Finding the Path

 

Baptismal records for Catholic ancestors who lived in Ireland pre-famine years can be hard to find—and once found, can be hard to read. Right now, I'm on a mission to capture all the entries for Flannery family members who might have been related to Margaret Flannery, my father-in-law's great-grandmother. My hope is to find the path from her Catholic parish in County Tipperary to the townlands where her family lived.

All the Flannery records I'm searching are from the Catholic parish in Ballina, but I already know from our family's visit there in 2015 that the priest from the church in Ballina also served as a sort of circuit rider, leaving the actual town to circle through the townlands to baptize and administer other sacraments of the faith. The records he kept usually indicated the actual location of the parishioner's residence.

I began my search by setting up a table to organize all the Flannery baptismal records for the Catholic parish of Ballina. Then, I looked for each entry which included a child surnamed Flannery. I noted date of baptism, mother's maiden name (if given), name of each godparent, and residence. Children born to the same set of Flannery parents were listed together under their parents' heading.

Then, I looked to find the locations of each residence. Right now, I've located several different locations, showing me that there were a number of different townlands where Flannery kin had lived during the time frame of my search—from about 1833 through 1850.

Among the most often repeated locations in the townlands of County Tipperary was one called Ballycorrigan. Searching on townlands.ie showed me that Ballycorrigan is just east of Ballina, a reasonable walking distance to the church. John Flannery and his wife Norry Johnson lived there, as well as William Flannery and his wife Kitty Keough, and Patrick Flannery and his wife Sally Ryan.

A second place with several Flannery families was named Curraghmore. Farther still from the church in Ballina, Curraghmore was actually in the next civil parish to the east, a place called Kilmastulla—another name I've found on the baptismal records for Flannerys.

The next step for me will be to look through those baptismal records for children of possible Flannery sisters of the men already found in the records, to see if I can spot any further patterns, using traditional clustering methods like the names of godparents. My hope is that some patterns will emerge to provide suggestions as to how to cluster each of these Flannery families with possible siblings. We've tried that approach before with Margaret Flannery's husband's Tully line, although that attempt turned out to be rather inconclusive. Hopefully, something more obvious will emerge for the Flannery line next week.