Taking a Look at Tipperary

Though it may have been a long, long way to Tipperary for those who left their Irish homeland for a better life in the New World, before you know it, it will be a short while until we arrive in that county of those Tully and Flannery ancestors.

Signs along the way point definitely to an origin in County Tipperary for my husband’s great-grandfather, John Tully. If you remember, a handwritten note from the parish at “Ballina and Boher” certified that John Tully was baptized there on February 24, 1842. That same note identified his parents as Denis Tully and Margaret Flannery—the same couple we’ve since identified in the 1852 Canada West census.

Of course, times—and borders—have changed greatly. What might have been, in the 1840s, a place within the realm of one parish, or one town—or even one county—may be entirely different now. Witness the very “county” of Tipperary: lately listed as not one, but two separate counties, the two will join again into one, effective this very year, with passage of the Local Government Reform Act.

Considering that, I feel better about the bewilderment I’ve experienced in searching through church lists, trying to replicate the name of the parish from which this baptismal verification was once issued. Though I couldn’t find that parish in a County Tipperary list provided by volunteers at Rootsweb, I did finally locate a mention of Ballina and Boher in a list of “Deaneries” within the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cashel and Emly. (The “Killaloe” mentioned in the baptismal note refers to Ballina’s “Twin Town” just across the Shannon River in neighboring County Clare.)

Once I was able to add the surname Flannery to my search terms, it garnered an additional resource that provided further confirmation that I’m on the right track. While this resource does not provide original documents but transcriptions, it serves to point me in the right direction, once I can get to Ireland and go through the records, myself.

This particular resource is the same one Intense Guy mentioned yesterday. It’s a website created and run by volunteers, best I can tell, and it doesn’t have the snazzy bells and whistles we’ve been spoiled by in commercial sites like Ancestry.com. But if you care to take a look at these links, just use your “find” button under the “edit” function, and it should help you navigate the long listing of marriages and baptisms culled from archival records for this site’s collection.

The website is that of the Flannery Clan. Entering on their homepage, you can read a brief explanation of the group, its website and the surname’s history. The files contain lists of documents that include mentions of the surname Flannery. The entire site is searchable. If you have any Irish genealogy connection to the surname Flannery, this is your site.

I was grateful to discover that the site included a page of Flannery entries found within the records of the Parish of Ballina. I first found this page when trying to locate any corroboration of John Tully’s baptismal record, since the note I found looked so…well…unofficial. If you use your “find” key and enter the term “Tully,” you will find, as I did, that this set of transcriptions yields exactly the same information as that of the handwritten letter: John Tully was baptized on 24 February, 1842.

Don’t stop with that one Tully entry, though. Take a look around and see the other Tully entries. Of course, there are undoubtedly more than are showing on this site. Keep in mind the goal of this website was to list entries related to the Flannery family, not the Tully line. It is only on account of Denis Tully’s wife’s maiden name that John and his siblings showed up here at all.

As for the Flannery line intertwining with our Tully family, that can be found, too. Search the list using the term “Edmund,” and you will find some original Irish records on this immigrant Flannery family we’ve been examining from the Ontario census records. Remember Cornelius, the one in that Flannery family with what I thought would be the most unusual name? You can find him in this list of baptismal records, dated 12 February, 1835.

While I can’t exactly call this resource a treasure trove of verification—it is, after all, only a transcript—it is nonetheless a jubilant discovery, for it leads me to a vital tool: the microfilm reference number of the parish registers, located at the National Library of Ireland. There, hopefully, it will still be available for me to peruse, once I arrive in Dublin in the fall.


Above left: cover to the sheet music, circa 1914, for the Jack Judge and Harry Williams song, made popular during the World War I era. Courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.