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.