When Irish Names get Tangled With Latin

 

It may be all well and good to learn the traditional Irish naming pattern and then determine who an ancestor's likely parents might have been. But when we go searching for that brick wall ancestor's possible siblings back in the homeland, things can get tangled quickly.

The problem lies between the Catholic tradition of memorializing saints through bestowing their names upon the family's newborns and the sticking point of recording those acts of adoration in a foreign language. 

In the case of Johanna Falvey's family back in County Kerry, that foreign language of record, at least for the Church, was Latin, while the Falveys—undoubtedly for centuries—probably conversed day to day in their native Irish tongue. Not that there weren't Irish saints, but that all records were entered by priests in Latin.

Tracing the baptismal records of Patrick and Anna Falvey's children gives us not one, but two apt illustrations. Their daughter, baptized in February of 1830, was listed in the parish record as Gobineta. When I trace the lines of Falvey DNA matches backwards in time, I can see that she must have married someone in County Kerry named Daniel Cullinane. However. if I follow the baptismal records for the Cullinanes' children, the mother's name appears alternately as variants of Gobineta or totally different names, such as Debora. Tracing one supposed DNA descendant, that name also appears as Abby. Were these three different wives of the same Daniel Cullinane?

Take this other Falvey example, Gobineta's younger brother Demetrius, baptized in January of 1837. When I try to trace his line down to the present, I find nothing. But my husband has a DNA match whose ancestor was named Jeremiah Falvey—another given name that sounds just about as Irish as Demetrius. What's going on here?

Searching for guides to how the Irish handled the sometimes awkward mismatch between what was on the record and what was used around the home when mom or dad called that child for dinner, I had to locate more than one resource. The FamilySearch wiki provided a useful chart of "Given Name Equivalents" to help me with Gobineta and Demetrius, but I had to use the "find" function to locate some details.

Gobnait, as it turns out, was the actual Irish name. Apparently, the priest recording the Falveys' daughter in the baptismal records tried to compromise, giving a Latin twist to the decidedly Irish saint's name Gobnait. From the FamilySearch wiki chart, I can see that Gobnait was used interchangeably with Abigail and Debora. Thus, in searching for Gobnait Falvey's name in subsequent records, I'll need to be prepared to look also for these alternate names.

As for Demetrius, that baptismal name was not given as an alternate for another Irish name in the wiki chart, but I did find information elsewhere. A listing of Irish given names at rootsireland.ie informed me that the traditional Irish name Darby is sometimes substituted by Demetrius—and also is considered an alternate for Dermot or Diarmuid. Those alternates, in turn, showed up in some unsourced lists on some sites on the (now very) old RootsWeb—such as here, and here, if you can stand reading despite the aggravating placement of ads—and could also be a substitute for the name Jeremiah. Or you can simply turn to a reliable source like John Grenham and glean his quick listing of some Latin to Irish equivalents to find the same information.

Thus, finding DNA matches whose pedigree leads back to someone named Jeremiah rather than Demetrius, or Debora or Abby instead of Gobnait, may not be such bad news, after all. I'd say it's time to start building out those branches and checking the documentation connecting each generations from Johanna's siblings to the present.

Examining Possibilities

 

Armed with two tenuous connections to her homeland in County Kerry, Ireland, we're off to examine the possibility that Johanna Falvey Kelly's father was named Patrick Falvey. We already know that Johanna's obituary, printed in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette the day after her May 1, 1903, death, stated that this widowed immigrant was a native of County Kerry. Although two separate obituaries offered conflicting information on the family in her homeland, we can at least say that she left several siblings behind when she and her husband decided to move their family to the U.S. city of Fort Wayne in Indiana.

Other than that—and a record from the Catholic parish of Kilcummin, affirming a marriage of Johanna Falvey of "Knocanscore" to John Kelly—I've yet to find documentation to point me correctly to that Irish homeland. This is where the guess work comes in. 

Using traditional Irish naming patterns as a guide, I surmised that Johanna's second-born son, Patrick, would represent the given name of her father. Looking for any corroboration, I did find an 1824 marriage record from the same Catholic parish for a man named Patrick Falvey, who married Anna Fleming.

Looking for documentation of any possible children of this couple, I did find a baptismal record for someone named John, baptized in June of 1827. Following that was another record, this time for a daughter named Gobnait, a traditionally Irish name, baptized in 1830. Following that was another baptism in 1835 for son Patrick, then another one two years later for Demetrius.

As far as any sign of Johanna, I found none. The time gaps between the elder Falveys' wedding in 1824 and the first baptism in 1827, then another gap between 1830 and 1835, signaled missing records or possibly stillborn births for the couple.

Setting aside the basic question of whether this couple—Patrick and Anna—were actually Johanna's parents, there were other concerns. The first involves a question of just how Catholic priests, required to keep ecclesiastical records in Latin, would handle a traditionally Irish name in their record keeping duties. This would not only impact search results for Johanna's possible sister, Gobnait, but also the brother recorded as Demetrius. Then, too, looking at the F.A.N. Club angle, Johanna had a neighbor after she moved to Fort Wayne, whose last name was the same as her maiden name—and ended up being her next door neighbor. Was there a family connection?

These are not merely idle questions. As it turns out, DNA matches linked to my husband's account trace back to those two possible siblings—if, that is, those questions can lead to substantiated answers. Hence, one reason why I am keen to create floating branches for this extended Falvey family. And the question of neighbors with the same surname who immigrated from the same homeland once again bids me to explore setting up another floating branch.

Floating Falveys

 

While I am absolutely certain that Johanna Falvey Kelly was my father-in-law's great-grandmother, I have no clue who her parents were or how she connected with the other Falvey family members in County Kerry, Ireland. I know this family line because I've done my due diligence to trace back through the generations on the short trip from my father-in-law to his father, Will Stevens, to his mother, Catherine Kelly, to her mother, Johanna Falvey. I've documented every ten years of the way from immigrant Johanna's landing place in Fort Wayne, Indiana, through to the current generation, including tracing every collateral line of all Johanna's surviving children and connecting that information with my husband's DNA matches at four different companies.

Tracing Johanna's line in the other direction, however, seems impossible. Though her obituary mentions her origin in County Kerry—and indeed, I've located a marriage record for her and John Kelly in the Catholic parish of Kilcummin—I've been unsuccessful in making progress back through time. There are, however, DNA matches signaling the possibility of Falvey siblings, or maybe cousins, for Johanna. Since it is possible to build out a tree for each of those lines, it means one thing if I hope to make any research progress: create floating branches in my father-in-law's tree and get busy confirming how those Falvey branches connect with Johanna.

Creating a floating branch for each of those DNA matches does mean I'll be building out a tree for each Falvey connection. Sure, that sounds like work. The process, however, is not as difficult—or messy—as it might seem. Granted, now on Ancestry.com, those who subscribe to ProTools have a way to do this through creating a "network" for the targeted surname in question. But even without the luxury of that subscription add-on, it is relatively easy to create a floating branch. Essentially, you add a person to your tree anywhere, then remove them from the relationship where you added that new person by "edit relationships" then remove the father, mother, or sibling from where you originally attached the suspected relative.

In other words, after adding that suspected Falvey relative, you snip him from any family connections and let him float free in your database. Then, you get to work building out that new branch until you arrive at a possible nexus where you can re-attach your mystery DNA connection.

I first learned this concept from Connie Knox on her YouTube channel, "Genealogy T.V." It's been an indispensable technique which I've used repeatedly. I've shared the technique with others in my local genealogical society and in classes I've taught. Although the technique's description may leave some people scratching their heads, when I walk them through the process, that learning light bulb fires up—learning by doing trumps all other teaching methods.

This coming week, I have several Falvey DNA matches to explore through this same "floating branch" process. They all do cluster together, though in closer examination, they clump into several distinct geographic regions, suggesting possibly descendants of Falvey siblings or cousins.

Beyond adding these Falvey floating branches, the next step will be to delve into the details—and documentation—as far back in time as I can follow each branch. Hopefully, each path will eventually converge in County Kerry in a way that will allow me to understand just how they all relate to Johanna. 

Those Falvey Forebears: What the DNA has to Say

 

There is another tale to be told about these forebears of my father-in-law's brick wall ancestor, Johanna Falvey. That is the telltale report held within these family members' DNA. With Johanna being my husband's second great-grandmother, any third cousins descended from her would still be within the range of discovery, if any of those third cousins would think to test. (Hint, hint: there are a few sales popping up lately, and if not now, surely when the holiday season arrives would be a golden opportunity.)

