There is something soothing about diving into a database of messy, human data and bringing some sense of order to it. King Crimson captures the feeling I experience in their classic 1981 track, “Frame by Frame”:
Frame by frame (Suddenly)
Death by drowning (From within)
In your own, in your own analysis
Step by step (Suddenly)
Doubt by numbers (From within)
In your own, in your own analysis
The first time I heard Adrian Belew and Tony Levin hit that harmony on the word “analysis,” I felt the way I feel when I am deep inside a spreadsheet, pulling information from query results and putting it into profiles, wiki pages, or online trees.
“Doubt by numbers”… yeah, that feels like the practice of critical thinking!
Frame by Frame
Which brings us to the Callan Name Study, and my ongoing effort to know what can be known about the Callan (or Callen, or Callin) folks who found their way from Ireland to America. If you recall one of my earlier posts about this, I had started collecting the households from the 1911 Census for Callan (and spelling variants) in County Louth. I quickly saw the value in combining the data from the 1901 Census, too, and over the last couple of weeks, I’ve devoted some time to refining what I’ve learned documenting links to Ancestry, FamilySearch, and WikiTree profiles in my Callin One Name Study spreadsheet.
As of this writing, I have recorded nearly 670 individuals, and I have at least one link to a public profile (most of them on Ancestry) where the records can be examined by anyone who is interested.
This can be some slow and painstaking work, but as I press on, I expect that some helpful patterns will emerge. New DNA connections to me through these Irish Callan families would be very helpful, of course, but they will be very distant. There is a small chance that I’ll figure out who Dr. Fred visited in 1907. I might even stumble across the family that came to Pennsylvania before the Revolutionary War – though I suspect that will be a long shot.
There are a lot of possible goals and several ways that putting this work in could benefit my research down the road. But, if I’m honest, I don’t really expect any answers to my immediate questions to come from this effort.
I just like doing it.
Suddenly, a Story
Nicholas Callan is one of the first profiles to come out of this effort. Born in 1838, he’s the father of 11 children and was a tenant farmer in Allardstown until his death, sometime before 1901. His widow was the former Mary Feehan (or Feeghan), and she maintained their farm in Allardstown through the 1901 and 1911 Census, with the help of several of her children. Two of their daughters, Elizabeth and Josephine, lived with Mary’s brother, Patrick Feehan, and their cousin (Patrick’s son, also named Patrick) lived with Mary Callan in 1901.
A lot of the records we have give us imprecise information, or facts that are hard to match up with other records. For instance, the eleven children were all baptized in the Roman Catholic church, and almost all of them can be found in baptismal records, which list both of their parent’s names and two sponsors. While the sponsors aren’t necessarily relatives, most of the sponsors I found had the surnames Feehan and Callan, and several of them were women with the surname Hughes.
These sorts of relationship clues, combined with the very specific information about the towns, townlands, parishes, and baronies within County Louth may not provide a solid proof of certain connections, but studying all of that information can help figure out where to look for more records.
It’s a lot like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, in that the contours of the pieces may take a while to start forming the big picture.
And so, we keep sorting the pieces.
Frame by Frame.
Doubt by Numbers.
In your own analysis.
Say hello, cousin!