Approaching Flannery Fatigue

 

It was bound to happen. After delaying my good intentions to find the roots for my father-in-law's great-grandmother Margaret Flannery due to a sickly September, I thought I'd try my best to make up for that lack. There is, however, no sense in trying to squeeze thirty days of research into a mere extra week. This goal, I decided, needed a decent full month of concentration sometime again in the future—sometime, that is, after I've recuperated from Flannery fatigue.

And then, wouldn't you know it, those DNA matches came back to haunt me. A Flannery cousin popped up in my husband's results—from Ontario in Canada, no less, home of the migrating Margaret and her husband Denis Tully and their children.

It was a small match, but big enough to tempt me into following the trail. From that Flannery cousin, I followed a Find A Grave clue for her father, (which conveniently included a copy of his obituary naming that same DNA cousin as well as all his siblings). That led to his father, and then that Flannery man's father—all while still remaining in Canada, in and around some of the same communities where our Margaret Flannery and her husband Denis Tully had settled in Ontario.

Tempting, that is, until I ran into yet another brick wall. This Flannery trail goes cold, still in Canada. I have no way to connect this ancestral Flannery from the DNA match's line to Margaret Flannery from my father-in-law's line. It seems I have a collection of stubs—dead ends on the Flannery branches.

It will take a lot more than a few days' work to unscramble this puzzle. Though I still regret not being able to work through the past month on this September goal, it's time to put it aside for another year's Twelve Most Wanted. It's time now to catch up with October, before another month disappears.

What we Find When We're Looking for Something Else

 

Rabbit trails—those tempting deviations from our intended research goal—can be dangerous, but I can't say I'd advocate ignoring them completely. Sometimes, it's what we find when we're looking for something else that turns out to be the answer to another question that has stumped us.

Take this Flannery puzzle that has kept me at bay for the entire past month of September. Granted, that month I had a rough go of it, thanks to unexpected illness and other troubles. Yet into this new month, I've still decided to persevere for at least a few more days to seek information on Margaret Flannery's roots in County Tipperary, Ireland.

Having made a listing of all the known children of Margaret and her husband, Denis Tully, my next step was to list each child's godparents, based on their baptismal record.

From that point, the tedium began: searching baptismal records from that same Catholic parish where I had found the children of Margaret and Denis—the church at Ballina—to look for the families of each of those named godparents. After all, if Margaret and Denis had selected these named godparents because they were siblings or in-laws, that would help me identify collateral relatives for both the Tully and Flannery lines. Besides, perhaps I would uncover a reciprocal baptismal relationship where Margaret or Denis were named as godparents for these siblings' own children.

Yes, I did mention tedium. I can't say I made much progress looking for the few Flannery names among the godparents. Basically, that included Kitty, William, and Bridget Flannery. Most of the rest of the godparents were from the Tully side of the family, so I continued my search on that branch of the family next.

My next search candidate, then, was Thomas Tully. Surely with that surname, the relationship would be clear: Thomas should have been a brother to Margaret's husband, Denis, right? But I couldn't really be sure because, for example, Thomas could have been selected as a godparent because he was an in-law to the new parents; he could have coincidentally acquired the same surname because he was, say, a cousin who just happened to marry a sister of one of the parents.

It was worth the detour to discover what could be found about this Thomas. In an 1834 baptismal record in the same parish for a son named Denis Tully, parents Thomas Tully and Margaret "Wilkisson" named as the child's godparents none other than John Tully and Margaret Flannery.

It just can't get any better than that. While we already know who Margaret Flannery was, we can now add John's name as another possible Tully sibling.

This, of course, brings up another possible theory, which in turn requires me to search for all the baptismal records for Thomas' children. If this Denis, born in 1834, was Thomas' eldest son, another Irish tradition would mean that Thomas' father's name would also be Denis. Thus, my Denis would, by necessity, have been the eldest son of his father—and, as far as I can tell, my Denis had also named his eldest son by that same name, in honor of his father. Perhaps looking further for this newly-discovered brother John Tully might reveal a firstborn son whose name resonates with this evolving pattern.

Unfortunately, the chance of finding baptismal records before the 1830s is near impossible for this area of County Tipperary, so discovering the exact dates and details for brothers Denis, Thomas, and John—and their parents—just wouldn't happen. But we can extrapolate from known traditions and piece together possible collateral lines, if nothing else.

