Rebuilding the Tree

 

Can you build another person's family tree?

No, I didn't ask whether you could copy someone else's family tree; I said actually do the work yourself and build a tree from another family's starting point. For some of our DNA matches unlinked from any family tree data, sometimes that is our only choice: roll up our sleeves and build the tree ourselves.

Not that I'm in that exact situation. The tree I'm building now will hopefully become part of my own father-in-law's tree, but for now, I'm not quite sure, so this is an experiment. My goal is to find a connection for my father-in-law's great-grandmother Margaret Flannery, wife of Irish immigrant Denis Tully from Ballina in County Tipperary, Ireland.

As it so happens, finding Denis Tully's household in the 1851 Canadian census revealed some neighbors of interest: the family of a man named Edmund Flannery. As if that weren't enough of an impetus, further down the same census page I discovered another immigrant Tully man whose wife happened to be a Flannery. Family members? Perhaps we'll see in this week's brief tour of what can be found, looking both backwards and forwards on that Flannery family tree.

My first step has been to add, then detach, Edmund Flannery from Margaret Flannery's part of my father-in-law's tree. That way, he is still in my database, but not in a position which might mislead an unsuspecting researcher to copy that detail—which, for now, could just as easily be a mistake as a presumed sibling.

From there, I'm beginning to add Edmund's children to that same database, under their disconnected father's record. So far, I've only been able to add Edmund's oldest son, Patrick. Included in Patrick's line was his wife, Margaret Gorman, Canadian-born daughter of Irish immigrants whose place in that same Canadian census was only one page prior to Edmund's own household.

Patrick and Margaret's family included several daughters and one lone son, at least according to the next document where I found Patrick's growing family listed: the 1891 Canadian census. From eldest to youngest in stair-step fashion, they were Mary, Margaret, Ellen, Agnes, James, and Kate.

As I've been busy adding documentation as confirmation of the connection—and in hopes of building the tree out further, in case it garners some additional Flannery DNA connections—the facts I'm uncovering jog my memory, and I realize I've run into Patrick before. Long before, it turns out, I found him on another failed research expedition to uncover our Margaret Flannery's roots. Patrick Flannery was the unfortunate sixty three year old man found drowned in a mill race in 1895.

What's a mill race, I had wondered at the time. Thanks to some help from a reader, and an incredible stroke of good fortune in that the only year the Essex Free Press had been placed online then was for that same year—1895—I at least learned of Patrick Flannery's sad demise. Since then, of course, much more material has come online, and I have found the death record for our Patrick, informing us that his death was—thankfully—an accidental drowning and not due to foul play. And, oh, that he was born in County Tipperary, and that the reporting party, at least, was from Paris in the County of Brant, our Patrick's Canadian home. But not much more than that.

From that eldest Flannery son Patrick from the 1851 census, I'll continue the same research project for his younger brothers. Hopefully, today's much-improved access to more online records will yield me better results than the last time I attempted this same project. In the meantime, we also need to take a look backwards to see whether we can find any documentation now on those Irish-born sons of Edmund Flannery back in County Tipperary.