Joanna Griffin

Life

References for this account: [1][2][3]

Where they lived

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The pins show approximate places. The line only joins them in time order; it does not prove the route travelled. 3 of the places listed above are recorded only as a county or country, so they are not pinned. Cemetery and burial places have red pins.

Historical context

These background articles explain the places, work, and events in this entry.

What we still don't know

• [THE WALL IS LOWER THAN THIS ARCHIVE THOUGHT] PLAN.md said her marriage of about 1858 was **'unfindable, permanently'** because civil registration of Catholic marriages begins in 1864. That reasoning was sound and its premise was wrong: the **Catholic parish registers are indexed and searchable**. Her son **Johannes was baptised at Dingle on 7 January 1859** and the register names her as his mother — five years before the civil wall, and the earliest record of this couple by that margin. **Her marriage itself has still not been found**, and a search of the registers for a Fitzgerald–Griffin marriage in 1850–1866 returns only unrelated Massachusetts couples. But it is now a gap in the indexing rather than a wall in the law, which is a different and much more hopeful kind of problem.
• [THE REGISTERS ARE SEARCHABLE AND STILL WILL NOT ANSWER THIS] With the Catholic parish registers now known to be indexed, both baptisms were looked for. The collection **does** cover Kerry — it produced the couple's son's Dingle baptism of January 1859. But **Fitzgerald and Griffin are the two commonest names in that corner of Kerry**, and the searches return a crowd: five plausible Maurice Fitzgeralds baptised 1828–1839, and half a dozen Joanna Griffins including one at **Dingle on 18 February 1839** to James Griffin and Joanna Kennedy. Not one can be told from the others without a discriminator this archive does not have. **This is the shape of the limit**: the unlock works where a surname pair is distinctive in a named parish, as Condon and Ryan were at Ballindangan, and fails where the names are the local wallpaper. What would cut through it is the **marriage**, which would name both fathers.
• [PRIVACY FLAG CORRECTED] This person was marked as possibly living, which suppressed everything about them. Nothing in their record refers to any year after 1872, so they cannot be alive: even somebody born in that year would be over a hundred and ten now. The flag was a default that had never been revisited, and it was hiding a nineteenth-century person as though they were a contemporary.
• [NEGATIVE CONTROLLED] Her marriage to Maurice Fitzgerald is not in the civil records and cannot be. Their eldest recorded child was born in 1859, so they married about 1858, and Irish civil registration of Catholic marriages did not begin until 1864. A search of Dingle marriages from 1855 to 1872 returns 69 Griffin marriages and not one Fitzgerald-Griffin pair in the right years. The record, if it survives, is in the Ventry Catholic parish register, which is free to read at the National Library of Ireland but is not indexed — it must be browsed page by page.
• [NEGATIVE CONTROLLED, 7 August 2026] FamilySearch's *Ireland, Catholic Parish Registers, 1740-1900* does index marriages — a Templemore marriage of 1836 was found in it on the same day — but it returns no Fitzgerald-Griffin marriage in Kerry between 1850 and 1862. The collection's coverage is patchy by diocese, and Kerry marriages of that period appear not to be in it. A control search of Kerry Fitzgerald marriages 1850-1862 returns results only from *Ireland, Civil Registration, 1845-1913*, which before 1864 registered non-Catholic marriages only. So the wall stands for two separate reasons, and the Ventry parish register remains the route.

References

1. [1] Ellen Fitzgerald birth, Ventry, 18 July 1870Back to citation 1
2. [2] Patrick Fitzgerrald christening, Dingle, 16 March 1867Back to citation 2
3. [3] Baptism of Johannes (John) Fitzgerald, Dingle, 7 January 1859Back to citation 3

See also

• Return to the Lynch branch
• See this family in the full tree
• Browse all original records