When Every Piece Falls Into Place

 

One aspect of using DNA testing to flesh out a family tree is the added ability to glean missing details through what we discover about a collateral line's descendants. Some lines of descent can be easily filled in, pointing back to an ancestor, but other ancestors seem to yield nothing more than gaps in the information. That's the way it's been with my father-in-law's Flanagan ancestors from County Limerick, Ireland: a story full of gaps.

When every piece does fall into place, though, there you can find your answers. In the case of Anna Flanagan Malloy, the woman whose husband sent her an ambiguous letter which left her chasing him to America, there has been one Flanagan DNA match which seems to point back to Anna's own roots, yet I couldn't be too sure.

This DNA cousin's direct line pointed back to a Flanagan man living in the right place at about the right time to suggest he might be Anna's brother. Then, too, he could have been a cousin. With big gaps in the Catholic records for that particular religious parish, it was impossible to find any marriage or baptismal records to provide convincing proof of the two Flanagans' relationship.

Thankfully, over the years since I first found that key DNA match, others related to that family have opted to do their own DNA test. Coupled with Ancestry.com's ProTools, I could then build out that Flanagan tree in a floating branch within my father-in-law's tree, to more clearly see the relationships contained within that branch. With test results for each of these Flanagan candidates, I can now test my hypothesis to see whether that Flanagan ancestor would be our Anna's brother, or merely a cousin. Hopefully, the numbers on these five current DNA matches will be sufficient to soon answer that question.

With a Little Help From Some Friends

 

The trouble with using DNA tests to determine the missing people in our family tree flares up when we have a bit too many blanks among our ancestors' descendants. Right now, I'm still struggling with the missing parents and siblings of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Anna Flanagan. I do, however, have a very few DNA matches who may well fit into that branch of our family tree. The question is: just how do these living people fit into the puzzle left behind by unnamed ancestral members of the Flanagan collateral lines?

Thankfully, in this Irish Flanagan case from County Limerick, I can reach out for a little help from some genealogy friends. Yesterday, I mentioned reviewing some old notes from one Flanagan match. Following the details provided in those old emails, then combining them with observations gleaned from other Ancestry subscribers' Flanagan trees, I have been able to build out some additional lines for my own tree.

That, in turn, has allowed me to spot surnames of DNA matches who had eluded me in earlier attempts at match-making. Children of a Flanagan daughter now sporting a married surname unknown to me can be just as puzzling as any other Irish descendant—until a genealogy friend points out the connection. That is the value of reaching out and connecting with other researchers. In some cases, those genea-friends can even turn out to be distant cousins.

Now that I've been able to add some married names to my tree (still in a floating branch, as I'm ever the cautious one), it's time to take a fresh look at a handful of DNA matches who have had me stumped. Maybe this time, their results will fall handily into this Flanagan puzzle and help me calculate whether their ancestor was our Anna's sibling, or merely another cousin living in the same Irish townland.

Spent the Evening With an Old Friend

 

Last night, still puzzling over the connection between my father-in-law and ancestors back in County Limerick, I decided to consult with an old friend. Not that I actually spent the evening talking with this friend face to face, but this was the next best thing.

Over a span of more than ten years, I have occasionally exchanged emails with another Flanagan descendant who happens to also be a DNA match to my husband. We've shared information, records, photos, personal remembrances of family members now long gone, all in the hopes of ascertaining exactly how our two families actually connect.

As you can imagine, that's a pile of material to assemble. And assemble it, I have. Over the years, realizing what a treasure gets accumulated each time I reach out to a fellow researcher or DNA match, I've made it my purpose to save that correspondence. I set up a folder in my computer for genealogy findings, then added subheadings of family surnames of interest, organized in alphabetical order.

Every time I heard from this fellow Flanagan researcher, I filed away that note (sometimes with photos!) in my family directory under that surname. By this point, the collection has added up to a sizable amount. Since there's no way I could ever keep all those details fresh in my memory, I thought it would do me good to review the entire collection, which I did last night.

With so much to review, I decided to outline the entirety of it all in a timeline format, then add notes in a to-do list for follow-ups in the more recently added Irish record sets, such as the 1926 Irish census. While yes, these are collateral lines reaching far afield from my original purpose, including the entire body of results in a floating Flanagan branch in my father-in-law's tree might point to some glaring detail which might become a handy hint or warning sign.

If I can't find my way back from Chicago to Ireland in this Flanagan and Lee family line, perhaps working from County Limerick forward may yield some clues I can grasp and run with before this month, itself, runs out.

Déjà vu Chicago

 

It's been a long time since I last took a serious look at resources in Cook County, Illinois. Sure, my father-in-law and his entire family lived there for generations, but researching his roots has since led me on a tenuous path to Ireland. Chicago and its genealogical resources have been a distant memory for me.

Thanks to a fellow researcher following another Lee family, who has been sharing resources with me, I've since had that déjà vu experience. Things shared in our email correspondence are starting to jog my memory. 

One helpful item sent was a directory of Catholic churches in the Chicago area, complete with information on each parish's history. The book, originally written by Jack Bochar in 1990 for the Czech and Slovak American Genealogy Society of Illinois and updated with a second edition in 1998, is thankfully available online at the website of the Archdiocese of Chicago. This is definitely a link I will keep handy as I puzzle over these family branches of the Flanagan line.

I also learned the updated way to access burial information for Catholic relatives in the Chicago area: look once again to the Archdiocese, where their website allows a timed access to burial information through the tab labeled "Locate a Loved One."

