Friends and Flannerys

 

Does that F.A.N. Club notion really hold? Could immigrant neighbors really have been more than just friends? Was it family or just coincidence that after a trip of more than three thousand miles, Denis Tully and his wife ended up with neighbors surnamed Flannery?

It all started with an ink blot and a curious hesitance to enter the actual name of married women in the 1851 census for the village of Paris in Brant County, Ontario. There was my father-in-law's great-grandfather Denis Tully, listed with his forty three year old wife, entered simply as "Mrs." Only a few lines below that in the same census record was an entry for another family with the surname Flannery. Predictably, the wife's name was also entered as "Mrs.," but the husband's name was aggravatingly obscured by an inconvenient ink blot.

Edman, I guessed—but I could hardly be sure. What kind of name might that have been? Besides not wanting to be socially forward about women he didn't know, this enumerator apparently hadn't shined in spelling during his school years.

No matter. What I did want to know was whether Edmund—as I presumed the official had meant to write—might have been an in-law of Denis Tully. After all, Denis had married a Flannery, himself. Perhaps ink-blot Edman might have been his brother-in-law. If so, I couldn't resist the thought that Edman might lead me back to the place in County Tipperary, Ireland, where both the Tullys and the Flannerys were said to have originated.

That is still my question today, though I've since found plenty of indicators that there were other Flannerys in and near the Catholic parish of Ballina. Reason I'm revisiting this question: another DNA connection has contacted me about a possible Flannery link in Canada. We're forming a Flannery collaboration. While we are comparing notes, it might be helpful to outline what I know about this Flannery family in Brant County before stepping backwards in time to their origins in Ireland.

That 1851 census showed a household with four children, having a similar pattern to our Tullys: all born in Ireland, with the exception of the baby of the family, born after the family's arrival in Canada. In this case, the baby was John Flannery, and at the point of that enumeration year, his upcoming birthday would have made him four years of age—in other words, sometime during the year of 1852.

Along with John—and after a significant gap in ages—were his older brothers Michael (aged 15), Cornelius (aged 17), and Patrick (aged 19). I've tried tracing these sons forward in time, as well as looking for their Flannery father back in County Tipperary. Now that I've found a possible Flannery cousin to compare notes with, thanks to a referral by another DNA match, we'll spend the rest of the month seeing what can be found on the extended Flannery family.