Even DNA matches who could point out a possible sibling for Johanna would be sterling. Granted, such descendants would then be fourth cousins, a much smaller match. But they might still be able to wave enough DNA in their representative sample to raise the Falvey banner for me to spot.

That, in fact, is what I'm on the lookout for right now. Just at Ancestry.com's DNA, my husband has eleven possible Falvey connections. Six of them descend directly from Johanna herself, and I know how each of them fits into my father-in-law's family tree. In addition to that, there are four more who descend from a possible sister who moved to New Zealand, exactly the detail we had found in Johanna's own obituary. And yet another DNA match descends from a different sister.

Using the ProTools "Shared Matches" device at Ancestry, I can then extend those eleven discoveries to see other matches connected to our Falvey cousins. So far, those who immigrated to the United States seem to center in either Massachusetts or Michigan, likely signifying a connection to the same Falvey ancestors.

To discover the connection may require me to do some tree building on floating branches, to allow me to sort out which Falvey ancestors each match points to. This, of course, will take some time—but that is what this month may be all about. We'll certainly be doing some experimenting with ways to open up the stories behind these Irish Falvey ancestors from County Kerry.

Patrick: an Assumption

 

When we have no solid information to go by in our quest to push past brick wall ancestors, we test assumptions. Based on Irish naming traditions of the 1800s, we can assume that Johanna Falvey Kelly's father would have his namesake represented by her second-born son. That child, born in Indiana shortly after the Kelly family's arrival there from Ireland, was named Patrick.

Thus with that one clue, we'll launch ourselves on an experimental journey next week to see what can be learned about one Patrick Falvey in County Kerry.

Fortunately, there were enough genealogical breadcrumbs sprinkled upon this Irish ancestral pathway to lead us to a few encouraging clues. In a marriage entry in the Catholic parish of Kilcummin, the March 2, 1859, record noted that Johanna was from the townland of Knockauncore—or, in the priest's hurried hand, "Knocanscore."

The witnesses for the ceremony were John Fitzgerald and John Fleming. Hold that thought while we jump back a generation to check on some earlier marriage records. Sure enough, there in the same Catholic parish on November 24, 1824, Patritius Falvey married Anna Fleming.

To be sure, they were not the only couple with that Falvey surname to be married during that time period. Following shortly after Patrick's November marriage entry were two other Falvey men: Hugo, marrying Maria Marmix "alias Cronin," and Daniel, marrying Maria Cotter. Both of these subsequent Falvey marriages occurred in February of the next year. We need to keep in mind that either of these alternate couples could have been Johanna's parents, if her later marriage in that same Catholic parish were any indicator of her roots.

And that is precisely the problem. While I can find baptismal records for some of Patrick Falvey's other children, there is nothing I can find for a daughter named Johanna during the time period later records suggested as her year of birth.

Because of that, I've taken to reading the parish records, line after line, to see whether indexing processes might have missed a misspelling or an illegible entry. In the meantime, there were a few other details I learned about the family of Patrick and Anna. We'll jump to those discoveries next week when we pick up the search for Johanna Falvey's roots.

If Traditions Held True

 

One encouraging detail about researching Irish ancestors was how they supposedly held to specific traditions in the naming of their children. Looking at the children of Johanna Falvey and her husband, John Kelly, could reveal much—if these Irish immigrants held to the traditions of their homeland even after their arrival in the United States.

Pulling up the 1870 U.S. census, the first enumeration in which the entire family appeared in the same American household, we see John and Johanna and four children living in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In order of their ages, those children were Timothy, Catherine, Mary, and Patrick. (Youngest son John did not make his appearance in this American document until 1880, at which point oldest son Timothy was no longer in the record, having tragically died in 1876.)

If, in the 1860s in County Kerry, Ireland, John Kelly and his wife Johanna had kept the old tradition of bestowing names on their newborn children, we could be certain that John Kelly's father was named Timothy, as that was the name he gave his oldest son. Likewise, with the arrival of his second son, we would learn that it was highly likely that Johanna's own father was named Patrick.

That, of course, is a big "if." If the parents, for whatever reason, thought it prudent to deviate from the ages-old tradition—and how would we know at this point?—that pattern would not be reliable. Or, if there were children missing from documentation, thus inserting another possible son into the family constellation, that could lead us to make a wrong assumption.

Barring such difficulties, taking this list from the 1870 census at face value would lead us to presume that Johanna Falvey Kelly's father's name should have been Patrick. With that proposal, we'll take some time this week to test out what such an assumption may reveal.

Revisiting Johanna

 

Every time I research Johanna Falvey, my father-in-law's great-grandmother from County Kerry, I think this time I'll finally discover who her parents were. Even a year ago, my last time to wrestle with Irish documentation, I thought I was close, but ended the month without any solid record. And yet, these Falvey DNA matches keep beckoning me to try just one more time. This month is that one more time.

What I do know about Johanna mostly comes from her three decades of residence in Fort Wayne, Indiana. With her husband and three—possibly four—Irish-born children, she made a straight course from Ireland for the midwestern United States from an undisclosed port. I have yet to find any passenger records, though two different obituaries indicated that she came from County Kerry in Ireland. One, in fact, mentions that she had "several sisters and brothers" still remaining in Ireland, while another asserted that not only were there several sisters in Ireland, but one who lived in New Zealand.

When she died in 1903, her death record gave her age as seventy seven, as did her obituary. Her headstone on the other hand, chiseled in the verdict as seventy four, giving the years as 1828 through 1902, proving that even details set in cement need a copy editor. Finding Johanna in Irish records will not be a matter of an exact science.

Unfortunately for this month's quest, marriage information may not be helpful. Johanna married a man named John Kelly, a quintessentially Irish name ripe for multiple name twins. Their marriage was back in Ireland. No documents that I have been able to find provide any details on the names of Johanna's parents. And if she ever was in touch with her multiple siblings back in Ireland—or even in New Zealand—I have no record of that, not even through family letters or remembrances left by her children or grandchildren.

The only clue I have of parents' names may come from an old Irish naming tradition, in which the second son of the family was customarily named after the mother's father. Tomorrow, we'll take a closer look at Johanna and John Kelly's children, both in Indiana and in Ireland.

Finding Falveys, the Next Generation

 

When I first discovered that my father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna had the maiden name Falvey, I thought I had hit the research jackpot. Surely, that was a unique name—unusual enough to grant me the keys to open that brick wall's hidden door. Then I pulled up a surname distribution map. That told me an entirely different story. In Johanna's native County Kerry, Falveys were everywhere.

Over the years—and even as recent as August of last year—I've chipped away at Johanna Falvey's story. Since after her marriage to John Kelly, she and her family were among immigrants to America long past the famine years, it was easy to trace her family's life in Fort Wayne, Indiana. But back home in Ireland? Not as much.

For this month's Twelve Most Wanted, I want to return to explore Johanna's roots. However, this time I'll try a more experimental approach. I believe Johanna's parents may have been Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming, but I need to test that theory, both with records in Ireland, and through those records embedded in our flesh and blood, our DNA.

Tomorrow, we'll start with a brief review of who Johanna was, and what records eluded me, the last time I had attempted researching her roots. From that point, we'll explore just why Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming might have been a reasonable choice to lead us back through time in the Falvey family history. And we'll meet some possible other siblings in that family constellation as we work our way through September.

This Blog is About a Struggle

 

Family history adventures often turn into unanswered questions:

• Why did they leave Ireland?
• Why did they move to Chicago?
• Why are they so invisible?

As much as I've tried to answer the questions I've had this month concerning Anna Flanagan from Ballyagran in County Limerick, her missing husband Stephen Malloy, and even her later years as a single mother in Chicago, it looks like I'm closing out another month without the documentation I've been struggling to find for decades. 

Don't look now, but tomorrow, I'll begin the process again with another mystery ancestor from my father-in-law's Irish heritage. This time with a guess about a possible second great-grandfather, I'll repeat the process in another Irish location in neighboring County Kerry.

Will I have better luck the next time I try this? Doubtful. This quest—and thus, this blog—is about a struggle, repeated as many times as my family has enigmatic ancestors, whether grandparents, great-grandparents, or even generations before that time. Most have stories which stretch beyond the reach of documentation, whether religious or governmental. 

