Two Places at the Same Time

 

If Margaret Flannery Tully and her family migrated to that tiny town known as Paris in what is now Ontario, Canada, where did she come from? That question about the two places she once called home is not as hard to answer as it might seem, thanks to finding a handwritten letter confirming the baptism of their son, John Tully, kept over the decades in personal family papers. Not only was that document the key to discovering Margaret's maiden name, but it was how I learned the location the family called their home church back in Ireland.

That church location was in Ballina, part of what was once known geopolitically as the "North Riding" of County Tipperary. But as you probably have learned by now, the most important location for tracing an Irish ancestor is actually the land subdivision known as a townland. Finding that townland can be challenging. After all, County Tipperary has a mere 3,245 townlands—or 3,144 townlands, as one Irish website puts it, "that we know about."

Besides finding the handwritten note verifying Margaret's son John Tully's baptism, I've since been able to locate digitized copies of baptismal entries for the remainder of the Tully children born in Ireland. For instance, in finding that their oldest known son, Michael, was baptized on June 5, 1834, I could spot the priest's entry at the top of the register stating that the family came from Tountinna, the townland named for the highest point in the Arra Mountains.

I've been there myself, viewing the rugged terrain which once housed the Tully family before their departure for Canada. By all accounts, the Tullys arrived in Canada in time to be listed there in the "1851 census"—an anomaly in itself, as that census, due to other difficulties, was actually not enumerated until January 12, 1852. Still, the very document which led me to find the Tully residence in Tountinna, Griffith's Valuation, was said to not have been completed until June 29, 1853.

Yet, looking closely at the Valuation entries in Tountinna—transcribed, unfortunately, as "Fountinna" in currently-available typewritten records—it is quite clear that, despite the family's entry in the Canadian census in the previous year, there was an entry for Denis Tully, Margaret's husband, back in that Irish townland. It is only in looking closely at the details from the Tully entry in Griffith's that we see the evaluator's note, "Added to [entry] No. 1. House struck out of valuation."

It is sometimes only in the relentless pursuit of the tiny details that we learn more about our ancestors. In Margaret's case, it appears we will only—if at all—be able to learn more about her roots if we continue to follow suit.

The Gift of DNA Cousins

 

With a little help from our friends on the technology side of the world, it's not that hard to figure out who our distant cousins might be. And it's the gift of effective tools for being able to discover DNA cousins that has enabled me to paint a picture of the far-reaching connections that can flow from one ancestor's family.

In researching my father-in-law's great-grandmother Margaret Flannery in the past month, I've been able to reach down the generations to document all the way to her fifth great-grandchildren. Many of them still reside in Canada, the place where Margaret and her husband, Denis Tully, had settled after leaving their native home in what used to be called the "North Riding" of County Tipperary, Ireland.

Researching those more current generations in Canada had been, in the past, a challenge. Perhaps it might have been the cultural influence of a more reserved, British composure that left obituaries with an air of understatement. Finding an obituary for an ancestor we're researching might, in general, be cause for the genealogy happy dance, but when that hard-won victory leaves us with news stating the deceased "left a wife and four children," it's, well, rather deflating. I found many instances of that reticence about divulging information, even well into the twentieth century.

Granted, some countries embed a far more generous zone of silence, for privacy purposes, in divulging, for instance, contents of some governmental records. While for my American ancestors, I need only wait a mere seventy two years before being able to view their names in U.S. Census records, countries like Canada set a ninety-two year wait, and Ireland and Great Britain espouse an even more conservative hundred year rule.

With limited access to the types of documents genealogists normally rely upon to build a family tree, the advent of DNA testing has indeed become a gift. The tools that have since been developed to help sort that avalanche of new data speed the research process even further. In Margaret Flannery's case, I still am working my way through the many DNA cousins said to be connected to her line. Having recently acquired the ProTools available at Ancestry.com has accelerated my ability to connect the dots between these DNA matches, thankfully, though I realize I still have a long way to go before I can check that finished task off my to-do list. 

