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.