The Long and Short of It

 

I have always known, in researching our family history, that ours is an unusual case due to one peculiarity: we have long generations. By that, I mean that from one generation to the next, you will find a longer stretch of time than might be seen with the "average" family's shorter generations. Knowing that my own father was nearly fifty years of age by the time I was born has prepared me to not be thrown by such long spans of time when I research other lines.

Still, when I started work on my father-in-law's Flanagan line—and, in particular, the family of this Flanagan DNA match we've been eyeing this past week—I had my doubts that the match's tree had all the dates right.

Granted, looking at Anna Flanagan Malloy's own line of descent, my father-in-law's great-grandmother, we can see some long generations. If Anna was born in 1812—our guess based on second-hand verbal reports concerning her age, noted in documents—she would have been thirty six by the time her daughter Catherine was born. In turn, Catherine's daughter Agnes arrived forty years after Catherine was born. Agnes' son Frank, my father-in-law, appeared on the family scene when Agnes was thirty six. That was likewise Frank's age when my husband was born.

Still, the span of ages stretching from this DNA match's ancestor to the present generation pushes the envelope even farther. If James Flanagan was born in 1814, as the age at his passing in 1900 indicates, the 1864 arrival of his son James came when the father hit fifty years of age. Almost matching that age span was the next generation, when the younger James' son was born in 1910, forty six years later.

When I first observed the span of years between each generation in this DNA match's James Flanagan family, I felt as if there were one generation missing in that line of descent. But now that we've found the 1864 baptismal record for the second James, and done the math on the elder James' age, at least we now have documentation to back up the assertions.

All that is missing is documentation to give us an idea of how James Flanagan and Anna Flanagan Malloy would be related. If the two were siblings, then my husband and his DNA match would be third cousins once removed; if James and Anna were cousins, the relationship would be fourth cousin once removed. Frustratingly, each relationship could be borne out statistically, the closer at a twenty three percent probability, the lesser at a fifteen percent chance. Now what?