Connecting DNA matches to my father-in-law's tree, while helpful—hey, I've found some willing collaborators among these DNA matches!—does not always guarantee that the results will automatically point us in the direction of the answer to my main question. I still want to know exactly where Margaret Flannery came from before she met her husband Denis Tully and settled with him high up in the mountain townland of Tountinna.

That, of course, was my main research goal for this past month. Or, to amend that statement, my erstwhile goal. Still, I have one more day to lay out the details of what I know, so far, about Margaret Flannery's roots back in Ireland. We'll talk about that tomorrow, and figure out then what to do next.

This Past Month: Plans versus Reality

 

On the first day of September, I launched into the exploration of an Irish immigrant woman in my father-in-law's family. Women in our family history are always hard to trace, and Margaret Flannery had had me stumped for the twenty years since an uncle had provided me with the handwritten document that even mentioned her maiden name. This month, I figured, was time to right that situation and paint a fuller picture of this bride of Denis Tully from Ballina in County Tipperary, Ireland.

I started off well enough, with an overview on the first day of my plans to "throw the net wide" to discover Margaret Flannery Tully's many descendants, courtesy of DNA test results, combined with my new subscription to Ancestry.com's ProTools. Besides that work, I mentioned on the second day that I also intended to seek information on the cluster of Flannery families who seemed to appear in her neighborhood, once the Tully family had made the big move from Ireland to a Canadian town in Ontario called Paris. 

Then, I got sick. I think you know the rest of the story. Part of my intention was, as I had done the previous month, to hunker down with my computer and scroll through online copies of centuries-old baptismal records, seeking any sign of Flannery family mentions, whether babies, parents, or godparents. Somehow, this month, I just wasn't up to that level of concentration.

For the longest time, I didn't do any research—and, face it, in the past I had usually found a way to rig a breakfast-in-bed set up so I could get work done on my computer, even while resting. But not this time. 

Though I ended up blasting through one of my biweekly report sessions without so much as a peep about it on the blog, after two weeks of this malaise, I did wince and check the numbers. Surprisingly, even the few days I was able to go online, I was able to find some DNA cousin connections and note them in my in-laws' tree.

Of course, now it has been another two weeks, so let's take a look at the numbers. Thankfully, I eventually got to the place where mindlessly scrolling through Ancestry hints was at least doing something besides sleeping. Apparently, that progress was not too bad. For my in-laws' tree in those past two biweekly reports, I moved the head count from 41,485 at mid-month to 41,674 today. In the past four weeks, that meant adding 335 new names, all somehow connected to Margaret Flannery's descendants—and most of them still residents in Canada (though some of them managed to slip across the border from Sarnia to Port Huron in Michigan). 

Some of that progress is thanks to recent additions of Canadian newspapers to the collection at  Newspapers.com. Much of the guidance has come from the ProTools ability to see matches of DNA matches, and in particular, their relationship connections. As to the specifics of what I found, though, we'll have to save the details for a wrap up in the remaining two days of this month.

Well, It's Been a While . . .

 

Some months just take us by surprise. Or, put it another way, some months just grab us and slap us around. Knock the breath out of us. Fun stuff like that. 

It's been like that around here, but I hope it hasn't happened to you. Covid apparently snuck up on me. While I've had the original set of vaccines, I have also come down with the virus two times in the past—but never anything like earlier this month. Everything seemed to be different—and knocked me flat out.

Then came those gotta-catch-up sequels: travel to a business conference to attend, work projects yet to complete. And incredible tiredness and that persistent cough.

This is starting to sound like one of those "the dog ate my homework" sob stories. For those who did reach out to check up on me, thank you for your concern! Hopefully now, we can pick up where we left off and get back on track with family history exploration. I'll play catch-up with September's research goal in the last few days of the month, and then we'll start fresh with a new—and hopefully germ-free—month ahead.

