Brick Walls, Canadians, and D N A

 

There comes a time in every family historian's life, I suppose, when one needs to concede arrival at a brick wall. In the case of my father-in-law's Flannery roots, that point may well be looming. On the one end, I'm stuck wandering in circles after the 1851 census, back in Ontario, Canada, seeking whatever became of his great-grandmother Margaret Flannery, while back at their pre-1850 origin in County Tipperary, Ireland, all signs of life for either her Flannery family or that of her husband, Denis Tully, disappear in the early 1830s.

It is, however, still hard to give up. That is what prompted this weekend's turn to DNA results. I experimented at first with searching for other matches whose family tree includes the surname Flannery. Several results popped up—even one whose own surname is actually Flannery. There is, however, one problem with building out our Flannery tree to the present time to connect with such matches: for those who live in Canada, I have few resources to help research living Canadians.

Privacy is highly valued, and rightly so, but I can think of so many resources I have in my own country to find living descendants of my family's ancestors. Many of them are accessible on genealogy services like Ancestry or MyHeritage, while Internet search engines can handily go beyond that to fill in the blanks. But for Canada? No matter how close Canada may seem to me, that is a different research world entirely.

Sometimes, as the saying goes, you can't get there from here. Not easily, at least. Though those Flannery descendants may have migrated to the western portions of Canada as our family has done in the United States, that border between neighboring countries seems impermeable.

There are ways to get around that impasse, as I've discovered while researching an Irish puzzle a while back. Even searching using Google.ie rather than the usual Google suffix here in America brought up a different set of search results for my Irish question. It will likely be the same for my Canadian puzzle this month. It's just a matter of digging deeper, checking resources, and experimenting with different approaches. 

And then, there's always that old fashioned approach, too. You know, just sending a message directly to that DNA cousin. Even in our high-tech world, the personal touch can still bring us a long way.