Fading Into the Future

 

There's been a volley of messages exchanged this week between myself and one DNA cousin connected to my father-in-law's Irish Flanagan roots. I'm certainly thankful for the willingness of total strangers to provide so much family information from personal experience and from the memories of their immediate family members. But I'm also awakening to the painful realization that these ephemeral memories are precariously perched on a point in a calendar which stands still for no one. Those memories are fading into the future with each approaching new day.

One Flanagan cousin has been sharing notes about the extended family on the Irish side of the equation, and telling me about the sources for these remembrances. One detail was passed along to me from the preserved memories of an eighty five year old woman; another source was a cousin moving into his nineties. These remembrances represent micro-histories of average, everyday people which, if not preserved, will someday be entirely lost. At some point, there will be no one left to ply with our endless questions about our ancestors' history.

On my side of the equation, I wasn't only asking the questions. I sent back photos and stories of what we had found on that Flanagan family from our trip to Ireland, now over ten years ago. Just to review the details for myself, thankfully I could refer back to posts made here at A Family Tapestry, as this blog has become somewhat of a research journal.

I sent this cousin the story—how grateful I am that someone in our family saw the need to preserve it over the years—of the 1849 letter sent to Anna Flanagan from her husband, Stephen Malloy, on the eve of his departure from Liverpool for Boston. I also shared our experience tracing the very address on that letter's envelope which led us to the place where, most likely, Anna stayed while awaiting news of her husband's arrival in America, and what we found when we got there to see the place for ourselves. 

Perhaps those photos will jog some memories, back in Ireland, for those who still live in that same area. I hope so, for in some cases, all we have left for some family research there is the memories of the oldest generation. And they are beginning to fade.

At the close of a month, I hate to lay aside the research project selected for the past thirty days. The "Twelve Most Wanted" project is helpful in keeping me on task in my research, as well as keeping the research moving through the entire spectrum of the family's ancestry. But thirty days—or even the bonus thirty one days for a month like July—can never truly be enough, especially as we move back through the generations, where the records become sparse and the brick walls impenetrable. I confess I may linger on this Flanagan research problem, even as we launch into a new inquiry in August.