Celebrating the Small Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drawing Up a List for Next Time

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, I Just Wanna . . .

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Nemesis: Name Twins

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Brothers Bound for Boston?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Far Can Seventeen Stretch?

 

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

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

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

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

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

Sloppy Handwriting and Line by Line Searches

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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