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.