Not a Moment Too Soon

 

Just as I was puzzling over the lack of direction in searching for Flannery ancestors—as they say, not a moment too soon—a book arrived in the mail for me. And though I'll close out my official Twelve Most Wanted search for my father-in-law's Flannery ancestors with the close of this month, this book will form my continuing education plan for not only this family line, but for that of all our family's other Irish immigrants to Canada.

The book was recommended to me in a reader's comment here at A Family Tapestry in a previous year when I had tackled this same family history question. Being an excruciating procrastinator, I only ordered the book this past month, while reviewing the work I had done on the Flannerys in past years' blog posts. And since I tucked in a week's trip to a conference in Houston this month, the book's arrival on my doorstep meant waiting until I came back home—just in time to wrap up the month's research and move onward.

What arrived on my doorstep was a 424-page paperback second edition of Bruce S. Elliott's Irish Migrants in the Canadas. As professor emeritus of eighteenth and nineteenth century social history at Ottawa's Carleton University, Bruce Elliott used the book's platform to delve into a different approach on examining Irish immigrant arrivals specifically from County Tipperary in Ireland—the perfect focus for my Flannery research problem.

While the index does not appear to include any specific entries on the surnames I'm studying, that is not the point of the volume—although several immigrant families are mentioned specifically by name, which can be helpful for some family historians. The value of the work is to guide us through the bigger picture of the immigration patterns found through the author's extensive research both in North America and in Ireland. The underlying historical forces which coalesced to impel many in County Tipperary to migrate, particularly to Canada, will help form the basis of our understanding of why our own ancestors chose that particular route.

When the time comes for me to revisit my unfinished research on the Flannery family in the County of Brant in Ontario, having studied the chapters in this book will have provided me a broadened understanding of the impetus behind the Flannery family's decision to leave home and family for new possibilities in a New World.