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.

Trying This, That, the Other

Some days, the research path leads in circles. Yesterday was one of those days. With plans to review Flanagan results at four of the DNA companies where my husband has tested, I ended up trying a little bit of this, a smattering of that, and some more of the other, and came up with...nothing. If I found Flanagan matches, they lived elsewhere. If I found County Limerick connections, they didn't merge with the Flanagan family. It was a zero sum day.

I tried every data manipulation combination I could think of, checking for matches in common with my husband and either of two sisters who had tested, plus matches shared with some of their children. Nothing led to the hoped-for connections.

However, spending hours being thorough must have put me in the mood to keep checking through other Flanagan files. I not only have made it a habit to check back through the fifteen years' history of this blog, but whenever I received a useful comment on a post, or an actual email, I saved it for future reference. In addition, as I found pertinent links for specific family lines, I'd save them in a set of electronic file folders delineated by surname. My Flanagan e-file has several gems saved over the years, some of which I had nearly forgotten about. It was good to review all those notes—some of which contained details I need to make sure to add to the right places in our family tree.

While the pursuit of DNA leads didn't, um, lead anywhere, it occurred to me to try a slightly different approach. While comparing matches linked to siblings can produce some insights—in the Flanagan case here, unfortunately, it didn't—it occurred to me that widening the circle might yield a more useful set of details. Over the years, I've kept in touch with distant cousins who also research their family lines. We've compared notes from time to time. Now might be just the right time to reach out and see whether those cousins have Flanagan matches where my husband's test just doesn't have the genetic details that would point to that side of his family. It's certainly worth the try.

Our Siblings' Side of the Family Story

 

One problem with using DNA for family history research is that we find silver bullet strategies often come crashing down. We put so much hope into such tests, but it turns out that DNA match lists may not contain the magic potion we've assumed would bring down those impenetrable ancestral brick walls.

There is a way around such disappointments, as I've found. It's in using DNA testing in combination with a lot of hard research work and testing strategies that can produce more useful results. One key is to test siblings. Where one sibling's DNA results may match the target test subject on certain chromosome segments, the other sibling may yield far different results, yielding another side of the family story. Perhaps this is the cause behind the red-headed step-child accusation, where one of several siblings doesn't seem to have the same appearance as the rest of the family, and yet is, indeed, a child of the same parents. Sometimes a hidden characteristic from a grandparent makes itself known in only one grandchild—and that can be the family quirk that leads us to a hidden ancestral story.

In my husband's case—as he is the proxy for my father-in-law's genetic profile—he has two sisters who were willing to test their DNA to help me with a class project I had, years ago, for a workshop taught by Blaine Bettinger at a genealogy conference. I'll call them Sister #1 and Sister #2. As I worked through the genetic differences that could be spotted between the three siblings, it was clear that Sister #2 had matches not shared by the other two subjects. Her matches, some of them quite distant relationships, all descended from her family's ancestors from County Tipperary in Ireland. I was able to confirm connections as distant as fifth cousin from specific matches which she did not share with her two siblings.

On the other hand, Sister #1 had matches from the more southern counties in Ireland. At the time when I had first realized this, I was working on connecting DNA matches from Sister #2 to the family's Tully and Flannery roots in County Tipperary and, while overjoyed to have discovered such a handy connection there, I gave little thought to the value of the other sister's DNA connections.

Now, as it turns out, Sister #1 may have the key to unlock at least some of the doors leading to Flanagan and Malloy answers from County Limerick. Because both siblings had tested at Family Tree DNA, rather than at the more popular Ancestry.com, this will mean working with a smaller universe of results, but it will also mean working with a company which, over the years, has focused on marketing directly to Irish residents at annual genetic genealogy conferences of the prior decade.

Hopefully, at least some of those many Irish DNA-testing subjects will have a useful match with Sister #1. The most likely approach will be to seek matches who are not "in common with" my husband's results at Family Tree DNA. However, I already did spot one Flanagan match from my husband's own results who leads back to a possible relative of Anna Flanagan.

