What we Find When We're Looking for Something Else

 

Rabbit trails—those tempting deviations from our intended research goal—can be dangerous, but I can't say I'd advocate ignoring them completely. Sometimes, it's what we find when we're looking for something else that turns out to be the answer to another question that has stumped us.

Take this Flannery puzzle that has kept me at bay for the entire past month of September. Granted, that month I had a rough go of it, thanks to unexpected illness and other troubles. Yet into this new month, I've still decided to persevere for at least a few more days to seek information on Margaret Flannery's roots in County Tipperary, Ireland.

Having made a listing of all the known children of Margaret and her husband, Denis Tully, my next step was to list each child's godparents, based on their baptismal record.

From that point, the tedium began: searching baptismal records from that same Catholic parish where I had found the children of Margaret and Denis—the church at Ballina—to look for the families of each of those named godparents. After all, if Margaret and Denis had selected these named godparents because they were siblings or in-laws, that would help me identify collateral relatives for both the Tully and Flannery lines. Besides, perhaps I would uncover a reciprocal baptismal relationship where Margaret or Denis were named as godparents for these siblings' own children.

Yes, I did mention tedium. I can't say I made much progress looking for the few Flannery names among the godparents. Basically, that included Kitty, William, and Bridget Flannery. Most of the rest of the godparents were from the Tully side of the family, so I continued my search on that branch of the family next.

My next search candidate, then, was Thomas Tully. Surely with that surname, the relationship would be clear: Thomas should have been a brother to Margaret's husband, Denis, right? But I couldn't really be sure because, for example, Thomas could have been selected as a godparent because he was an in-law to the new parents; he could have coincidentally acquired the same surname because he was, say, a cousin who just happened to marry a sister of one of the parents.

It was worth the detour to discover what could be found about this Thomas. In an 1834 baptismal record in the same parish for a son named Denis Tully, parents Thomas Tully and Margaret "Wilkisson" named as the child's godparents none other than John Tully and Margaret Flannery.

It just can't get any better than that. While we already know who Margaret Flannery was, we can now add John's name as another possible Tully sibling.

This, of course, brings up another possible theory, which in turn requires me to search for all the baptismal records for Thomas' children. If this Denis, born in 1834, was Thomas' eldest son, another Irish tradition would mean that Thomas' father's name would also be Denis. Thus, my Denis would, by necessity, have been the eldest son of his father—and, as far as I can tell, my Denis had also named his eldest son by that same name, in honor of his father. Perhaps looking further for this newly-discovered brother John Tully might reveal a firstborn son whose name resonates with this evolving pattern.

Unfortunately, the chance of finding baptismal records before the 1830s is near impossible for this area of County Tipperary, so discovering the exact dates and details for brothers Denis, Thomas, and John—and their parents—just wouldn't happen. But we can extrapolate from known traditions and piece together possible collateral lines, if nothing else.

Though it doesn't help me move forward yet with any Flannery discoveries, for now, I can at least add two collateral lines to my father-in-law's Tully ancestors, all thanks to the wanderings in pursuit of the answer to a different research question. You can bet I stopped to write that answer down so I wouldn't forget what I found.