This struggle, no matter how annoying, is what keeps drawing me back into the fray. With every new record set added online—hey, MyHeritage just made available Irish dog license registrations from the National Archives of Ireland, as did Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org, just to give an idea of how desperate some researchers can be about finding their Irish roots—my hopes get amped up at the start of another round of searches.

If all the answers fell easily into my lap at the first try, I guess this wouldn't be such an adventure. Perhaps it would become more of a round of predictable dances with ancestral partners which, after enough iterations, would become unbearably boring.

Thankfully, that is not the case. But when the going gets rough and I can't see any answer in sight, I need to remind myself that this has always been about a struggle. It's the challenge that keeps us going.

It's Only "Classic" 'til October 1

 

Here I was, getting ready for my biweekly count and looking forward to a new ancestor to pursue at the start of next month, when I decided to sneak a peek at that ancestor's ThruLines results on Ancestry.com.

Right now, Ancestry DNA is going through a revision process, which in my view means a whole lot more clicks just to get to the same information. In other words, there are some breathless beta versions which simply deserve a click back to the original program. 

I get it that some people may find revisions informative, helpful, or just the very spark to make things exciting again. On the other hand, I use Ancestry every day, and the DNA tools several times a week. I like to find things where I put them the last time I used them.

Trying to provide feedback to Ancestry—they provided a hyperlink, which once clicked, supposedly leads to a page where such can be offered—led me only to a blank page with a perky "Ask Leaf" dialogue bubble. I declined. I didn't want to ask him anything; I wanted to tell about something.

Thankfully, Ancestry provides a button for those who wish to revert to the way things had always been—in other words, back to the classic version. When I tried that last night, though, I saw—to my dismay, I might add—that the DNA classic view will only be available until October 1.

I guess that means I'll have to put on the brakes and slow down enough to take in the scenery in this new DNA drive. The classic option is only temporarily classic. Soon it will not only become antiquated, it will be non-existent.

As is often said in October: "Boo!" (Hoo!)

Well, on to other matters. The rest of the Ancestry universe still continues to serve my quest to expand my in-laws' family tree, though not as rapidly as before I began wrestling with my father-in-law's Irish ancestors. I only managed to find forty nine additional family members to add to his tree in the past two weeks, most of whom were collateral lines or floating branches expanded in my futile attempt to follow Anna Flanagan Malloy's F.A.N. Club. Right now, my in-laws' tree has edged up to 44,318 documented relatives.

Thanks to some unexpected DNA matches—both at Ancestry.com and elsewhere—I was able to add six more individuals to my own tree. Right now, that tree is parked at 41,969 people, waiting until I turn to my dad's Polish roots in October. I'd be ecstatic if I could find some Polish DNA matches, but that is a search better taken elsewhere than my international subscription at Ancestry, unfortunately. 

Right now, with my focus on my father-in-law's roots in Ireland, we've got plenty of time to delve into yet another near-impossible immigrant story, which we'll do at the start of September. Maybe by then, I'll make my peace with the ever-changing website bells and whistles at Ancestry.

At Summer's Close

 

The weather yesterday took a turn that, in decades past, might have heralded the shift from summer to fall. Not that the last weekend of August normally signals the instant arrival of autumn—not around here in northern California. Despite the soon approaching holiday of Labor Day, which once marked the end of summer for American school children everywhere, here in my corner of the world, we are accustomed to another two months of lovely weather before the autumn rains set in. This unexpected shower in our semi-arid seasonal desert certainly changed the mood for me.

Summer, for many involved in family history, represents a chance to travel to chase after those few clues our ancestors scattered in their wake. Visits to cemeteries, or trips back to the old homestead are perfect for summertime research. It makes sense to see some genealogical societies "go dark" for the summer months, as ours does; everyone is maximizing their chance to get out and reconnect with family or old friends from places far away—a nostalgic kind of genealogy.

Soon, though, we'll be back in full swing, learning more about genealogical research techniques, and sharing stories of our "conquests" with fellow society members as we edge into autumn. What are stories without listeners? Somehow, the anticipation of telling about our research victories in the coming month makes each discovery even sweeter when we gather together again.

Still, I always hate to bid summer goodbye. A time to explore, to try new approaches, to hope for something better—or at least different—that's what summer has always been for me. 

Why Chicago?

 

One question I've always had, while researching my father-in-law's ancestral roots, was why his Irish ancestors chose Chicago as their immigration destination. After all, ports of arrival for such European immigrants were usually known to be geographically logical places like New York—and, specifically for the Irish, Boston. One well-known online periodical, A Letter From Ireland, brings up that very point in listing the most likely destinations for Irish passengers to the United States, noting heavy settlement in America's urban northeast.

Single mother Anna Flanagan Malloy, on the other hand, arrived in Chicago. How did she come to such a decision? Granted, her brother also arrived there, possibly looking for work in a city with a growing need for laborers. That said, I have yet to determine just what it was, exactly, that William Flanagan did for a living.

I took my question—why Chicago?—to the Internet to see what could be found, in hopes I'd uncover some conclusive evidence to explain why these Irish seemed to bypass the more reasonable (and easily accessible) east coast options for a trip of nearly an additional thousand miles overland.

Very likely, chain migration played a key role for some Irish immigrants, but I've yet to find the initiating family member—or former neighbor from back in County Limerick—who made the decision to try Chicago over those much easier eastern targets. Compelling reasons drawing later Irish arrivals included the expanding infrastructure in Chicago: the canals and railroads that made industrial expansion possible were often built on the backs of Irish immigrants.

There must have been an aggregate of forces remaking Chicago into the fourth largest Irish city in America by the start of the Civil War. What, among all those causes, beguiled our Flanagans to make Chicago their choice still eludes me. Reviewing what I knew of the Flanagans' F.A.N. Club did little to expand my understanding. If anything, it made me realize how invisible the poorer of those Irish immigrants may have been in those early years in Chicago—or how vitriolic the rhetoric hurled between opposing sides in those early years in Chicago.

Even checking the development of the area known as Hyde Park, once an independent township before incorporation as part of the City of Chicago, did little to reveal any details about the extended Flanagan family, some of whom had settled in or very near that area. I still cannot find census entries after 1860 for some of these descendants until the turn of the subsequent century.

Perhaps it was the city itself, through its size and rate of growth, which kept those family members invisible. Granted, their entries in census enumerations, if found, might not have been sufficient to answer the questions I had about these relatives' whereabouts and background. But it serves to point out the frustration of researching family whose history still draws a blank, despite best efforts.

Reminder From a Scrap of Paper

 

Notes written to myself show up in the most unexpected places, and at times when I least would expect them to remain pertinent. One scrap of paper, retrieved from a cranny where I was searching for something else, provided a timely reminder—yet, given the passing of time, taunted me and caused me to ponder what's left in the discovery's wake.

I had first written out the note—ironically on some scrap paper printed with the statement, "The greatest casualty is being forgotten"—during a class I was taking at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. The instructor had shared a quote gleaned from a volume of British history, which he felt was also applicable to the use of computerized research tools we were then accessing to trace our family history. I thought it was pertinent to what was unfolding in my own life and research.

The quote made such an impact on me that I later wove it into a post here at A Family Tapestry. It was a simple, straightforward observation:

Because so much less time is spent searching...for relevant material, more time can be spent assessing the meaning of the content.

And finding that note here, after spending a solid month not finding the details I had sought on Anna Flanagan Malloy's origin in County Limerick, Ireland, I realize this quote needs an addendum: the time spent searching is relational to the amount of relevant material still in existence and accessible. For those records never preserved—or the ones now facing the possibility of no longer being valued—no amount of dedicated search time will uncover their existence. We can only find what is already there to be found. The search prowess of technology is only as meaningfully valuable as the material it can surface for those wanting to know. 

Add to the Research Wish List: Legible Handwriting

 

For one last, desperate attempt at rounding out the extended family picture for Anna Flanagan Malloy, my father-in-law's great-grandmother, I returned to church records of the 1800s at the Catholic parish of Ballyagran in County Limerick. Those, if you remember, were spotty records; if they had been a complete collection, I'd have known by now which sibling or in-law had stood at the 1848 baptism of Anna's daughter as godparents.

Preserved baptismal records would have been a nice touch, but there was something else to add to that wish list: legible handwriting. The priest keeping the records for Ballyagran seemed to be in constant fear that someone was about to snatch the very records from his hands before the ink dried.

