Considering James Flanagan

 

Could the ancestor of a DNA match lead us to the answer we've been seeking about Anna Flanagan Malloy, my father-in-law's great-grandmother? All I know about her Irish origin so far is that her brother William claimed Catholic parish Ballyagran in County Limerick as his native home, and that she received a farewell letter near that spot when her husband sailed for America.

As it turns out, the DNA match I'm considering claims an ancestor by the name of James Flanagan. That ancestor shows up in two baptismal records from that same parish of Ballyagran. In each of the baptisms, James is named as the child's father (in Latin, as Jacobo), along with Elizabeth Hanrahan as the child's mother. 

The older of the two children, a son whom they named James, was baptized on November 7, 1864. Following that birth, their daughter Anna was baptized at the same church on July 14, 1867.

It was interesting to look at the actual handwritten record, specifically to view the names of the godparents. While I'm having trouble deciphering the handwritten entry for son James' sponsors, the names of Anna's godparents nearly jumped right out at me: Ellen Gorman and William Lee. While I can see that the Gorman (or O'Gorman) surname figures in this DNA match's family tree in later generations, what I was keen to notice was the mention of someone with the surname Lee.

Lee, as you may remember, was the married name of another Flanagan relative who eventually migrated from County Limerick to Chicago in the United States. Johanna Flanagan Lee was mentioned as niece of William Flanagan, whose sister Anna was my father-in-law's great-grandmother. While I still don't know who Johanna Flanagan's parents were, it is encouraging to even find mention of another Lee family member in the vicinity of our Flanagans' origin.

Up to the point of the Great Hunger—the cause of so many making their exit from their Irish homeland—tradition had it that godparents were selected based on their relationship to the parents of the child being baptized. Thus, a child's sponsors would be either the sibling or the sibling-in-law of either parent. After the famine years, the tradition wasn't as tightly adhered to, so one can't be sure that William Lee had to be an in-law of James Flanagan or Elizabeth Hanrahan. But I'll certainly keep that possibility in mind as we look through more records in pursuit of this possible Flanagan family connection.