Finding Flanagan Collaterals

 

One of the best ways to work around ancestral brick walls is to examine the family's collateral lines. Those descendants of aunts and uncles can sometimes lead us to connections we'd otherwise miss. In the case of my father-in-law's Flanagan line, that is exactly what I'm hoping will clear up the mystery about his great-grandmother Anna Flanagan Malloy's origin in Ireland.

I've been working on this Flanagan family connection for years—in fact, ever since I first began writing daily entries in A Family Tapestry. In one of my earliest Flanagan posts, I mentioned discovering a second obituary for Anna's bachelor brother William Flanagan, in which not only was Anna's daughter Catherine mentioned as William's niece, but a second niece was named: Johanna Lee.

At that point, I hadn't yet learned just how Johanna connected to the rest of the Flanagan family, but I was glad to have discovered that link. Since then, I've worked on Johanna's tree enough to document all her descendants plus their descendants, in some cases for three or more additional generations.

There has been an additional Flanagan connection to revisit: identifying Johanna Lee's father. He may well have been the additional Flanagan man buried in an unmarked grave within William Flanagan's family plot at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Chicago, the immigrants' adopted home. Or perhaps that man was Edward Flanagan, identified as godfather of one of Johanna Lee's sons, meaning a likely brother. Whether these two identities lead us to a clarified family constellation for Johanna, I can't yet be sure, but it is important to investigate this further.

In addition, there may have been a connection back in the Flanagan and Lee homeland in County Limerick, Ireland: a man by the name of James Flanagan. He, it turns out, may well have been the ancestor of a DNA match showing in my husband's test at Ancestry.com. On the other side of Johanna's family, Griffith's Valuation points to someone leasing property in a nearby townland known as William Lee, perhaps connecting us to Johanna's husband's family.

With all these leads, there will be much to follow up on in this coming week—or perhaps longer, depending on how accessible records may be for these Flanagans and their related lines.

These Stars Weren't so Lucky

 

No matter how stuck we might be with a research brick wall, there is always wiggle room for further exploration. Before we turn to the collateral Lee family, tomorrow, to shed any light on Anna Flanagan Malloy's origin in County Limerick, there is one other option: seeking whatever became of her husband, Stephen Malloy, after he left home abruptly to sail for Boston.

Because several records already found with that surname—whether for Anna, her daughter Catherine, or Stephen, himself—sported a number of spelling variations, I figured the asterisk would be my go-to tool for this task. Rather than searching for Malloy, then Mulloy, then Meloy, I'd simply do the whole package, once and for all, using the wild card symbol to look for M*l*y. (Spoiler: while the idea seemed sound in principle, it turned out these stars weren't so lucky.)

Apparently, as Irish surnames go, that one device opened up far too many possibilities for me to handle. Maloney, Mullarky, Mulcahey, and even McCully and Modley entered the fray. It may have seemed like a good idea when I started, but the sheer number of choices made the technique unwieldy for this case.

To complicate matters, I also found a will in Massachusetts for someone by that same name, Stephen Malloy, who married and had two children before he drew up his will in June of 1882. Even then, I'd say chances are slim that this Stephen Malloy and Anna's missing husband by that same name were one and the same, but it was an interesting discovery. Perhaps the search for whatever became of Anna's husband will be a question which never finds an answer. Of that, I'm not entirely sure yet, but one thing I do know: this search will not be one for which use of a wildcard will find a sure-fire solution.

Off the Shelf: One in Six Million

 

Heading to a conference in Minnesota last week, I thought I'd grab a book to read on the flight. This was a title I'd long awaited the chance to read: Amy Fish's One in Six Million. 

I thought the flight would give me plenty of time to complete the brief volume—after all, its length is only 210 pages, including notes, acknowledgments, and even a book club reader's guide. That was not so, due to unexpected turbulence, a reason which has also kept me from reading in cars and trains. (I'll spare you the details.)

Thus, putting the book's engrossing story on hold, I attended an educator's conference which included a tour of a local synagogue, perhaps as an ethnic-awareness exercise, but which served as a timely enrichment of my reading experience as well. 

You see, encountering a story like One in Six Million is not merely an exercise in reading one page after another. Though the pages do turn—and sometimes, you can't help but read just one more—the story unfolds much like a Middle Eastern or Jewish explanation might. You simply must understand the background. And the author is more than happy to provide that enrichment.

Simply put, the book recounts the predicament of a woman who didn't even know who she was. Wrapped in a woolen blanket and set to the side of the road as an eight month old infant, her only identifiers were a first name and date—presumably of her birth—written on a note pinned to her only protection from the elements. How she got there or why can only be presumed by the events surrounding the town near the street where she was found: a village in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942.

