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.