Dealing With Unfinished Business

 

Today may mark the beginning of a new year, but I need to bring some unfinished business forward into the new calendar's freshness. In my quest to outline the Twelve Most Wanted for research goals in 2022, I can't escape the fact that there are several goals not fully achieved from past years. Today's selection highlights one of those examples.

With this seventh choice for research plans in 2022, the selections move from my mother-in-law's family lines to those of my father-in-law. This means entering the realm of the Irish diaspora, with all the pertinent paperwork woes attached.

In my father-in-law's case, he had an additional complication: his maternal grandfather's journey to settle in the United States included a several-year stop in Canada. Apparently, the town his great-grandfather chose to call his new home was a location in Ontario for which the earlier records either are not digitized, or perhaps now non-existent. Missing are cemetery records for that time period, as well as any other signs of their existence after a widowed Denis Tully's household showed up in the 1861 census for Brant County.

After that point, several of Denis Tully's children moved further across the international border to either Detroit, Michigan, or Chicago, Illinois. But what happened to Denis—or even his wife Margaret—by that point is not clear. I had presumed them both dead before 1870—except for one twist.

Apparently, a DNA match showing up in my husband's results points to a connection with that same Tully line, but not in the States. That line remained still in Canada. While I'd like to think it belongs to one of the missing sisters I haven't been able to trace, that is not what the DNA match account's administrator thinks. That account shows a different pedigree stretching back to that generation than I had researched.

Obviously, it's time to compare notes, and possibly build an alternate tree. No matter what the outcome, though, the challenge will be to piece together records which may not have been available online, but which could possibly remain in repositories back home in Ontario. It will be my goal for this sixth Most Wanted ancestor to connect with local record-keepers to see whether more information can be found. After all, the DNA does have a valid point. It's the paper trail which needs some closer inspection.