Back at Ancestry.com, their ThruLines results show only seven matches connected to Anna Flanagan. All of those, unfortunately, are close cousins whom we already know. No secrets unlocked there. And though I had already prompted the system to find a father, simply labeled by his surname "Flanagan," the ThruLines system hasn't yet uncovered any more distant cousins, despite my father-in-law's tree including Flanagan descendant Johanna Flanagan Lee and her descendants down to the level of third great-grandchildren.

In addition, there are test results at MyHeritage and 23andMe, though these are only for my husband's results, not his siblings, so there is no way to compare or contrast those results, only to find matches with the rather common surname Flanagan.

Still, having DNA test results does provide one additional way to chip away at that Flanagan brick wall story back in County Limerick. Now that we're finally at the beginning of August—the official start of researching Anna Flanagan, number eight of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026—perhaps these updated DNA matches, especially from Sister #1, will provide some answers about Anna Flanagan's roots in County Limerick.

Summer Slowdown

 

I have often wondered whether the reasons some genealogical societies always chose to "go dark" for the summer might now be outdated. After all, with a major demographic in such organizations weighted heavily towards those who are now retired, who needs summer for a vacation? Extended travel can be done at any time.

This past week, I had my own personal proof that summer travel is still a reality: I spent the week in Minnesota. As you can guess, I gave very little thought to family history research. In fact, with today marking my biweekly review of progress, the numbers confirmed that summer slowdown for me.

Granted, I had an additional excuse for a less than stellar biweekly report: looking for clues about brick wall ancestors from Ireland can bring any search to a screeching halt. To package the slowdown entirely under that umbrella, though, would not be a fair representation. I was busy doing what people often do in the summertime.

With that in mind, I did add fifty one more names to my father-in-law's tree, which now includes 44,259 ancestral relatives. I managed to add two more to my own tree, to boot, though that tree is trailing at 41,959 documented names. That surprise addition on my tree was thanks to the discovery that twelve more DNA matches were added to my side of the family, which rounded out one branch by an additional generation.

DNA matches on my father-in-law's side have not increased by quite so much. For this biweekly span, there were only two new matches; the previous two weeks yielded zero. Perhaps not as many are testing from the Irish roots side of the equation, leaving me without answers where I need them the most.

Whether the DNA slowdown can also be attributed to a summer slowdown, I can't really say. Still, with the start of a new week, I'll be taking a long look at whatever can be gleaned from those matches I've already spotted, to see whether any new additions will help point me in the right direction for my Flanagan question, back in County Limerick.

With a Little Help From Family

 

An emailed note I recently received reminded me of another resource to use as I struggle to piece together Anna Flanagan's story. While my father-in-law, Anna's descendant, has long since passed away, I not only have his son's DNA test at Ancestry.com to rely on for potential Flanagan matches, but two additional children had also tested, using another of the four testing companies which we had used for my husband's test. With a little help from family members' DNA results—not to mention, a review of results at the other companies we had utilized—perhaps it will be easier to zero in on the closest Flanagan connections.

One thing I had noticed by testing three siblings is the variety of DNA matches linked to only one of the siblings. The matches' ancestors seemed to cluster around different geographic regions of Ireland. One test matched many of the lines from County Kerry and County Limerick, while the other sibling's matches pointed farther north to County Tipperary.

Admittedly, this was an effect I had noticed for more distant cousin matches—say, around third cousins—but that is exactly what is needed for this question about Anna Flanagan. Anna would be the second great-grandmother for all three of the siblings who tested, so any same-generation matches would register at about the third cousin level.

Since each sibling seemed to have a different set of matches at that distant relationship level, it may help me zero in on the one test which seemed more likely to match the Flanagan side, with its roots in County Limerick.

I hadn't looked at those siblings' test results for years. I had originally asked each of them to test as part of a project for a DNA class I was taking, and each candidate had kindly allowed me to serve as the administrator for their test results. Though that project was undertaken years ago, many more matches have been added over the years. I'm curious to see whether that geographic signature still holds for each sibling's DNA test results, and whether there might be any new matches who connect with our Flanagan line.

It will take some time to review it all, but hopefully by Monday, I'll see some new possibilities.