Capturing the Clusters

 

Trying to find some clue in Irish baptismal records regarding the extended family of Margaret Flannery, my father-in-law's great-grandmother, I gleaned all the information on Flannery children baptized in the Ballina Catholic parish in County Tipperary from its earliest records up until about 1850. My next step was to find the names of each child's godparents, then to capture those names in clusters of likely family members.

My reason for capturing the clusters comes from an article on baptism traditions from the website Ireland Reaching Out. The main direction in that article assured me that the godparents selected for any given child were either siblings or siblings-in-law of either parent of the child to be baptized.

Thus, after gathering all the Flannery baptisms in the Ballina parish and separating them out by townlands of residence, I then looked for family connections through the godparents. While the idea seems sound enough, there were a few roadblocks. First was that some priests did not enter the place of residence for the parents. But following that objection, the second problem was that it was challenging trying to read the handwriting of the priests tasked with entering the baptismal records. And of course, spelling variations were all across the board.

Some of the clusters of names became obvious, such as the sponsors for children of John Flannery and Norry Johnson, some of whom also had the same surname as the child's mother. Some of the surnames of godparents caught my eye immediately, such as the surnames Ryan—name of another Tully family in-law in a subsequent generation—and Keogh, surname shared by Edmund Flannery's wife, Margaret Keough. These names might be obvious because I already know what became of the family in subsequent generations—or perhaps they are providing an indication that those same surnames have recycled through the community for many generations of marriages preceding ours.

Now that I've harvested all the data to the best of my chicken-scratch-reading ability, I'll review all the names to see whether I can cluster them by location. There is, however, one further problem with hoping that will provide a streamlined answer: while it seems the god-parent selection process seems firmly set, I have no way to intuit when a family might have deviated from the norm. If a pattern does show up, all well and good. If it doesn't, then it will be back to DNA to see whether any further Flannery matches surface through that approach.