Flanagan Fatigue

 

Like a door-to-door salesman, I've pounded the genealogical pavement for over three weeks now, hoping to just get my foot inside an open record collection and find my father-in-law's missing Flanagan forebears. With hardly any prospects at all in that dearth of historic Irish records, by now I'm suffering from Flanagan fatigue.

Granted, I've watched the news eagerly when spotting announcements about reconstructed Irish record sets. There's always the hope that a newly-discovered cache of duplicate records will emerge. As it is, I'm back to hunting for baptismal records on possible collateral lines and hoping a key relative will be mentioned as a godparent.

And then, there's DNA. Knowing that my husband has a few DNA matches related to that Flanagan line back in County Limerick, I thought I'd try out that recent beta offering at Ancestry ProTools, called Matches by Cluster.

Almost immediately, I noticed my downfall: the Clusters program at Ancestry is set for a minimum threshold of twenty centiMorgans. Guess who falls below that minimum...

However, there are quite a few features which I want to explore further on this tool. The enhanced shared matches tool alone has helped me piece together some unexplained DNA matches, and I need to keep working at that task to add in others who are close matches to already-identified DNA matches in both my husband's tree and my own.

As for the Clusters program itself, expanding the clusters readout to take in information on one specific cluster can be useful—although again limited to that minimum threshold of twenty centiMorgans. I may try to partner with some of my known Flanagan matches to see if their readout, above that threshold, will reveal anything about relationships that I can't see due to the slim genetic connection. After all, I did see some others among those Flanagan DNA connections who share a greater amount of genetic material with each other—just not with my husband.

Looking over at the DNA results at MyHeritage, I will update the clusters readout there and see whether there are any Flanagan DNA connections at that website. After all, there are several who have Flanagan in their family tree—but that doesn't necessarily mean their Flanagan connection is on their direct line. Re-doing the clusters there may point to a new connection.

Other than that, for this last week of the month, it will be back to drilling through what few records from the 1840s through 1860s can be found for my father-in-law's Flanagan ancestors. I'm still hopeful—though the research energy is flagging.