The baby, once abandoned, was eventually found and rescued, of course. Else her tale would have been a brief one. Instead, the story recounts how many people and networks came together over time to help one woman discover who she really was, and who her family had been. While the author pulls in many facets of the process and its international cast of volunteers, this requires understanding of several aspects, including the early use of technology to reunite Holocaust survivors, efforts to build a genealogical database now freely available to all, the introduction of DNA testing for family history, and the volunteers from around the world who each played a tiny part in reaching the conclusion, decades afterwards, of the infant's true identity. 

From my viewpoint—yes, I did complete the book on my return flight—this is a book not merely read, but absorbed. Perhaps it's my genealogical perspective—I've personally met some of the DNA players mentioned in the book—but I found One in Six Million to be a recounting which, after being completed, still remains on my mind. 

Turning Leeward

 

A surname like Lee can be misleading. While it is prevalent in the United States, where Anna Flanagan Malloy's niece Johanna Flanagan Lee settled in Chicago, it is not only a common surname across the English-speaking world, but also an oft-encountered surname in Asian countries. Despite being such a common surname, it may be the key to determining the origin of Anna Flanagan and her siblings, back in County Limerick, Ireland. It's time to turn toward the Lee family to see if we can gain any direction in our search for the Flanagan family back in County Limerick.

Anna's niece Johanna was born a Flanagan, but after she arrived in Chicago, she married a man by the name of John Lee. Understandably, it has been challenging to trace someone by a name like that, no matter where we might be searching for him, and I've found very little on the man in his adopted home, other than mention of his name in baptismal and birth records for his children.

However, I did discover that, back in the same townland in Ireland where Anna's husband once sent her that desperate and rushed goodbye letter, there was an assessment record for someone by that same surname, Lee. That record, for a man named William Lee leasing a property owned by John Mason, the same man for whom Anna's letter was sent in care of, might just be a coincidence, but I can't help but notice that, in yesterday's search through DNA matches, I ran across someone by that same name.

If learning more about the Lee family back in the County Limerick townland of Cappanihane could help me sort out family connections for Johanna, perhaps that could also explain why so many Lee matches seem to appear in my husband's DNA results. Perhaps this is a case of intertwining family lines, generation after generation.

At any rate, since I've been stuck on the Flanagan side of the equation, maybe pursuing the collateral line of Anna's relatives will unlock a way through this brick wall ancestor's family story. We'll give this detour a try again, come next week. 

It's the Little Things that Count

 

When using DNA to connect with matches who share second great-grandparents, those distant cousins share very little genetic material in common. But when the goal is to push beyond the brick wall ancestors just one more generation, it's the little things that count. As I mentioned yesterday, third cousins can share under two hundred centiMorgans—and the number can slide far lower than that. It's that little amount that is consuming my research time lately.

Anyone who might be related to Anna Flanagan through, say, an as yet unknown sibling, would share a very small amount of genetic material with her direct descendants, indeed. With that in mind, I conducted yet another hunt to see whether I could find a potential match among the many who share as low as ten, twenty, or thirty centiMorgans with my husband.

I used the approach of creating a custom cluster on Ancestry.com, naming one specific match as my key target. Keep in mind that, though this match has the Flanagan name in her tree, I don't yet know for sure that she is related to the same Flanagan line in County Limerick, though our email discussions over the past few years have led me to believe this could be a possibility.

I created the custom cluster to have, at its lowest amount, a centiMorgan count far smaller than the usual clusters offered at Ancestry. The result of my request provided forty one matches. Oddly enough, two of that group matched my husband on his maternal side, rather than the expected paternal side. I set those two results aside and did not consider them, though I have seen some matches in the past in which the wrong side of the family had been attributed as the nexus. I also know that, reaching back that many generations among American descendants can sometimes produce other lines in which someone from the paternal side coincidentally also ended up marrying someone from my husband's maternal side.

From that point, I went one by one through the remaining thirty nine matches produced by this custom cluster request. Where I could determine through viewing each candidate's "shared matches" option which branch of my father-in-law's Irish roots might claim each candidate, I eliminated those from other branches from my search.

In the end, I was left with...nothing. None of that grouping seemed to indicate roots either linked to Flanagans or descended from the Ballyagran area of County Limerick. There was, however, a surprise: a few matches who had the surname Lee in their roots. Lee, I had found out from prior years' experience, was the married name of a niece of Anna Flanagan who had also emigrated from Ireland to the Chicago area of the United States.