When I located the Ballyagran records online, I first looked at entries for the Flanagan family. Then, since Anna's niece Johanna Flanagan had married someone named John Lee, I was curious to see whether I'd find any connection between the two surnames back in their homeland. Doing a search specifically on that surname Lee limited to Ballyagran, I did find five baptisms and one entry for a marriage.

Here is what I found, as best as could be read, considering the abysmal handwriting. The earliest record was a baptism for Catharine Lee on September 21, 1842. Her parents were likely Thomas Lee and Brigida, a woman whose maiden name may have been Fox or Fos. Brigida's brother was the likely godfather, though I can't read his given name. Margarita Dineen was the godmother.

Next was Margaret Lee, baptised on March 3, 1843. Born to parents David Lee and another Brigida—maiden name recorded as Molony—she had godparents David Lee and Margarita...um...Nojan???

Johannam Lee was baptized on February 16, 1852. Father Jacobis Lee was likely called James in real life. His wife was listed as Maria McAuliffe. After that is where I run into more legibility issues: godfather Patritius Brunniham (?) and godmother Johanna McAuliffe.

The next two baptisms were much later, after a wide gap in the records. Jacobus Lee was baptized May 26, 1864, born to David Lee and another Maria with an illegible surname—not to mention sponsors Jacobus and Ellina with equally unreadable surnames. And on December 9, 1869, Danielem Lee, son of David Lee and Maria Neiland (?) was baptized in the presence of sponsors Michaele Boice and Brigida Lee.

The final record found was an entry for a February 1854 marriage of David Lee and Maria Nulan (?), which gives us a clue about the maiden name of Daniel's mother. If this Maria was indeed the same woman as Daniel's mother, despite the differing spelling of the surname, then the records are likely missing several baptisms in those ten years between the couple's two appearances in the church's records.

Such, apparently, was the case for much of the religious records of this particular Irish parish, giving a visible illustration of why it is so frustrating to find signs of our Irish ancestors on paper, even as recent as the mid-nineteenth century. 

A Few Housekeeping Routines

 

Before I reluctantly leave this Flanagan research topic for yet another year, there are a few housekeeping routines I like to put into practice every time I exit one of my Twelve Most Wanted. During the rest of this week, I'll be making sure to take care of these necessary chores.

First on the list is to ensure that any discoveries I listed on my main tree at Ancestry.com also get carried over to other sites where I maintain family trees. Today I stopped in at FamilySearch.org to make sure all was updated there and that I hadn't missed linking any known documentation to Anna's branch of the family.

Of course, I was also hoping that some unknown distant cousin who could spill all the scoop on this mysterious Malloy caper had posted a tell-all explanation, but that was not in the cards for this year, apparently. Anna's family connections are still as tenuous as the distant DNA matches I've found who might be descended from her brother—but then, again, could just as well have been related to an ancient cousin.

I have reasons for making sure to post updates on discoveries to multiple genealogy websites. One reason, naturally, is to see what others have already posted. More than that, though, is the hope that what I share will eventually be spotted by some future someone who does know where Anna fits in, but hadn't yet shared that information. There are distant cousins out there, I firmly believe, who have yet to discover that we are family who need to connect and answer each other's questions. I just want to leave behind some genealogical crumbs to lead those cousins to my front door. I'm certainly looking forward to chatting, if that occasion ever arises. 

Starring Some Question Marks

 

The challenge with researching Anna Flanagan, my father-in-law's Irish immigrant great-grandmother, was using her married name to locate any further information on her. Researching a given name like Anna—which sometimes could morph into Anne, or even the more plain Ann—was challenging enough, but joining that with the component of her married name provided multiple additional woes.

While I mostly have written about Anna using her maiden name, once she arrived in the New World, it was her married name which would enable me to track her whereabouts. The problem was that that surname took on multiple appearances, depending on who was writing the record, as Anna herself, like many Irish Catholic immigrants of that time period, could not read or write.

The surname that pinpointed Anna, once she landed in Chicago, could take many forms. In the 1860 census, handwriting made her surname look more like Mullory than Mulloy. Yet in a Cook County death index, her name was rendered in 1885 as Anne Maloy, as did her obituary. To complicate matters, her death certificate, issued in Chicago by the City Board of Health, noted her name to be Ann Mulloy. Other records kept by the family sometimes mentioned the surname as Malloy, other times as Molloy. The options for seeking this woman in records back in Ireland—to say nothing of Chicago—kept multiplying.

With all these question marks—spelling the name with an a, an e, an o or u, and whether to double the l—caused a train wreck of search options. Rather than put the search on multiple tracks, I decided to replace those question marks with stars, as in the asterisk symbol used as a wildcard in computer searches.

Taking that idea back to Irish records, I pulled up the Irish Catholic Parish Records, set a keyword as Ballyagran, the name provided as the family's originating parish in County Limerick from her brother William's own headstone, and entered the surname as M*l*y. That way, I figured, I'd capture each of the spelling possibilities I had encountered in other search results.

Granted, I didn't count on the many other possibilities that could surface with that code—including unexpected results like Moloney and Mackley—but the result did give me thirty possibilities from the Flanagan family's home parish. Unfortunately, none of them included the possibility of Anna's marriage to Stephen Malloy, nor even the 1848 baptism of their daughter Catherine.

It's true that there are several gaps in the church records of Ballyagran for that time period—leaving me bemoaning the invisible Irish—but I had to give this a try. I'm still left with as many question marks as I had before this attempt at finding Anna under her married name, but even the negative results are necessary to complete a thorough search. 

When Every Piece Falls Into Place

 

One aspect of using DNA testing to flesh out a family tree is the added ability to glean missing details through what we discover about a collateral line's descendants. Some lines of descent can be easily filled in, pointing back to an ancestor, but other ancestors seem to yield nothing more than gaps in the information. That's the way it's been with my father-in-law's Flanagan ancestors from County Limerick, Ireland: a story full of gaps.

When every piece does fall into place, though, there you can find your answers. In the case of Anna Flanagan Malloy, the woman whose husband sent her an ambiguous letter which left her chasing him to America, there has been one Flanagan DNA match which seems to point back to Anna's own roots, yet I couldn't be too sure.

This DNA cousin's direct line pointed back to a Flanagan man living in the right place at about the right time to suggest he might be Anna's brother. Then, too, he could have been a cousin. With big gaps in the Catholic records for that particular religious parish, it was impossible to find any marriage or baptismal records to provide convincing proof of the two Flanagans' relationship.

Thankfully, over the years since I first found that key DNA match, others related to that family have opted to do their own DNA test. Coupled with Ancestry.com's ProTools, I could then build out that Flanagan tree in a floating branch within my father-in-law's tree, to more clearly see the relationships contained within that branch. With test results for each of these Flanagan candidates, I can now test my hypothesis to see whether that Flanagan ancestor would be our Anna's brother, or merely a cousin. Hopefully, the numbers on these five current DNA matches will be sufficient to soon answer that question.

With a Little Help From Some Friends

 

The trouble with using DNA tests to determine the missing people in our family tree flares up when we have a bit too many blanks among our ancestors' descendants. Right now, I'm still struggling with the missing parents and siblings of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Anna Flanagan. I do, however, have a very few DNA matches who may well fit into that branch of our family tree. The question is: just how do these living people fit into the puzzle left behind by unnamed ancestral members of the Flanagan collateral lines?

Thankfully, in this Irish Flanagan case from County Limerick, I can reach out for a little help from some genealogy friends. Yesterday, I mentioned reviewing some old notes from one Flanagan match. Following the details provided in those old emails, then combining them with observations gleaned from other Ancestry subscribers' Flanagan trees, I have been able to build out some additional lines for my own tree.

That, in turn, has allowed me to spot surnames of DNA matches who had eluded me in earlier attempts at match-making. Children of a Flanagan daughter now sporting a married surname unknown to me can be just as puzzling as any other Irish descendant—until a genealogy friend points out the connection. That is the value of reaching out and connecting with other researchers. In some cases, those genea-friends can even turn out to be distant cousins.

Now that I've been able to add some married names to my tree (still in a floating branch, as I'm ever the cautious one), it's time to take a fresh look at a handful of DNA matches who have had me stumped. Maybe this time, their results will fall handily into this Flanagan puzzle and help me calculate whether their ancestor was our Anna's sibling, or merely another cousin living in the same Irish townland.