While these tips helpfully shared by a genealogy friend do take me down a memory lane of research efforts long since past, that real déjà vu feeling struck in earnest, thanks to an unexpected but serendipitous email from Family Tree Magazine. Who could have predicted that, just this week, they would include such a timely article as "Chicago: A Windy City Genealogy Guide"?

Reading through that list of Chicago resources certainly brought back memories of searches long since forgotten. I'm certainly appreciative of the reminder. It's been a long time since I last wandered through the  archival holdings of my father-in-law's hometown.

The Invisible Irish

 

There's another problem I encountered during my fruitless search for the identity of Edward Flanagan in Chicago: the huge gaps in time between each sighting of a Flanagan relative in Chicago records. These Irish immigrants might have blended into the cityscape merely from the sheer numbers of their countrymen who also chose this new-to-them home, but when looking for specific individuals, they sometimes disappeared from records for decades at a time. I'm beginning to wonder whether they had discovered the knack of becoming invisible.

Take Anna Flanagan Malloy and her daughter Catherine. True, tracing a surname like Malloy was a challenge in its own right. I found Anna under multiple spelling variations from Malloy through Mulloy. But after her appearance in her brother William's household in 1860, I couldn't find her again in census records. Not until her obituary in 1885 did I find any mention of her name.

Likewise for her daughter Catherine who, following that one census appearance with her mother in 1860, disappeared from view until the 1900 census, long after she had married John Tully. Before that century mark, she was more likely to be found in the church records of her children's baptism, or in the obituaries of family members. Governmental records in the city seemed to turn a blind eye to some Irish immigrants. Perhaps in the sheer numbers of urban life, immigrants disappeared into the grayer fringes of the picture.

Gaps left from 1860 to 1900 represent a significant portion of adult life, not to mention the life story of multiple immigrants' journeys. I am trying to discover alternate ways to document these ancestors' existence, but perhaps this will call for more inventiveness and creativity than a genealogist is accustomed to mustering. Learning the ropes of life in 1800s Chicago has been my sideline this month, but I'm running out of alternate routes to explore.

Moment's Over

 

If I had thought, yesterday, that now would be an excellent opportunity for fleshing out the Flanagan family line by spending some "focused time" on the identity of Edward Flanagan, that moment was over in a flash. Here's the report on my negative results.

First, heading to Chicago city directories—of which there are several, thankfully, to consult online—I discovered that searching for a possible relative named Edward Flanagan was not as simple a procedure as one might expect. As for the surname, there were at least five different ways to spell it: Flanagan, Flanaghan, Flanigan, Flannagan, and Flannigan—not to mention the typezian alternative, Flangan. Add to that the problem, in some years, of alphabetization not being of utmost concern, leaving the researcher to visually scan the entire section of the alphabet from F-l-a-n through F-l-e.

Because my only clue about Edward's possible relationship to the family was through his unmarked grave found at William Flanagan's family plot at Mount Olivet, I did see his date of burial was June 24, 1904. However, finding his record in death indexes for the county or the state didn't produce any likely matches, and searching through Chicago obituaries for that same year led nowhere. That he was dead was obvious, but any record of when, or even where, he died has eluded me.

There are other beguiling signs that someone named Edward Flanagan was connected to the family. A man by that name was listed as godfather for one of Johanna Flanagan Lee's sons. Looking forward another generation, Johanna had a grandson who literally carried that same name as his own: Edward Flanagan Lee. But who that first Edward Flanagan was, I have yet to discover. His identity will not be the key to unlock the mystery of how the rest of the Flanagans tie together, or where they originated in Ireland.

Re-Evaluating the F.A.N. Club

 

Research may seem to lead us in dizzying circles, but I still feel there is a way around a brick wall ancestor's roadblock—even if it is an Irish Catholic living in Chicago. In my quest to find Anna Flanagan Malloy's roots in County Limerick, Ireland, so far I've found few tokens of her existence prior to her immigration to Chicago in the United States. Though she is related to my father-in-law close enough to have been his great-grandmother, it is as if she had been as difficult to find as an ancestor several more generations removed from him.

Facing that research roadblock once again, I instinctively turn to her F.A.N. Club. This, an acronym for Family, Associates, and Neighbors, can help trace a missing ancestor through the company they kept on their life's journey.

In Anna's case, that close-knit group included her daughter Catherine, her brother William, and her niece Johanna. Catherine eventually married an Irish immigrant who arrived in Chicago via Canada, named John Tully. Anna's brother William showed up in Chicago in time for the 1860 census, and remained there, a bachelor until his death in 1893, though I have little to inform me about the man, other than that he had an impressive monument built in his memory at Mount Olivet Cemetery. And Johanna married an Irish immigrant named John Lee, leaving several children behind to honor her memory.

One place where I could make some F.A.N. Club connections was through the burial records for both William and his niece Johanna. For whatever reason, Johanna's husband was out of the picture by the time of her death in 1909, as she was not buried in a plot including John Lee. Rather, I found her burial listed in the family plot owned by bachelor William Flanagan, burial plot S-313 in section 15 of Mount Olivet.

What was interesting to spot was the burial of another Flanagan in that same cemetery plot. Someone named Edward Flanagan had died in June of 1904, after William but before Johanna, who was included in the Flanagan family plot. I had known about this Edward for quite some time, but still cannot place him within the family. That name has appeared in various family records, such as a sponsor for one of Johanna's children. Perhaps it's time to set aside work on Anna, her brother William, or even her niece Johanna, and spend some focused time on identifying this particular Edward Flanagan. If he is part of the family's F.A.N. Club, we need to put him in his proper place—not to mention, perhaps he will be the one to point us back to Ireland, even though the others couldn't do so.