'Irish Roots' archive

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Irish Roots

June 23rd, 2014

Accentuate the negative

I recently overheard a bar-room theology session end with a triumphant "But you can't disprove that God exists!" Unfortunately, the old logical saw works both ways: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it's not much good as evidence of presence either.

Research in Irish records means constantly confronting such uncertainties: Irish genealogy's motto should be "Absence of evidence".

Not long ago, I took on what looked like a very straightforward search for the baptism of a James Holohan, born to a Holohan/Molloy couple around 1850 in Kilkenny. The Catholic baptismal records of the county are good for the period and, in my experience, the Kilkenny transcripts at kilkenny.rootsireland.ie are very accurate. So there should have been no problem.

But there was no matching baptism 1840 to 1860. No baptism for other children of the couple 1830 to 1870. No matching baptism with mother's name missing. No parents' marriage. No baptism outside Kilkenny. An absolute blank on every single front.

This was more than annoying, it needed explanation. Even if one baptism was missing or mis-transcribed, siblings' records or a parents' marriage record should be providing enough bites of the cherry to identify at least a general area of origin.

So I listed all parishes in Kilkenny with both Holohan and Molloy households in Griffith's in 1849 and then checked the status of the Catholic records for these parishes (all on irishtimes.com/ancestor, of course). For the parish with the single largest number of households, Ballyragget, all of the parish registers between 1807 and 1855 were missing.

Does this prove my James Holohan was from Ballyragget? Not at all. Without the records, it's simply impossible to know. All I have is a possible explanation of why it's impossible

So Irish researchers just have to cultivate what Keats called "Negative Capability", the capacity "of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".

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