Spent the Evening With an Old Friend

 

Last night, still puzzling over the connection between my father-in-law and ancestors back in County Limerick, I decided to consult with an old friend. Not that I actually spent the evening talking with this friend face to face, but this was the next best thing.

Over a span of more than ten years, I have occasionally exchanged emails with another Flanagan descendant who happens to also be a DNA match to my husband. We've shared information, records, photos, personal remembrances of family members now long gone, all in the hopes of ascertaining exactly how our two families actually connect.

As you can imagine, that's a pile of material to assemble. And assemble it, I have. Over the years, realizing what a treasure gets accumulated each time I reach out to a fellow researcher or DNA match, I've made it my purpose to save that correspondence. I set up a folder in my computer for genealogy findings, then added subheadings of family surnames of interest, organized in alphabetical order.

Every time I heard from this fellow Flanagan researcher, I filed away that note (sometimes with photos!) in my family directory under that surname. By this point, the collection has added up to a sizable amount. Since there's no way I could ever keep all those details fresh in my memory, I thought it would do me good to review the entire collection, which I did last night.

With so much to review, I decided to outline the entirety of it all in a timeline format, then add notes in a to-do list for follow-ups in the more recently added Irish record sets, such as the 1926 Irish census. While yes, these are collateral lines reaching far afield from my original purpose, including the entire body of results in a floating Flanagan branch in my father-in-law's tree might point to some glaring detail which might become a handy hint or warning sign.

If I can't find my way back from Chicago to Ireland in this Flanagan and Lee family line, perhaps working from County Limerick forward may yield some clues I can grasp and run with before this month, itself, runs out.

Déjà vu Chicago

 

It's been a long time since I last took a serious look at resources in Cook County, Illinois. Sure, my father-in-law and his entire family lived there for generations, but researching his roots has since led me on a tenuous path to Ireland. Chicago and its genealogical resources have been a distant memory for me.

Thanks to a fellow researcher following another Lee family, who has been sharing resources with me, I've since had that déjà vu experience. Things shared in our email correspondence are starting to jog my memory. 

One helpful item sent was a directory of Catholic churches in the Chicago area, complete with information on each parish's history. The book, originally written by Jack Bochar in 1990 for the Czech and Slovak American Genealogy Society of Illinois and updated with a second edition in 1998, is thankfully available online at the website of the Archdiocese of Chicago. This is definitely a link I will keep handy as I puzzle over these family branches of the Flanagan line.

I also learned the updated way to access burial information for Catholic relatives in the Chicago area: look once again to the Archdiocese, where their website allows a timed access to burial information through the tab labeled "Locate a Loved One."

While these tips helpfully shared by a genealogy friend do take me down a memory lane of research efforts long since past, that real déjà vu feeling struck in earnest, thanks to an unexpected but serendipitous email from Family Tree Magazine. Who could have predicted that, just this week, they would include such a timely article as "Chicago: A Windy City Genealogy Guide"?

Reading through that list of Chicago resources certainly brought back memories of searches long since forgotten. I'm certainly appreciative of the reminder. It's been a long time since I last wandered through the  archival holdings of my father-in-law's hometown.

The Invisible Irish

 

There's another problem I encountered during my fruitless search for the identity of Edward Flanagan in Chicago: the huge gaps in time between each sighting of a Flanagan relative in Chicago records. These Irish immigrants might have blended into the cityscape merely from the sheer numbers of their countrymen who also chose this new-to-them home, but when looking for specific individuals, they sometimes disappeared from records for decades at a time. I'm beginning to wonder whether they had discovered the knack of becoming invisible.

Take Anna Flanagan Malloy and her daughter Catherine. True, tracing a surname like Malloy was a challenge in its own right. I found Anna under multiple spelling variations from Malloy through Mulloy. But after her appearance in her brother William's household in 1860, I couldn't find her again in census records. Not until her obituary in 1885 did I find any mention of her name.

Likewise for her daughter Catherine who, following that one census appearance with her mother in 1860, disappeared from view until the 1900 census, long after she had married John Tully. Before that century mark, she was more likely to be found in the church records of her children's baptism, or in the obituaries of family members. Governmental records in the city seemed to turn a blind eye to some Irish immigrants. Perhaps in the sheer numbers of urban life, immigrants disappeared into the grayer fringes of the picture.

Gaps left from 1860 to 1900 represent a significant portion of adult life, not to mention the life story of multiple immigrants' journeys. I am trying to discover alternate ways to document these ancestors' existence, but perhaps this will call for more inventiveness and creativity than a genealogist is accustomed to mustering. Learning the ropes of life in 1800s Chicago has been my sideline this month, but I'm running out of alternate routes to explore.

Moment's Over

 

If I had thought, yesterday, that now would be an excellent opportunity for fleshing out the Flanagan family line by spending some "focused time" on the identity of Edward Flanagan, that moment was over in a flash. Here's the report on my negative results.

First, heading to Chicago city directories—of which there are several, thankfully, to consult online—I discovered that searching for a possible relative named Edward Flanagan was not as simple a procedure as one might expect. As for the surname, there were at least five different ways to spell it: Flanagan, Flanaghan, Flanigan, Flannagan, and Flannigan—not to mention the typezian alternative, Flangan. Add to that the problem, in some years, of alphabetization not being of utmost concern, leaving the researcher to visually scan the entire section of the alphabet from F-l-a-n through F-l-e.

Because my only clue about Edward's possible relationship to the family was through his unmarked grave found at William Flanagan's family plot at Mount Olivet, I did see his date of burial was June 24, 1904. However, finding his record in death indexes for the county or the state didn't produce any likely matches, and searching through Chicago obituaries for that same year led nowhere. That he was dead was obvious, but any record of when, or even where, he died has eluded me.

There are other beguiling signs that someone named Edward Flanagan was connected to the family. A man by that name was listed as godfather for one of Johanna Flanagan Lee's sons. Looking forward another generation, Johanna had a grandson who literally carried that same name as his own: Edward Flanagan Lee. But who that first Edward Flanagan was, I have yet to discover. His identity will not be the key to unlock the mystery of how the rest of the Flanagans tie together, or where they originated in Ireland.

Re-Evaluating the F.A.N. Club

 

Research may seem to lead us in dizzying circles, but I still feel there is a way around a brick wall ancestor's roadblock—even if it is an Irish Catholic living in Chicago. In my quest to find Anna Flanagan Malloy's roots in County Limerick, Ireland, so far I've found few tokens of her existence prior to her immigration to Chicago in the United States. Though she is related to my father-in-law close enough to have been his great-grandmother, it is as if she had been as difficult to find as an ancestor several more generations removed from him.

Facing that research roadblock once again, I instinctively turn to her F.A.N. Club. This, an acronym for Family, Associates, and Neighbors, can help trace a missing ancestor through the company they kept on their life's journey.

In Anna's case, that close-knit group included her daughter Catherine, her brother William, and her niece Johanna. Catherine eventually married an Irish immigrant who arrived in Chicago via Canada, named John Tully. Anna's brother William showed up in Chicago in time for the 1860 census, and remained there, a bachelor until his death in 1893, though I have little to inform me about the man, other than that he had an impressive monument built in his memory at Mount Olivet Cemetery. And Johanna married an Irish immigrant named John Lee, leaving several children behind to honor her memory.

One place where I could make some F.A.N. Club connections was through the burial records for both William and his niece Johanna. For whatever reason, Johanna's husband was out of the picture by the time of her death in 1909, as she was not buried in a plot including John Lee. Rather, I found her burial listed in the family plot owned by bachelor William Flanagan, burial plot S-313 in section 15 of Mount Olivet.

What was interesting to spot was the burial of another Flanagan in that same cemetery plot. Someone named Edward Flanagan had died in June of 1904, after William but before Johanna, who was included in the Flanagan family plot. I had known about this Edward for quite some time, but still cannot place him within the family. That name has appeared in various family records, such as a sponsor for one of Johanna's children. Perhaps it's time to set aside work on Anna, her brother William, or even her niece Johanna, and spend some focused time on identifying this particular Edward Flanagan. If he is part of the family's F.A.N. Club, we need to put him in his proper place—not to mention, perhaps he will be the one to point us back to Ireland, even though the others couldn't do so.

Free Form

 

When all the usual resources don't materialize the family history records we are seeking, it's time to take a different approach. For Anna Flanagan Malloy and her niece, Johanna Flanagan Lee, lacking key records, I'm left with nothing else but to go free form.

