Signs They Were There

 

The further I reach into old Canadian—and then Irish—records, the more I see signs not only that our Flannerys and Tullys were there, but ways that they continued to connect. Take this July 1847 baptismal record for John Flannery, son of Edmund Flannery and Margaret "Quogh" in the Roman Catholic records of Ontario, Canada. For the godparents of this son born on June 24, the priest had listed John Gorman and Margaret Tully. Tully had been the married name of Edmund's suspected sister Margaret, and Gorman is a surname spotted as neighbors of our original Denis Tully family from the 1851 census.

Denis Tully, my father-in-law's great-grandfather, had married someone named Margaret Flannery, but being that they were both immigrants to Canada West from Ireland, I needed to trace their path back to their homeland. What signs could I find that the Flannery family was there in County Tipperary as I had supposed? That was my next step.

Fortunately, there were several signs, embedded in the scrawl of religious documented in the all-but-underground Catholic church of the time. Referring to the 1851 census where we had already found them in the village of Paris in Brant County, Ontario, I knew their children's names: Patrick, Cornelius, and Michael. (Youngest son John, as we've already seen, had been born after the family arrived in Canada.)

Yet looking to baptismal records back in County Tipperary, in the area surrounding the town of Ballina, I couldn't find a record for any of these children of Edmund and Margaret. What I did find was a record naming those parents for two other children, children who apparently died in the late 1840s—and possibly became the impetus for the family's decision to migrate to Canada. Those two were Ellen, baptized in April 1843, and Edmund, baptized in 1845.

Those two baptismal records garnered a few interesting details. For Ellen, the record represented the parents as "Ned"—a possible nickname for Edmund—and gave Margaret's maiden name as Keogh, a more likely spelling for her name than the Quogh rendition in her son John's Canadian baptismal record. For Ellen's younger brother Edmund in April 1845, his parents were seemingly listed in a rush: "Edmd" for his father, with Margaret's name likely abbreviated as "Marg.," read possibly in error as Mary.

While looking at these baptismal records, I also gleaned the names of each child's sponsors, just in case those names turned out to be significant to us in our current chase for DNA cousins. For Ellen, the godparents were John Keogh, likely Margaret's brother, and Winny, a woman whose maiden name keeps appearing in family records but seems difficult to render properly: Finn? Linnel? For Edmund, the godparents were Laurence and Mary Mullins.

Sometimes, it seems that to find the key to connect the extended family constellation, we need to reach ever farther in records. I find myself in that place, working with this Flannery line, so I did a search on a collection of Irish baptismal records, limiting the results to County Tipperary and Ballina. I'll glean all the pertinent names, including sponsors, and see if I can find any patterns among the Flannery names. After all, traditional Irish naming patterns may help me make some presumed connections to compare with the distant Flannery cousins I'm working with online.

In the meantime, in perusing those County Tipperary records for Flannerys, I couldn't help but notice one marriage record which also linked to our Tully line: someone named John Tully—but not ours—marrying someone named Kitty Flannery. These two likely also followed my father-in-law's great-grandparents from Ballina to Canada, if they are the same as the John Tully family in the 1851 Canadian census. Though I haven't yet been able to figure out just how this John Tully connects to our Denis Tully—hint: he is not Denis' son by that same name, as that is our fully researched direct line—this time we'll take it from the Flannery side and see if we can connect Kitty to her relatives in County Tipperary, as well.