brick walls that have us struggling. Oh, to be able to actually visualize those invisible links!

Surprise! We can see those invisible threads tying our ancestors' generations together. At least for a few generations, the tool which renders those invisible connections visible is the process which shows us the patterns laid down in the very genes in our own bodies. Those genetic patterns, when compared to other people's genetic signatures, can lead us to people who "match" a portion of our own DNA records.

When it comes to my convoluted research attempts to find the origin of my husband's second great-grandparents, John Kelly and Johanna Falvey, I have certainly put in my fair share of time twisting and turning in the face of a wide variety of records—all to no avail. Of course, from their records left after their immigrant years in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I already know John and Johanna were born in Ireland. Furthermore, chatty resources like newspaper reports of their death lead me to believe they both originated in County Kerry. But where, specifically? And who were their parents?

Enter the key to unlock the code so I can actually see the invisible "air" of their genetic record. I have the DNA test results for my husband and his two sisters. Though those test kits at five DNA companies plus GEDmatch.com haven't garnered a great number of matches with Falvey kin—searching for Kelly matches would not be a productive foray just yet—there are a few matches to work with. Now is the time to re-evaluate just whom to pursue on this next attempt at finding the answers I seek.

Starting with Ancestry DNA, I limited my search to those matches who also have the surname Falvey somewhere in their family tree. Of those results, there were only three customers who placed high enough to be listed as possible fourth cousins—nothing closer. 

Of those three matches, one shared thirty five centiMorgans with my husband, all in one lone segment. Examining her tree, I see one encouraging detail: this Falvey ancestor ended up traveling from Ireland to New Zealand—a good sign, as we already have another Falvey match from a different testing company with those specifics. This line very likely will align with that other New Zealand match, an answer I'm already off and running to pursue.

The second of these three closest matches is someone who is far closer in relationship to my husband. An actual descendant of Johanna Falvey's own children, this match already has a place in my husband's family tree, confirmed as a third cousin, once removed. Their shared thirty four centiMorgans, though only one count less than that shared with the first match, is actually distributed over three separate segments. Because of the already-known relationship, pursuing this match will likely not reveal any information I don't already know. The only way it could help with my research problem now is if this person is willing to collaborate with me and share the details she has on any of her DNA Falvey matches to whom she might be connected through genetic material my husband or his sisters did not inherit from those ancestors.

The third of the three closest matches is someone who shares just a little less genetic material: twenty nine centiMorgans. Like the first match, this amount is shared in only one segment, likely pointing to a specific inheritance from someone coming at least a generation prior to our Johanna Falvey. This information may prove valuable, so my next task will be to examine this match's family tree and pull up all associated documentation related to that Falvey line. You can be sure I will be examining each of the digitized documents for any details omitted in the indexing process, as well as seeking out further records to round out the narrative.

Thus, our next task will be to meet Catherine Falvey, presumably the daughter of immigrants from County Kerry known as Daniel Falvey and Mary O'Leary. We'll take a look at whether the documentation on this family will reveal anything new about the extended Falvey family. Hopefully, it will lead us back to the right townland location in County Kerry.

But first, we need to start from step one: the same step we take when we begin our own tree. Just as we would start with ourselves on our own family history project, we'll begin this new exploration with a Falvey descendant in a much closer time and place than pre-Famine Ireland.

Our first visit in this research trial will be to travel to a place not far from the Toledo home of all those Sullivans we've been agonizing over: we'll start our journey in Detroit, Michigan.

Boxed in by Sullivans

 

Truth be told, having followed several related lines—mostly belonging to Sullivans—connecting to that of John Kelly of County Kerry, all I have to show for the effort is: not much at all. In all my research wanderings, it is as if I have pounded on the four walls surrounding me, yet only now have I been able to see I've been surrounded by Sullivans, but none of their clues have led me to open doors with any useful answers. 

I can find the connection between our family's ancestral John Kelly and his sister "Abbie," who married a Sullivan. I can find John Kelly's sister Margaret, the spinster aunt who, once immigrated to Toledo, Ohio, served as host to several Sullivan nieces and nephews—and then more Sullivan grand-nephews—who followed in her footsteps and came to America. But I can't find the hand pointing me in the direction of the townland back in Ireland which the Sullivan and Kelly families called home before home became the midwestern United States. 

Clearly, it's time to backtrack. To regroup. To come up with Research Plan B.

Do I have an answer? To put it shortly: no.

I suspect my next best bet is to go back to tracing those DNA matches which seemed to belong to family members linked with either our John Kelly's line, or that of his wife, Johanna Falvey. Some of those matches, after all, were the six to ten centiMorgan matches which I joined others in howling over their potential loss this past summer at Ancestry.com. Fortunately, I saved our Falvey and Kelly matches. And it is for such a time as this. May as well get back to work muddling through the possible links.