According to definitions, the term "free form" implies a structure lacking a standard shape or following fixed rules, an irregular pattern or asymmetrical shape, something outside conventional rules. Yes, maybe even—shock and horror!—following one of those rabbit trails off into the misty purple.

Apparently, identifying those two women in census records, vital records, or even newspaper reports has provided only the barest outline of who they were or, more critically, who they were related to, and where they all came from. I'm beginning to wonder whether wandering the historical streets of Chicago and just using my five observational senses might reveal more than those missing but necessary documents of genealogical practice. I need to broaden my horizons and, most importantly, think outside the box.

Case in point: I recently reached out to another Lee researcher, who brought up a point I hadn't considered.  While her Lee family is likely not related to my father-in-law's relatives, this researcher's Irish family had indeed settled in the same place as ours: Chicago. But in correspondence with this researcher, brainstorming our mutual research dilemmas, she mentioned that one branch of the family had immigrated on a path from Ireland through Canada.

Duh. I should have thought of that. Wasn't it another line in my father-in-law's past which had taken that very approach? And I was so elated when I discovered that end run around U.S. Immigration records. Of course, Canada would be a reasonable detour for emigrating subjects of the British Crown.

While I don't have any documentation for either Johanna or Anna entering the United States through the usual ports, that doesn't mean I shouldn't think outside the box. Perhaps there is a reason why I can't find their entry into this country.

What other aspects of their existence in their newly-adopted home might have been missing from the usual record sets? There, again, taking a free form approach may be my only alternative. Tracking their residences, year by year through city directories, may sound like grunt work, but such efforts may prove necessary for ancestors who refuse to otherwise be found. After all, Johanna and her possible relative, Edward Flanagan, had to live somewhere in the years before I found her, married with children in 1880—or Anna Flanagan after her appearance in the 1860 census, drawing a blank until the year of her death in 1885, listed as "Mrs. Ann Mulloy." Where was she hiding during those twenty five years?

They, Anna and Johanna, had to have been somewhere in Chicago in the interim. Going free form may be the only research technique I can use to find them, just sniffing them out, year by year, in the highways and byways of Chicago.

A Little Early

 

It's been a long two weeks—but don't think that means I conquered a lot of family history territory. In fact, I've traveled to two different week-long conferences for our family's business and have little to show for my genealogy efforts.

Driving home late last night from—well, let's just say the host hotel's name rhymes with Schmizney—I tried to think of what to share today. I've done near zero work on the family trees, other than to check that I haven't missed anything on Johanna Flanagan Lee's branch. So in lieu of the regular commentary, it seems now would be a perfect time to post my biweekly count. It's only a little bit early. After all, it usually makes its appearance every other Sunday, so I'm one day ahead of schedule.

Checking the numbers confirms what I suspected: travel plans wreck research intentions. No surprise here, but I only added ten more names to my in-laws' tree, which now includes 44,269 documented individuals. Even so, though I'm taking a vacation from my own family tree until the fall, somehow I managed to add four more names there. That means adjusting the record on that tree to reflect 41,963 individuals.

Results for new DNA tests for each side of the family come in slowly, too—confirmation that summertime is a slow season for genealogy. At Ancestry.com, I gained one more DNA match, pushing my close cousin count to 2,813. One was the magic number for my husband's test, too, so he now has 1,509 matches, fourth cousin or closer.

Though there's a lot of summer looming ahead of us—fall doesn't really make an appearance here until well into October—hopefully I'll get back to building out those branches of my father-in-law's Irish ancestry this coming week.

Checking the Neighborhoods

 

It was a sure bet—I thought—that Irish immigrant Catholic families of the 1880s in Chicago would have been sure to have their newborn babies baptized, so I continued looking through records of the Church of the Holy Family to spot verification of John and Johanna Lee's youngest children. When I found none of them listed in the digitized files, I wondered if the family might have moved to a different parish.

Since the Catholic Church traditionally set up local parishes based on geographic areas, organized under dioceses, it made sense to discover which parish might belong to a Catholic family's neighborhood. Thus started my hunt to find Catholic Churches in the Chicago area, based on any newer addresses of the Lee family. Since Johanna had died in 1909 at a different address in Chicago—3414 Parnell Avenue—I entered that address in a search engine and asked for the nearest Catholic parish for that neighborhood.

The search result pointed me to Saint Gabriel's Church which, conveniently, has digitized baptismal records available online at FamilySearch.org. I'm still in the process of searching through that record set, page by page, because not all entries are in date order. However, even before I've completed that search, I can say I doubt I'll find the youngest of Johanna's children listed there. Perhaps the Lee family hadn't moved to that location until long after the arrival of their youngest children.

The next step was to find a way to locate Chicago city directories. It was time to go through the listings, year by year, to pinpoint the Lee family's location. From those addresses—assuming the Lee family had moved from their original address during the years when their youngest children were born—I could then search for the appropriate Catholic parish for accessing baptismal records.

Finding Chicago city directories is not a one-stop-shopping process. ChicagoAncestors.org pointed me to some directories digitized at the Newberry Library, such as this 1880 city directory. Looking under the entry for "L," then heading to the Lee surname, I quickly found twenty one listings for John Lee. Fortunately, I already knew from the 1880 census that our John Lee was a cooper, so that entry was easily distinguishable, and I saw that he was still living at the family's old address. So much for finding a new church for his children's baptisms.

To find city directories for other years was a challenge. Blogger "Sassy Jane" (Nancy Loe) provides a resource page, "Free Chicago City Directories Online," filled with clickable links for Chicago area directories and other resources, which was helpful. ChicagoAncestors also sent me back to Newberry for a directory for 1885, revealing a change of address in 1885 for our John Lee to a home on Forty Second Street. Once again seeking the closest Catholic parish for the Lee family's new neighborhood, search engines pointed me back to Saint Gabriel's.

While I'm still having no luck finding mentions of Lee children at Saint Gabriel's—at least for our John and Johanna—I realized I had a third mention of a possible Catholic parish for the family. On Johanna's own obituary in 1909, it mentioned the funeral was to be held at "Nativity Church." For this, I'm off again, searching for any records and history of that congregation to find mentions of the Lee family and point me to the right neighborhood for the family.

Nothing is Ever Easy

 

It may be hard enough to actually locate the digitized record set needed to find that elusive ancestor, but once that collection is found, proceeding to the long-sought document should be rather straightforward, right? Wrong. Nothing is ever easy, especially in genealogy. There's always a snag along the way.

Thanks to a generous Chicago researcher, I now had the link to the records for Holy Family Church in Chicago, home parish for Irish immigrants John and Johanna Lee. According to the 1880 census, John and Johanna lived an easy walk from one of the city's longest-standing Catholic parishes.

Despite realizing that this set of microfilmed reels was not indexed for computer searches, I was ready to hunt and peck my way through to family history answers. Information on the collection told me that the first film contained the alphabetized handwritten index to help find the records, organized year by year, so that was step number one for me.

Since I had scrolled way too far in that collection for my first jumping-off spot, I found myself stuck in 1879. I decided to begin my search with John and Johanna's fourth son John James Lee, who was born in October of that year. Problem: there was no sign in the index of anyone surnamed Lee, let alone someone named John James Lee. Thinking perhaps he was not baptized in the same month as his birth, I scrolled through the indexed names, month by month, until I reached January of the subsequent year. No sign of John James Lee.

By that point, I was so close to the entries for 1881, I decided to continue the search with John James' younger sister Lillian, who was born in July of that year. Surprise: no entry for Lillian, either.

Perhaps going in the opposite direction might yield better luck. Hey, who am I kidding? I already knew that my new-found genealogical genie had located that earlier Lee child's record. George Aloysius Lee, born in June of 1877, should be in that index. Holding my breath, I took a look.

Thankfully, there he was, his entry in the index indicating that he was baptized on June 22, 1877. If I cared to view the actual entry the priest made in the ledger, I could go to page 167 to see for myself.

That, of course, I didn't need to do, as I already had a copy of that record, thanks to the helpful Ancestry.com subscriber who shared her research finds. And I knew that two children younger than George would also be in the church's records.

What of the older children? Since the 1880 census seemed to indicate that the family still lived in the area of that particular parish, I had expected to see the Lee children included there. After all, even if the family moved away, the parish's territory covered an immense part of the city of Chicago, nearly seven miles wide.