Though it doesn't help me move forward yet with any Flannery discoveries, for now, I can at least add two collateral lines to my father-in-law's Tully ancestors, all thanks to the wanderings in pursuit of the answer to a different research question. You can bet I stopped to write that answer down so I wouldn't forget what I found.

Baby Steps

 

It may be the start of a new month, but after a month like the one I just finished, I'm not ready to relinquish the research goal I wasn't able to conquer last month. For the next few days—only a few, I promise—I'd like to spend a bit more time puzzling over Margaret Flannery and her home back in pre-famine-era County Tipperary, Ireland.

Today, I went back over the baptismal records for each of Margaret's babies—at least, the ones who were born in Ireland. The goal was to list the godparents listed in each child's church record. There is a reason for this: at that time in Ireland, the tradition was to name a sibling or sibling-in-law of one of the parents as the child's sponsors. If this custom held true for Margaret's time period and location, then we would see the formation of possible relatives to add to her family tree. Then, too, if the priest were consistent in record keeping, each godmother would also have been listed by her maiden name.

With the exception of a baptismal record for son Denis, born in 1830 as (possibly) the oldest child of Margaret Flannery and Denis Tully that I could find, here are the results of my search:

• Johanna, born in 1832: Kitty Flannery and - - ke [Luke? Mike?] Tully
• Michael, born in 1834: William Flannery and Bridget Flannery
• Patrick, born in 1836: Thomas Tully and Mary Tully
• William, born in 1839: John Tully and Judy McNamara
• John, born in 1842: John Brun and Mary McNamara
• Margaret, born in 1844: Mick Tully and Mary Gleeson
• Honora, born in 1847: John Tully and Biddy Tully

Of those children, I do know that William and Honora died before the family emigrated around 1851. (The name William must have been important to the family, for they named their youngest son, born after the family's arrival in Canada, by that same first name.)

Of those godparents, I have already discovered DNA matches linking back to the Gleeson surname from County Tipperary, an encouraging sign. And the name McNamara appears in the Griffith's valuation for the townland of Tountinna, where Margaret settled when she married Denis Tully. The only surname that puzzles me among the godparents listed is for John Brun; I have no idea of that connection.

As for the Flannery connections, I now have Kitty, Bridget, and William Flannery as possible leads. These three, however, could be either Margaret's siblings, or they could be spouses of either Margaret's or Denis' siblings. No matter which way this turns, a possible next step would be to look for those names as parents in the baptismal records for the same church parish in Ballina, Margaret's home church where her own children were baptized. 

Two Places at the Same Time

 

If Margaret Flannery Tully and her family migrated to that tiny town known as Paris in what is now Ontario, Canada, where did she come from? That question about the two places she once called home is not as hard to answer as it might seem, thanks to finding a handwritten letter confirming the baptism of their son, John Tully, kept over the decades in personal family papers. Not only was that document the key to discovering Margaret's maiden name, but it was how I learned the location the family called their home church back in Ireland.

That church location was in Ballina, part of what was once known geopolitically as the "North Riding" of County Tipperary. But as you probably have learned by now, the most important location for tracing an Irish ancestor is actually the land subdivision known as a townland. Finding that townland can be challenging. After all, County Tipperary has a mere 3,245 townlands—or 3,144 townlands, as one Irish website puts it, "that we know about."

Besides finding the handwritten note verifying Margaret's son John Tully's baptism, I've since been able to locate digitized copies of baptismal entries for the remainder of the Tully children born in Ireland. For instance, in finding that their oldest known son, Michael, was baptized on June 5, 1834, I could spot the priest's entry at the top of the register stating that the family came from Tountinna, the townland named for the highest point in the Arra Mountains.

I've been there myself, viewing the rugged terrain which once housed the Tully family before their departure for Canada. By all accounts, the Tullys arrived in Canada in time to be listed there in the "1851 census"—an anomaly in itself, as that census, due to other difficulties, was actually not enumerated until January 12, 1852. Still, the very document which led me to find the Tully residence in Tountinna, Griffith's Valuation, was said to not have been completed until June 29, 1853.

Yet, looking closely at the Valuation entries in Tountinna—transcribed, unfortunately, as "Fountinna" in currently-available typewritten records—it is quite clear that, despite the family's entry in the Canadian census in the previous year, there was an entry for Denis Tully, Margaret's husband, back in that Irish townland. It is only in looking closely at the details from the Tully entry in Griffith's that we see the evaluator's note, "Added to [entry] No. 1. House struck out of valuation."

