Six is All we Get

 

If you are looking for clues to help break through brick walls, a surefire way to overcome research roadblocks is to look to DNA. In the case of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Anna Flanagan and her mysterious fleeing husband Stephen Malloy, however, six DNA clues is all we get. Worse, there are no guesses on the ThruLines tool as to who their parents might have been. Nobody knows, apparently—at least, nobody who has already tested their DNA.

Of those six Flanagan and Malloy DNA matches we get, however, none is a distant relative. All matches descend from Anna's only daughter Catherine, who eventually became the wife of Chicago cop John Tully. With Catherine's six children, though, the possibilities are still limited. Only three married and had children: William, Mary Monica, and Agnes, my father-in-law's mother.

From those three children came the descendants who eventually became my husband's DNA matches. But even that became a limited resource. Looking at the possibilities, I began to wonder whether using a different form of DNA testing—mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA for short—might help uncover clues about Anna Flanagan Malloy's Irish past.

Here were the possibilities. From William came his only child, one daughter whose frail constitution didn't prohibit her from having children of her own, but each of those granddaughters of William chose to become nuns, perhaps inspired by the sobering loss of their mother. Agnes, the baby of Catherine Malloy Tully's family, raised six healthy children—five sons and one intrepid daughter whose only child was a son; again, no resource for possible mtDNA testing. But Mary Monica was a different story.

Mary Monica had one of those storybook romances from that bygone era. The family's doctor, who lived down the street and was far more a part of the local community than what we experience in current times, mentioned that his brother in Ohio had unexpectedly lost his wife and mother of his two young children, a toddler daughter and infant son. Would Mary Monica consider...?

The answer was yes, and Mary Monica set out from her home in bustling Chicago to a lifetime in a far different setting, that of rural Perry County, Ohio. From that union with widower Dennis McGonagle came nine children, all with different stories to share of the lives which unfolded after that move.

Four of those six DNA matches come from that same storybook romance. Two of those four are actively researching their roots and have been in touch with me to compare notes as we struggle with that brick wall impasse of Anna Flanagan and her husband Stephen Malloy. And though he may not realize it, another DNA match is the grandson of the Tully descendant who had, in a past generation, become the designated family recipient of the original letter from Stephen to Anna on the eve of his unexplained flight from Ireland to the New World, just before his disappearance. (A poor photocopy of that original letter is all that's left to witness that original goodbye between husband and wife.)

Meanwhile, what can a researcher do? I keep watching the autosomal DNA results at each of the companies where we have tests—and hope a matrilineal descendant of Anna might be willing to take a mitochondrial DNA test.

And I keep adding to the family tree in hopes of finding more distant cousins, especially those whose roots may reach back a generation before Stephen and Anna. After all, in the past two weeks, I've documented 395 more family connections on my in-laws' tree, which now has 40,615 individuals. And though the DNA matches come dribbling in at about two or three for each biweekly period, perhaps someday, one match will make that connection we've been waiting for.