With four more Lee children yet to find in baptismal records, I'll need to continue the search. My main purpose at this point is to find the names of each child's godparents, and hope that the Irish tradition for selecting sponsors had a strong hold on this immigrant family. I need some clues about siblings in these babies' parents' generation to reconstruct a missing family tree for both Johanna Flanagan and John Lee.

Thanks to Some Genealogical Kindness

 

If it weren't for the help of others in the genealogy world, how many chances would we have missed to find the details we're seeking on our brick wall ancestors? Thanks to someone posting baptismal records online to share with whomever needed them, I learned that the home church in Chicago for Irish immigrants John and Johanna Lee was named Holy Family. But which Holy Family congregation? As it turned out, searching online brought me to at least two, if not more similarly-named churches.

I first took my search to the records digitized at FamilySearch.org. Through their wiki, I discovered that there were plenty of resources for those seeking Chicago ancestors. Referred from FamilySearch, in a long list of repositories, I found a list for Catholic Churches in Chicago. Posted on the now-static RootsWeb site, the list didn't seem to exactly include a church named Holy Family, but it did mention one called Saint Francis of the Holy Family. Problem number one: the name wasn't quite the same as what I'd found on the posted baptismal records. Problem number two: the hyperlink clicked through to...nothing.

Another link brought me to a FamilySearch collection of records from Catholic Churches in the Chicago area, but that didn't seem to bring up any records for the family I was seeking.

I took my search to the search engines. There, I found two possibilities. One was a Chicago church called Our Lady of the Holy Family, but reading that organization's history, it seemed to be a newer parish. The other church was called, simply, Church of the Holy Family.

That parish seemed to fit the specifications more closely. The church's history, for one, made it the perfect fit. And its location was close enough to the Lee family's home, according to the 1880 census, to be within walking distance from their home on Fourteenth Street.

The only problem was locating a copy of digitized records for this church. According to FamilySearch, only records of closed parishes are held by the Archdiocese of Chicago; if the church is still serving a congregation and the records aren't digitized online, then what?

Thankfully, I had reached out to the source of that Random Act of Genealogical Kindness and asked about the baptismal discoveries she had posted on Ancestry.com. Within a matter of hours, there in my inbox at Ancestry was not only a series of useful links for Chicago research, but the specific record set she had used to access those Lee baptismal records from the Church of the Holy Family. Sure, it's a set of records on microfilm reels to be searched the old fashioned hunt-and-peck method but, grateful for the guidance, at least now I can start the process.

Retracing Steps

 

When you don't have every detail documented for a brick wall ancestor, there is only one thing to do: retrace your steps and check for more records to fill in the blanks.

It was thanks to some random acts of genealogical kindness that baptismal records for at least two of Johanna Flanagan Lee's children were shared on Ancestry.com. I had already spotted that, not due to my own efforts, but solely because of Ancestry's hints system. I had remembered cranking through the microfilm at a FamilySearch Center in decades past for my father-in-law's Chicago ancestors, but I was pretty sure I had never done anything so tedious for the Lee branch of the Flanagan family, so I was grateful for the discovery.

Little did I know how grateful I should have been. Since I had gone through this process in the past, I assumed it would be just as easy to do so now—if not easier, thanks to modern conveniences like computerized searches through digitized records, not to mention AI assistance and Full Text Search at FamilySearch.org.

Wrong. Looking at FamilySearch yielded no easy answers, though explanations in the heading for one particular collection did remind me of vital facts about Chicago records: 

• City of Chicago marriage licenses were separated from Cook County records...but only from 1894 onward
• For each hundred names in the index, the first set is for Cook County, then followed by City records
• The female index did not begin until 1878

Most important, though, was one main, overarching, glaring detail: if you were looking for a record before July 24, 1871, your luck was out. That's when the great Chicago fire wiped out most records for the city.

Considering that Johanna Flanagan and John Lee had a child as early as 1875—at least according to their entry in the 1880 census—one could conclude that history had snatched their marriage record from the jaws of complete destruction. It could be quite likely that they'd have married closer to 1874, at least in my thinking.

Wrong—at least if we can trust the Statewide Marriage Index at the Illinois Secretary of State's website. No matter which way I searched—groom's name only, Flanagan spelled as Flanigan, searching statewide versus Cook County records only—I came up with...nothing. Not, at least, for this couple. There were certainly many other men married in the state who claimed the name John Lee.

I returned to one of the baptismal records posted by the Ancestry subscriber, this one for a son born before the oldest child showing in the 1880 census. Details attached to the record noted that the church where the baptism occurred was a congregation named Holy Family Catholic Church.

Whether there were any records digitized at FamilySearch from that congregation, I couldn't yet say, so it would be important to check for availability. At any rate, it would also help to learn more about the congregation, itself. That, as my first step, I'll save for tomorrow's post.

Finding Flanagan Collaterals

 

One of the best ways to work around ancestral brick walls is to examine the family's collateral lines. Those descendants of aunts and uncles can sometimes lead us to connections we'd otherwise miss. In the case of my father-in-law's Flanagan line, that is exactly what I'm hoping will clear up the mystery about his great-grandmother Anna Flanagan Malloy's origin in Ireland.

I've been working on this Flanagan family connection for years—in fact, ever since I first began writing daily entries in A Family Tapestry. In one of my earliest Flanagan posts, I mentioned discovering a second obituary for Anna's bachelor brother William Flanagan, in which not only was Anna's daughter Catherine mentioned as William's niece, but a second niece was named: Johanna Lee.

At that point, I hadn't yet learned just how Johanna connected to the rest of the Flanagan family, but I was glad to have discovered that link. Since then, I've worked on Johanna's tree enough to document all her descendants plus their descendants, in some cases for three or more additional generations.

There has been an additional Flanagan connection to revisit: identifying Johanna Lee's father. He may well have been the additional Flanagan man buried in an unmarked grave within William Flanagan's family plot at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Chicago, the immigrants' adopted home. Or perhaps that man was Edward Flanagan, identified as godfather of one of Johanna Lee's sons, meaning a likely brother. Whether these two identities lead us to a clarified family constellation for Johanna, I can't yet be sure, but it is important to investigate this further.

In addition, there may have been a connection back in the Flanagan and Lee homeland in County Limerick, Ireland: a man by the name of James Flanagan. He, it turns out, may well have been the ancestor of a DNA match showing in my husband's test at Ancestry.com. On the other side of Johanna's family, Griffith's Valuation points to someone leasing property in a nearby townland known as William Lee, perhaps connecting us to Johanna's husband's family.

With all these leads, there will be much to follow up on in this coming week—or perhaps longer, depending on how accessible records may be for these Flanagans and their related lines.

These Stars Weren't so Lucky

 

No matter how stuck we might be with a research brick wall, there is always wiggle room for further exploration. Before we turn to the collateral Lee family, tomorrow, to shed any light on Anna Flanagan Malloy's origin in County Limerick, there is one other option: seeking whatever became of her husband, Stephen Malloy, after he left home abruptly to sail for Boston.

Because several records already found with that surname—whether for Anna, her daughter Catherine, or Stephen, himself—sported a number of spelling variations, I figured the asterisk would be my go-to tool for this task. Rather than searching for Malloy, then Mulloy, then Meloy, I'd simply do the whole package, once and for all, using the wild card symbol to look for M*l*y. (Spoiler: while the idea seemed sound in principle, it turned out these stars weren't so lucky.)

Apparently, as Irish surnames go, that one device opened up far too many possibilities for me to handle. Maloney, Mullarky, Mulcahey, and even McCully and Modley entered the fray. It may have seemed like a good idea when I started, but the sheer number of choices made the technique unwieldy for this case.

To complicate matters, I also found a will in Massachusetts for someone by that same name, Stephen Malloy, who married and had two children before he drew up his will in June of 1882. Even then, I'd say chances are slim that this Stephen Malloy and Anna's missing husband by that same name were one and the same, but it was an interesting discovery. Perhaps the search for whatever became of Anna's husband will be a question which never finds an answer. Of that, I'm not entirely sure yet, but one thing I do know: this search will not be one for which use of a wildcard will find a sure-fire solution.

Off the Shelf: One in Six Million

 

Heading to a conference in Minnesota last week, I thought I'd grab a book to read on the flight. This was a title I'd long awaited the chance to read: Amy Fish's One in Six Million. 

