It Might be up to Ed

 

When faced with brick wall ancestors—those end-of-the-line predecessors who can't seem to give up their family secrets—sometimes the only solution to the problem is to draw the research circle wider and wider. That might be just what we'll do this month, as we try to determine the Irish parents of Chicago resident Anna Flanagan Malloy through cluster research—A.K.A. the Flanagan "F.A.N. Club."

When I look at all the names connected to Anna, her brother William Flanagan, and her daughter Catherine Malloy, one name keeps popping up: a man named Edward Flanagan. Brother? Cousin? Neighbor? Or just plain ol' friendly guy? It's hard to tell without launching into a study of the cluster of names surrounding Anna and her household.

Setting up a Flanagan family network on Ancestry.com seemed a first step, but searching for Edward Flanagan in Chicago records hasn't yielded many results—so far. However, thanks to the helpfulness of another Ancestry subscriber who posted copies of baptismal records, two children of another Flanagan descendant—Johanna Flanagan Lee—showed an interesting connection.

First, for a child that I wasn't even aware of—Johanna's son James John Lee, born in July of 1874—the godparents were listed as John Ponsonby and Catherine Flanagan. Could that Catherine be yet another Flanagan relative?

For a son born in 1877, George Aloysius Lee, I spotted that recurring name: Edward Flanagan, listed as George's godfather. There he was, Edward Flanagan—but try as I might, I couldn't find him listed in any census entry at the start of the next decade. Who was this man?

One additional recollection—a detail I definitely will need to recover—was a listing of all the names buried in the family plot along with Johanna Flanagan Lee. Was that Edward Flanagan once again? I'll need to look it up in my files, as that entry certainly doesn't show among Find A Grave memorials.

While I might not know exactly who Edward Flanagan was, he certainly was rife with possibilities of key connections to our Flanagan family. Though so little is known about him at this point, it will certainly be worth our while to follow this rabbit trail. I suspect it might lead to a connection with our Flanagans, whoever they were.