Our Man Flanagan

 

Chasing after clues about Edward Flanagan, the man named as godfather of Johanna Flanagan Lee's son George, has yielded very little. That he might have been Johanna's father is unlikely, given the impracticality of her father fulfilling the role of godfather for her child. But whether this Edward Flanagan could have been her brother, while a possibility, still leaves me with doubts.

Since we had found two entries for men by that name in the Chicago city directory for 1878, a logical next step was to go back and check the 1880 census once again—this time, eyeing all the different possible spelling variations. With that approach, two possibilities presented themself: twenty two year old Ed on Laurel Street, and the twenty one year old Ed on Fifteenth Street.

Ed on Laurel Street was an Irish immigrant boarding with the Sullivan family, who apparently was joined on his trans-Atlantic adventure by George Flanigan, possibly Edward's younger brother. The other Ed was living in the home of his parents, John and Elizabeth Flanagan. While this Ed's parents were born in Ireland, Ed and his older siblings were born in New Jersey, painting a far different immigration story.

Granted, either of these two young men could have been the correct identity for a godparent of John and Johanna's son, even if they weren't relatives. The baptismal traditions from the Old Country may well have been disregarded so many years after immigration. This may leave us at a loss for how to reconstruct a picture of the cluster of family members who may have immigrated together—but not so severely hobbled us as to cause us to give up the search. There may be other ways to explore this mystery.

One possible way is to take a break from genealogical pursuits and step back to absorb the history of the place where those Flanagans now called home. Since church was such an important part of Irish life, learning something about the family's new church home may provide some pointers.

For one thing, I noticed that the three baptismal records that had been shared by another Ancestry.com subscriber all focused on births from the 1870s. However, when I located the online resource to view all the baptismal records from the Lees' church in Chicago—Holy Family Catholic Church—missing from the index were all the children born after the 1870s. This would include daughter Lillian in 1881, son Edward in 1883, another son David in 1884, and daughters Deborah in 1886 and Mary Elizabeth in 1888. Each of those documents would give us more opportunities to explore whether family members were named as each child's sponsors.

While we're stuck on this pursuit, let's take some time to set aside the certificate search and learn a bit about the church in Chicago where the Lee family attended and had their first three children baptized. Then we can figure out what, if anything, changed for the Lees, once those children of the 1880s were added to the family.