This, of course, means borrowing from the playbook of adoptees seeking their birth parents: building tentative family trees from our current time, using each of those matches as the home person. Then, working step by step, pushing back one generation at a time, not just copying the other person's tree online, but building my own using documentation to verify the connections. Then, seeing where that line leads us, back in Ireland. Hopefully, it will be in County Kerry.

Having to backtrack and regroup with a research goal can be disheartening, indeed. There are some obstacles which may prove insurmountable, even if we call for a re-do of effort. For one thing, there are so many records missing from the historic accounts of the common people of Ireland. Another contributing factor is the aggravating habit of our Irish ancestors to borrow from their elders the same names, repeated generation after generation by each sibling of each family, making confident identification of this specific John Kelly next to impossible, at times.

Yet, I'm up for one more go round on this attempt. Thankfully, there are a few promising DNA matches to examine. If we have them, why not use them? Perhaps we'll uncover a story or two along the way. But even in this process, we need to remember that every research task may come with its own embedded genealogical clock. Sometimes, the timing of the quest may simply not be right; the records we need may not be available now, but that is not to say they will never be accessible. Some projects are initially handled far before their time has come to be completed.

Labor Day: Unofficial End to a Summer that Never Was

 

Today, Americans celebrate the 126th anniversary of the first officially-designated national holiday of Labor Day. While Labor Day was definitely acknowledged in this country before 1894, those thirty states which had previously designated the day a public holiday were closer to the era in which the holiday was, as one organization put it, more a cause for protest than picnic.

In those far-off years when I was growing up, Labor Day was definitely more picnic than protest, yet I hardly remember the picnic. I spent more than my fair share of time on the sidelines, waiting for the marching band to pass by on the parade route for summertime holidays. My dad was, after all, a trombone-wielding member of the local musicians' union ever since New York City's Big Band era. And yet, while I remember Memorial Day parades and parades for Independence Day, I can't seem to recall any such events for that unofficial close of the summer season.

Perhaps it was because we were too busy getting ready for the first day of school. Back then, the official start of the school year arrived the second day after the Monday holiday. That gave everyone a chance to get home from their last-gasp-of-summer vacation weekend and frantically complete back-to-school shopping. After all, most of the stores were also closed for Labor Day. Moms needed to have one last chance to cross everything off their lists.

While it has been a long time since I last headed off for that first day of school—after a fitful night's sleep filled with back-to-school dreams—I never have shaken loose from that "end of summer" correlation with Labor Day. I'm not even in the climate zone where fall weather patterns are crouched and ready to spring—we are, after all, expecting a hundred-degree-plus heatwave to continue for the remainder of this weekend—but it is not lost upon me that we are about to say goodbye to one of my favorite seasons of the year. I'm not sure I'm ready for this.

But what summer are we saying goodbye to? In this year of firsts—as in "first time in recent memory"—those hundred-year historic commemorations such as the Women's Right to Vote seem to pale in the shadows of a corona virus pandemic and ensuing quarantine, or even seeing nearly a million acres of my side of the state burn up in the past two weeks.

Somehow, I keep waiting for summer to start. Perhaps it's just as well that I chose to make my home in "sunny" California. Once the haze clears up, perhaps I can pretend it's June, again. In the meantime, back to research....

Counting on a Plan

 

When I set my research plan for this year, the hope was to focus on particular goals so that progress, overall, would provide a measure of success for each of the four lines I am following: a tree for each of my parents, and likewise, a tree for each of my in-laws. That brilliant idea has taken some heat over the years, as changing situations beyond my control still yielded their impact on lil ol' me. In the early nineties, delight over increased communication between researchers on like family lines was bundled with requests to email reports with "only" their side of the family listed; I obliged and reconstructed my tree into four trees. And now we have entirely swapped that for a new song: keep it all in one tree so you can tag all your DNA matches, no matter which side of the family claims them.

Those changing wishes impact other aspects of my choice of research projects. Take my current diversion from the research path, chasing my father-in-law's Falvey and Kelly lines in County Kerry. I've ended up building not one, not two, but—count 'em—three trees to keep track of this winding trail. A lot of effort is yielding not much to show for the work.

With that in mind, it is not much of a surprise, for my bi-weekly check, to realize I had not made much progress on the tasks I had presumed would be this year's primary focus. Even on my own mother's tree, I only added sixty two new names. Despite the fact that her tree now includes 23,150 relatives—a handy DNA-match reference for fifth cousins on many lines of descent—there were barely any new discoveries there in the past two weeks.

Worse, when you consider my mother-in-law's line, which now has 19,103 individuals. That number may seem impressive, but not as impressive as it was when I claimed the same count, two weeks ago. And two weeks before that. Nothing new to report for her line, this time, again. Nor for either my father or my father-in-law, since in the latter case, all new names added have been attached to a separate private, unsearchable tree to work on until I am sure I am not attaching any wrong ancestors to his line.