It is sometimes only in the relentless pursuit of the tiny details that we learn more about our ancestors. In Margaret's case, it appears we will only—if at all—be able to learn more about her roots if we continue to follow suit.

The Gift of DNA Cousins

 

With a little help from our friends on the technology side of the world, it's not that hard to figure out who our distant cousins might be. And it's the gift of effective tools for being able to discover DNA cousins that has enabled me to paint a picture of the far-reaching connections that can flow from one ancestor's family.

In researching my father-in-law's great-grandmother Margaret Flannery in the past month, I've been able to reach down the generations to document all the way to her fifth great-grandchildren. Many of them still reside in Canada, the place where Margaret and her husband, Denis Tully, had settled after leaving their native home in what used to be called the "North Riding" of County Tipperary, Ireland.

Researching those more current generations in Canada had been, in the past, a challenge. Perhaps it might have been the cultural influence of a more reserved, British composure that left obituaries with an air of understatement. Finding an obituary for an ancestor we're researching might, in general, be cause for the genealogy happy dance, but when that hard-won victory leaves us with news stating the deceased "left a wife and four children," it's, well, rather deflating. I found many instances of that reticence about divulging information, even well into the twentieth century.

Granted, some countries embed a far more generous zone of silence, for privacy purposes, in divulging, for instance, contents of some governmental records. While for my American ancestors, I need only wait a mere seventy two years before being able to view their names in U.S. Census records, countries like Canada set a ninety-two year wait, and Ireland and Great Britain espouse an even more conservative hundred year rule.

With limited access to the types of documents genealogists normally rely upon to build a family tree, the advent of DNA testing has indeed become a gift. The tools that have since been developed to help sort that avalanche of new data speed the research process even further. In Margaret Flannery's case, I still am working my way through the many DNA cousins said to be connected to her line. Having recently acquired the ProTools available at Ancestry.com has accelerated my ability to connect the dots between these DNA matches, thankfully, though I realize I still have a long way to go before I can check that finished task off my to-do list. 

Connecting DNA matches to my father-in-law's tree, while helpful—hey, I've found some willing collaborators among these DNA matches!—does not always guarantee that the results will automatically point us in the direction of the answer to my main question. I still want to know exactly where Margaret Flannery came from before she met her husband Denis Tully and settled with him high up in the mountain townland of Tountinna.

That, of course, was my main research goal for this past month. Or, to amend that statement, my erstwhile goal. Still, I have one more day to lay out the details of what I know, so far, about Margaret Flannery's roots back in Ireland. We'll talk about that tomorrow, and figure out then what to do next.

This Past Month: Plans versus Reality

 

On the first day of September, I launched into the exploration of an Irish immigrant woman in my father-in-law's family. Women in our family history are always hard to trace, and Margaret Flannery had had me stumped for the twenty years since an uncle had provided me with the handwritten document that even mentioned her maiden name. This month, I figured, was time to right that situation and paint a fuller picture of this bride of Denis Tully from Ballina in County Tipperary, Ireland.

I started off well enough, with an overview on the first day of my plans to "throw the net wide" to discover Margaret Flannery Tully's many descendants, courtesy of DNA test results, combined with my new subscription to Ancestry.com's ProTools. Besides that work, I mentioned on the second day that I also intended to seek information on the cluster of Flannery families who seemed to appear in her neighborhood, once the Tully family had made the big move from Ireland to a Canadian town in Ontario called Paris. 

Then, I got sick. I think you know the rest of the story. Part of my intention was, as I had done the previous month, to hunker down with my computer and scroll through online copies of centuries-old baptismal records, seeking any sign of Flannery family mentions, whether babies, parents, or godparents. Somehow, this month, I just wasn't up to that level of concentration.

For the longest time, I didn't do any research—and, face it, in the past I had usually found a way to rig a breakfast-in-bed set up so I could get work done on my computer, even while resting. But not this time. 

Though I ended up blasting through one of my biweekly report sessions without so much as a peep about it on the blog, after two weeks of this malaise, I did wince and check the numbers. Surprisingly, even the few days I was able to go online, I was able to find some DNA cousin connections and note them in my in-laws' tree.

