Headed to Ireland this Month — Digitally

 

As confident as I was last month, in battling brick wall ancestor Simon Rinehart, that the ever-expanding reach of technology would find me some answers, this month brings me a boatload of doubts about such successes. For one thing, we're bidding adieu to the well-worn research paths in Perry County, Ohio, and launching across an ocean to a country known for catastrophic loss of documentation. To compound the issues, our research target for July is a land also known for its preference in selecting the same, oft-repeated names for its many children.

For July, we're headed to Ireland—digitally, at least. With this month's research project, we shift from my mother-in-law's American ancestors to my father-in-law's Irish roots. With a family history full of stories and amply supplied with brick wall ancestors, his is a collection of emigrants' memories with not much more to go on.

Perhaps it is for this reason that, unlike others of my Twelve Most Wanted projects, this month I didn't select just one ancestor's name, but a family of ancestors: the Flanagans. I am hoping that the FAN Club approach—or cluster research—will help me sort through the family and associates of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Anna Flanagan Malloy. She is the young mother who, at home in County Limerick in 1849, received a letter from her husband who informed her of his abrupt departure for Boston.

I am thankful that Anna kept that letter for the rest of her life, passing it down to her daughter, who then passed it along to her descendants. If not for that letter, I think it would be near impossible to have traced this family. At least with the letter, I had a start. But then what? I have hardly found any guidance to trace the family back just one generation.

With this coming month, I will be tracing the possible Flanagan siblings who also emigrated from Ireland, especially one, possibly named Edward, who eventually moved to Chicago along with his sister Anna and another brother, William.

We'll start by reviewing what we found, the last time I visited this research problem, then see what can be located in documentation on each of these Irish immigrant Flanagans, both in Chicago and back in their Irish homeland.