So, progress? Yes—but not that anyone can see, from the vantage point of my public trees. Which makes me consider re-evaluating my research plan for this year. Should I continue with this work-intensive chase to find John Kelly's roots in Ireland—an almost laughable quest—or temper its lack of progress with "duty" days in which I designate research time only to continue rounding out the blanks on my other relatives' trees?

In a way, I somewhat am doing that alternate plan right now. Based on what DNA matches show up for either side of our family on four of the main testing companies, if I see a viable match, I will work to attach that match to the appropriate tree. This, of course, involves checking each step of the way back through the generations to make sure I've established a documented trail from DNA match to most recent common ancestor. But it serves double duty by allowing me to continue work on more than one tree at a time.

However, I am wondering about incorporating a mid-year review for research goals—or at least some tool or process to temper those research projects which conceal those enormous yet unsuspected jumps off the deep side into murky waters. We research, after all, because we don't know. And what we don't know is whether we'll even find anything to provide us the answers we seek. Perhaps the real question is: can we develop our own set of premises about what constitutes a reasonable cause to call a project to a halt for now. Sometimes, the time for a research question may be not just yet.

Who's Left?

 

If a person can experience being foggy-brained, can one also become smokey-brained? That, at least, is how I feel after a solid two weeks hunkered down behind closed doors and windows to avoid the fallout of twin infernos not far from my home. True, I shouldn't complain, considering I never even had to flee my house in the wake of an evacuation order—when others no longer have a home to return to—but the incessant smoke has a way of seeping into every crevice. Including one's own grey matter.

It's been over a month since I've attended to some of my regular genealogy duties, like volunteer indexing of digitized records at FamilySearch.org. Try as I might to keep up with my once-a-month commitment, I could do nothing more than open up the site, stare stupidly at the projects currently needing help—like, why is the project for Papua New Guinea filed with the projects for North America?—and just walk away. For now.

Times like this call for some mindless yet productive activity—hence, my wandering thoughts about knitting last Saturday. Symptoms of a mind which fails to engage.

That's why, thanks to a post last Monday from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings, I recalled the cataclysmic hatchet job scheduled for the end of August to remove small DNA matches (under eight centiMorgans) at Ancestry.com. The time had come; the deed was done. Through the haze, I wondered how my starred and color-coded small matches fared in my own account. (Randy's, by the way, were reduced by fifty one percent, according to his scientific calculations. I, on the other hand, could not possibly think straight enough right now to even come up with an estimate.)

I took a peek. Not so bad, it seems. I still have 30,201 distant matches—far more than I could ever process. Included in that number, though, are the many I had flagged for valid reasons like surnames shared in common. Those twelve color-coded surname groups plus my group of starred matches held firm in this latest re-adjustment. Thankfully.

That, of course, means there is a lot of work ahead—work to properly connect the match to the right distant ancestor in my tree, or to verify and discard as one of those false matches predicted by Ancestry. But at least we had the chance to buy ourselves some more time for further consideration. Something that even the most foggy-brained among us can appreciate, for the time being. 

A Missed Opportunity

 

If I had seen what I've just found of a past census record before participating in my own most recent census enumeration, I think I would have gotten down on my knees and thanked the enumerator for doing a conscientious, careful job of noting my entries. My descendants may be depending on it.

As it is, I did make progress, in the current research project, in finding out more about Charles Sullivan in Toledo. Not long before his wife's untimely death due to complications of childbirth, Charles had filed his Declaration of Intention to become a citizen of the United States. He filed the document in the Court of Common Pleas in Lucas County, Ohio, where he had settled with his wife and children in Toledo.

From that document, we learned a few details about Charles—although, unfortunately, nothing about his parents. Those few details were enough to confirm that we were, indeed, looking at a report about the right Charles Sullivan—an important detail, considering the prevalence of a name like his.

For one thing, he reported his birth as occurring on May 1, 1882, in Stratford, England. We learned that he stood five feet, seven inches tall, with blue eyes and dark brown hair—and even that he was "tattood" on his "left rist."

Charles traveled with his wife Alice—another gratefully-received hint that we are on the right track—and children aboard the RMS Adriatic, arriving in New York City about the tenth day of December, 1920. From there, he and his family traveled to Ohio to settle with Alice's siblings and Sullivan aunts at 324 Saint Mary's Street, the very house where Alice soon gave birth to a stillborn son before losing her own life.

But what about their story, back in Stratford? Wouldn't you like to know more? I sure would. Yet, even though I can find them in the 1911 census, the opportunity to discover one of the key points I was seeking was doomed to slip through my very fingers. Notice the category in the 1911 census for England and Wales with these specific instructions: "Birthplace of every person. (1) If born in the United Kingdom, write the name of the County, and Town or Parish."

 

Now, wouldn't you like to know that about your own British Isles ancestors? That was precisely what I was seeking, not only for Charles, but especially for his wife, Alice. But do you think the census enumerator was able to follow those straightforward instructions for Charles (line one), his wife Alice (next line) and their young son Charlie? The answer:

No.