Who's Left Behind?

 

After bemoaning my possible fate of conceding loss to another brick wall ancestor, I got to wondering: who was left behind? After all, the Flannery folk who made it to Canada must have left behind some of their relatives in their homeland in County Tipperary, Ireland. And there was one document which I could consult to at least console myself that the Flannery trail hadn't yet gone cold: Griffith's Valuation.

Thanks to signs of approximate birth years for the youngest members of the Flannery families in the 1851 Canadian census, I can estimate dates of each family's arrival in their New World. For my Denis Tully family, his wife Margaret Flannery must have given birth to baby William by 1849. Likewise for the Edmund Flannery household, where baby John made his Canadian debut about 1847. And John Tully's wife, likely Kitty Flannery, gave birth to Margaret in Canada by 1849.

Granted, that puts all three families as leaving Ireland before those dates, and long before the completion of Griffith's Valuation back in the "North Riding" region of County Tipperary, the emigrants' original home. But even though Griffith's was said to have been completed in that county at the end of June of 1853, the resultant catalog of tenants there might give us an idea of the names of Flannerys left behind.

Ballina, the Catholic parish where many of our family's Flannery and Tully relatives were baptized—also the name of the townland where the church was located—was in the civil parish of Templeachally. Having a map to determine the relative placement of these townlands and civil parishes in County Tipperary certainly helps when taking a look at the list of heads of households in Griffith's. 

So who was left in Templeachally after our Flannery relatives left for Canada? Doing a search in the North Riding portion of County Tipperary for Flannerys in Griffith's Valuation, I found names like Michael, John, and William, as well as Anne. Of course, that was a search based on the spelling as Flannery, but as I've already seen from baptismal records, that surname could morph into many different spelling iterations, so repeating that search may yield more names to consider. And based on residences given in some baptismal and marriage records, searching in those nearby civil parishes may also point out other possible relatives remaining behind (and who survived the famine).

While that listing doesn't point me in a precise direction, it does at least give me a universe of possible first names to consider as I work my way through the maze of Flannery connections both in County Tipperary and across the ocean in Ontario, Canada.