I thought the flight would give me plenty of time to complete the brief volume—after all, its length is only 210 pages, including notes, acknowledgments, and even a book club reader's guide. That was not so, due to unexpected turbulence, a reason which has also kept me from reading in cars and trains. (I'll spare you the details.)

Thus, putting the book's engrossing story on hold, I attended an educator's conference which included a tour of a local synagogue, perhaps as an ethnic-awareness exercise, but which served as a timely enrichment of my reading experience as well. 

You see, encountering a story like One in Six Million is not merely an exercise in reading one page after another. Though the pages do turn—and sometimes, you can't help but read just one more—the story unfolds much like a Middle Eastern or Jewish explanation might. You simply must understand the background. And the author is more than happy to provide that enrichment.

Simply put, the book recounts the predicament of a woman who didn't even know who she was. Wrapped in a woolen blanket and set to the side of the road as an eight month old infant, her only identifiers were a first name and date—presumably of her birth—written on a note pinned to her only protection from the elements. How she got there or why can only be presumed by the events surrounding the town near the street where she was found: a village in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942.

The baby, once abandoned, was eventually found and rescued, of course. Else her tale would have been a brief one. Instead, the story recounts how many people and networks came together over time to help one woman discover who she really was, and who her family had been. While the author pulls in many facets of the process and its international cast of volunteers, this requires understanding of several aspects, including the early use of technology to reunite Holocaust survivors, efforts to build a genealogical database now freely available to all, the introduction of DNA testing for family history, and the volunteers from around the world who each played a tiny part in reaching the conclusion, decades afterwards, of the infant's true identity. 

From my viewpoint—yes, I did complete the book on my return flight—this is a book not merely read, but absorbed. Perhaps it's my genealogical perspective—I've personally met some of the DNA players mentioned in the book—but I found One in Six Million to be a recounting which, after being completed, still remains on my mind. 

Turning Leeward

 

A surname like Lee can be misleading. While it is prevalent in the United States, where Anna Flanagan Malloy's niece Johanna Flanagan Lee settled in Chicago, it is not only a common surname across the English-speaking world, but also an oft-encountered surname in Asian countries. Despite being such a common surname, it may be the key to determining the origin of Anna Flanagan and her siblings, back in County Limerick, Ireland. It's time to turn toward the Lee family to see if we can gain any direction in our search for the Flanagan family back in County Limerick.

Anna's niece Johanna was born a Flanagan, but after she arrived in Chicago, she married a man by the name of John Lee. Understandably, it has been challenging to trace someone by a name like that, no matter where we might be searching for him, and I've found very little on the man in his adopted home, other than mention of his name in baptismal and birth records for his children.

However, I did discover that, back in the same townland in Ireland where Anna's husband once sent her that desperate and rushed goodbye letter, there was an assessment record for someone by that same surname, Lee. That record, for a man named William Lee leasing a property owned by John Mason, the same man for whom Anna's letter was sent in care of, might just be a coincidence, but I can't help but notice that, in yesterday's search through DNA matches, I ran across someone by that same name.

If learning more about the Lee family back in the County Limerick townland of Cappanihane could help me sort out family connections for Johanna, perhaps that could also explain why so many Lee matches seem to appear in my husband's DNA results. Perhaps this is a case of intertwining family lines, generation after generation.

At any rate, since I've been stuck on the Flanagan side of the equation, maybe pursuing the collateral line of Anna's relatives will unlock a way through this brick wall ancestor's family story. We'll give this detour a try again, come next week. 

It's the Little Things that Count

 

When using DNA to connect with matches who share second great-grandparents, those distant cousins share very little genetic material in common. But when the goal is to push beyond the brick wall ancestors just one more generation, it's the little things that count. As I mentioned yesterday, third cousins can share under two hundred centiMorgans—and the number can slide far lower than that. It's that little amount that is consuming my research time lately.

Anyone who might be related to Anna Flanagan through, say, an as yet unknown sibling, would share a very small amount of genetic material with her direct descendants, indeed. With that in mind, I conducted yet another hunt to see whether I could find a potential match among the many who share as low as ten, twenty, or thirty centiMorgans with my husband.

I used the approach of creating a custom cluster on Ancestry.com, naming one specific match as my key target. Keep in mind that, though this match has the Flanagan name in her tree, I don't yet know for sure that she is related to the same Flanagan line in County Limerick, though our email discussions over the past few years have led me to believe this could be a possibility.

I created the custom cluster to have, at its lowest amount, a centiMorgan count far smaller than the usual clusters offered at Ancestry. The result of my request provided forty one matches. Oddly enough, two of that group matched my husband on his maternal side, rather than the expected paternal side. I set those two results aside and did not consider them, though I have seen some matches in the past in which the wrong side of the family had been attributed as the nexus. I also know that, reaching back that many generations among American descendants can sometimes produce other lines in which someone from the paternal side coincidentally also ended up marrying someone from my husband's maternal side.

From that point, I went one by one through the remaining thirty nine matches produced by this custom cluster request. Where I could determine through viewing each candidate's "shared matches" option which branch of my father-in-law's Irish roots might claim each candidate, I eliminated those from other branches from my search.

In the end, I was left with...nothing. None of that grouping seemed to indicate roots either linked to Flanagans or descended from the Ballyagran area of County Limerick. There was, however, a surprise: a few matches who had the surname Lee in their roots. Lee, I had found out from prior years' experience, was the married name of a niece of Anna Flanagan who had also emigrated from Ireland to the Chicago area of the United States.

While none of these Lee matches were the same as the Lee family I had researched, they also were Irish immigrants who hailed from the Chicago area, the same area where Anna Flanagan had settled, prompting me to revisit that Lee connection I had found from so long ago. We'll take a look at that tomorrow, especially because there is one issue nagging at the back of my brain: there don't seem to be any DNA matches pointing to my husband's Flanagan-Lee side of the family.

What we Don't Have in Common

 

Perhaps in wrestling with a research problem, we struggle so much that we end up on the far side of reasonable conclusions. Perhaps, after comparing and contrasting DNA matches over and over today, I've reached that far end. But the thought this day left me with might have some validity, despite the mental exhaustion. I'm wondering whether it might be far more productive for me to partner with Flanagan cousins whose matches have nothing in common with my family, as far as DNA goes. What we don't have in common may provide the answer we seek.

I'm searching for DNA matches who share genetic material with my husband and a common heritage in County Limerick with his Flanagan ancestors. Other than close relatives descended from the very same second great-grandmother as my husband claims—Anna Flanagan—I've found very little to work with. If I search for DNA matches whose family tree includes Flanagan surnames, I end up with matches whose ancestors hailed from County Cork, or even County Mayo, not County Limerick.

Trying to find DNA matches with another descendant of a second great-grandparent would mean finding a third cousin, at the closest. At that point, it is quite possible that two such cousins would share absolutely no genetic material in common, despite both being descended from the same ancestral couple. In other words, the shared centiMorgans might amount to an absolute zero.

If what I am actually trying to accomplish is to push back even beyond that second great-grandmother, it would mean finding descendants of a third great-grandparent, thus looking for fourth cousins. At that level, it would be even less likely to find someone who shares the same Flanagan genetic signature as my husband.

In other words, the more distant the relationship, the less likely that two such cousins would share any genetic material at all. 

But what genetic Flanagan signature my husband might not share with his own DNA matches could very well be the exact segment that a Flanagan cousin might share with a different family member. In other words, rather than reading the ProTools results for cousins who share DNA with my husband's test and a match in common, I need to find the matches of our matches who share different Flanagan DNA segments with their own matches—not in common with my test, but in common with other Flanagan cousins.

While that might sound reasonable in theory, in practice, it would take cooperation between cousins who are willing to share their data. Perhaps a letter writing campaign might convince candidates to join up to solve this Flanagan mystery. On the other hand, at a third cousin level, the greatest amount of genetic material any one match set could share would be 234 centiMorgans—a small amount, indeed, but also an amount which shows us how much variability there is between what one third cousin could inherit versus another third cousin descended from the same second great-grandmother.

In other words, I'm looking for someone with DNA in common with my husband's Flanagan ancestor who has other Flanagan matches who do not share the Flanagan segments that match shares with my husband. Perhaps there's someone out there who inherited all the Flanagan genes that my husband did not. I hope that person took a DNA test and posted the results, along with a complete family tree. At least, I can dream.