Revisiting the Flannerys

 

I first discovered Margaret Flannery thanks to the thoughtfulness of a packrat relative. Uncle Ed, my father-in-law's older brother, had become the "keeper of the stuff," as author Denise Levenick calls it. In other words, Ed was the one who inherited all the "stuff" that his mother had kept before him—and she, in turn, had gotten it from her parents.

After Ed's passing, now years ago, several family members were sitting around his kitchen table when his widow brought out a box filled with some of that "stuff." There was, it seemed, something in there for everyone. Old keepsakes and memorabilia went to some of Ed's now-adult children who appreciated the nostalgia of times past. My husband was gifted with the World War II letters home from his own father, then serving in the Navy, to the family back in Chicago. And I, hoping for something to help with family history research, received a priceless gift: a handwritten letter from County Tipperary, Ireland, confirming the baptism of John Tully, my father-in-law's maternal grandfather.

As far as I was concerned, it was John Tully's mother who made the star appearance in that verification of his baptism. The letter identified her, complete with her maiden name: Margaret Flannery. Since then, I've explored what I could find of her family, both in Ballina, the place where the baptism was recorded, and even across the ocean in Paris, the small town in Ontario, Canada, where Margaret and her husband, Denis Tully, settled their family.

While receiving that document was an unexpected and irreplaceable gift, I have been able to trace Margaret after her arrival in Ontario—but not for long. Her earliest years in Canada unfortunately predate the available records from the local Catholic Church, as far as I and other descendants I've partnered with can tell. And I have yet to find any record of her death. Though it may not be obvious from her absence in the 1861 census that she had passed before that point, it is a given that at some point during that era, she certainly did so.

For the most part, thanks to collaboration with distant cousins in possession of labeled family photographs, I've been able to trace almost all of Margaret's children. DNA matches have guided me to build out the Flannery family tree even further. But the real key, I believe, will be to trace those collateral Flannery lines, especially considering the appearance of other Flannery families in close proximity to Margaret and Denis after they settled in Paris.

True, those could be coincidental appearances, but in a just-established town of barely one thousand people, I tend to favor such connections as a good sign. Take, for example, the appearance on the same page of the 1851 census on West River Street in Paris of both Denis and "Mrs." Tully and another family by the name of Flannery. Relatives? I've taken some time in the past to begin exploring that possibility, and we need to revisit that question once again this week.

Throwing the Net Wide

 

While last month may have been my moment to celebrate the small victories in ancestral research, this month I'm hoping to throw the net wide and pull in information on several family members. For September, we'll move on to another of my father-in-law's Irish great-grandmothers, this time looking at the Flannery family from County Tipperary.

Now that I'm equipped with Ancestry.com's ProTools—and especially the "Networks" beta version—I can easily put together a cluster of possibly related people. In this case, I'll be keeping close tabs on people with that same surname, both in the northern parts of County Tipperary, where my father-in-law's great-grandmother once lived, and onward into the 1850s and beyond, when she and her family began appearing in records in Canada.

Looking at clusters of connected people can be particularly helpful when we find no other pathway to move forward in our research. Particularly when working with families of Irish heritage, there are other clues which may help piece together a proposed family constellation, such as names of godparents for pre-famine baptisms in Ireland. Migrations en masse may also provide clues as to why names of neighbors back in County Tipperary soon afterwards showed up in census records in one particular town, far across the Atlantic Ocean. 

This month, we'll first review what we've already discovered about this great-grandmother Margaret Flannery, wife of Denis Tully. From there, we'll explore the other Flannery households which also appeared in records for Margaret's new home in Canada, as well as do a thorough search through church baptismal records back home in County Tipperary. As we widen the family network, we'll also keep an eye on any DNA matches related to this Flannery line to see what leads they may provide.

Granted, this month may be a repeat of last month's exhaustive searches through Catholic Church documents, but we'll do so, pen in hand. Any clue to help build this cluster of Flannery connections may lead us to the goal we're seeking: to connect Margaret Flannery with her siblings and parents, whoever they were.