While none of these Lee matches were the same as the Lee family I had researched, they also were Irish immigrants who hailed from the Chicago area, the same area where Anna Flanagan had settled, prompting me to revisit that Lee connection I had found from so long ago. We'll take a look at that tomorrow, especially because there is one issue nagging at the back of my brain: there don't seem to be any DNA matches pointing to my husband's Flanagan-Lee side of the family.

What we Don't Have in Common

 

Perhaps in wrestling with a research problem, we struggle so much that we end up on the far side of reasonable conclusions. Perhaps, after comparing and contrasting DNA matches over and over today, I've reached that far end. But the thought this day left me with might have some validity, despite the mental exhaustion. I'm wondering whether it might be far more productive for me to partner with Flanagan cousins whose matches have nothing in common with my family, as far as DNA goes. What we don't have in common may provide the answer we seek.

I'm searching for DNA matches who share genetic material with my husband and a common heritage in County Limerick with his Flanagan ancestors. Other than close relatives descended from the very same second great-grandmother as my husband claims—Anna Flanagan—I've found very little to work with. If I search for DNA matches whose family tree includes Flanagan surnames, I end up with matches whose ancestors hailed from County Cork, or even County Mayo, not County Limerick.

Trying to find DNA matches with another descendant of a second great-grandparent would mean finding a third cousin, at the closest. At that point, it is quite possible that two such cousins would share absolutely no genetic material in common, despite both being descended from the same ancestral couple. In other words, the shared centiMorgans might amount to an absolute zero.

If what I am actually trying to accomplish is to push back even beyond that second great-grandmother, it would mean finding descendants of a third great-grandparent, thus looking for fourth cousins. At that level, it would be even less likely to find someone who shares the same Flanagan genetic signature as my husband.

In other words, the more distant the relationship, the less likely that two such cousins would share any genetic material at all. 

But what genetic Flanagan signature my husband might not share with his own DNA matches could very well be the exact segment that a Flanagan cousin might share with a different family member. In other words, rather than reading the ProTools results for cousins who share DNA with my husband's test and a match in common, I need to find the matches of our matches who share different Flanagan DNA segments with their own matches—not in common with my test, but in common with other Flanagan cousins.

While that might sound reasonable in theory, in practice, it would take cooperation between cousins who are willing to share their data. Perhaps a letter writing campaign might convince candidates to join up to solve this Flanagan mystery. On the other hand, at a third cousin level, the greatest amount of genetic material any one match set could share would be 234 centiMorgans—a small amount, indeed, but also an amount which shows us how much variability there is between what one third cousin could inherit versus another third cousin descended from the same second great-grandmother.

In other words, I'm looking for someone with DNA in common with my husband's Flanagan ancestor who has other Flanagan matches who do not share the Flanagan segments that match shares with my husband. Perhaps there's someone out there who inherited all the Flanagan genes that my husband did not. I hope that person took a DNA test and posted the results, along with a complete family tree. At least, I can dream.

Trying This, That, the Other

Some days, the research path leads in circles. Yesterday was one of those days. With plans to review Flanagan results at four of the DNA companies where my husband has tested, I ended up trying a little bit of this, a smattering of that, and some more of the other, and came up with...nothing. If I found Flanagan matches, they lived elsewhere. If I found County Limerick connections, they didn't merge with the Flanagan family. It was a zero sum day.

I tried every data manipulation combination I could think of, checking for matches in common with my husband and either of two sisters who had tested, plus matches shared with some of their children. Nothing led to the hoped-for connections.

However, spending hours being thorough must have put me in the mood to keep checking through other Flanagan files. I not only have made it a habit to check back through the fifteen years' history of this blog, but whenever I received a useful comment on a post, or an actual email, I saved it for future reference. In addition, as I found pertinent links for specific family lines, I'd save them in a set of electronic file folders delineated by surname. My Flanagan e-file has several gems saved over the years, some of which I had nearly forgotten about. It was good to review all those notes—some of which contained details I need to make sure to add to the right places in our family tree.

While the pursuit of DNA leads didn't, um, lead anywhere, it occurred to me to try a slightly different approach. While comparing matches linked to siblings can produce some insights—in the Flanagan case here, unfortunately, it didn't—it occurred to me that widening the circle might yield a more useful set of details. Over the years, I've kept in touch with distant cousins who also research their family lines. We've compared notes from time to time. Now might be just the right time to reach out and see whether those cousins have Flanagan matches where my husband's test just doesn't have the genetic details that would point to that side of his family. It's certainly worth the try.