Of course, now it has been another two weeks, so let's take a look at the numbers. Thankfully, I eventually got to the place where mindlessly scrolling through Ancestry hints was at least doing something besides sleeping. Apparently, that progress was not too bad. For my in-laws' tree in those past two biweekly reports, I moved the head count from 41,485 at mid-month to 41,674 today. In the past four weeks, that meant adding 335 new names, all somehow connected to Margaret Flannery's descendants—and most of them still residents in Canada (though some of them managed to slip across the border from Sarnia to Port Huron in Michigan). 

Some of that progress is thanks to recent additions of Canadian newspapers to the collection at  Newspapers.com. Much of the guidance has come from the ProTools ability to see matches of DNA matches, and in particular, their relationship connections. As to the specifics of what I found, though, we'll have to save the details for a wrap up in the remaining two days of this month.

Revisiting the Flannerys

 

I first discovered Margaret Flannery thanks to the thoughtfulness of a packrat relative. Uncle Ed, my father-in-law's older brother, had become the "keeper of the stuff," as author Denise Levenick calls it. In other words, Ed was the one who inherited all the "stuff" that his mother had kept before him—and she, in turn, had gotten it from her parents.

After Ed's passing, now years ago, several family members were sitting around his kitchen table when his widow brought out a box filled with some of that "stuff." There was, it seemed, something in there for everyone. Old keepsakes and memorabilia went to some of Ed's now-adult children who appreciated the nostalgia of times past. My husband was gifted with the World War II letters home from his own father, then serving in the Navy, to the family back in Chicago. And I, hoping for something to help with family history research, received a priceless gift: a handwritten letter from County Tipperary, Ireland, confirming the baptism of John Tully, my father-in-law's maternal grandfather.

As far as I was concerned, it was John Tully's mother who made the star appearance in that verification of his baptism. The letter identified her, complete with her maiden name: Margaret Flannery. Since then, I've explored what I could find of her family, both in Ballina, the place where the baptism was recorded, and even across the ocean in Paris, the small town in Ontario, Canada, where Margaret and her husband, Denis Tully, settled their family.

While receiving that document was an unexpected and irreplaceable gift, I have been able to trace Margaret after her arrival in Ontario—but not for long. Her earliest years in Canada unfortunately predate the available records from the local Catholic Church, as far as I and other descendants I've partnered with can tell. And I have yet to find any record of her death. Though it may not be obvious from her absence in the 1861 census that she had passed before that point, it is a given that at some point during that era, she certainly did so.

For the most part, thanks to collaboration with distant cousins in possession of labeled family photographs, I've been able to trace almost all of Margaret's children. DNA matches have guided me to build out the Flannery family tree even further. But the real key, I believe, will be to trace those collateral Flannery lines, especially considering the appearance of other Flannery families in close proximity to Margaret and Denis after they settled in Paris.

True, those could be coincidental appearances, but in a just-established town of barely one thousand people, I tend to favor such connections as a good sign. Take, for example, the appearance on the same page of the 1851 census on West River Street in Paris of both Denis and "Mrs." Tully and another family by the name of Flannery. Relatives? I've taken some time in the past to begin exploring that possibility, and we need to revisit that question once again this week.

Throwing the Net Wide

 

While last month may have been my moment to celebrate the small victories in ancestral research, this month I'm hoping to throw the net wide and pull in information on several family members. For September, we'll move on to another of my father-in-law's Irish great-grandmothers, this time looking at the Flannery family from County Tipperary.

Now that I'm equipped with Ancestry.com's ProTools—and especially the "Networks" beta version—I can easily put together a cluster of possibly related people. In this case, I'll be keeping close tabs on people with that same surname, both in the northern parts of County Tipperary, where my father-in-law's great-grandmother once lived, and onward into the 1850s and beyond, when she and her family began appearing in records in Canada.

Looking at clusters of connected people can be particularly helpful when we find no other pathway to move forward in our research. Particularly when working with families of Irish heritage, there are other clues which may help piece together a proposed family constellation, such as names of godparents for pre-famine baptisms in Ireland. Migrations en masse may also provide clues as to why names of neighbors back in County Tipperary soon afterwards showed up in census records in one particular town, far across the Atlantic Ocean. 

This month, we'll first review what we've already discovered about this great-grandmother Margaret Flannery, wife of Denis Tully. From there, we'll explore the other Flannery households which also appeared in records for Margaret's new home in Canada, as well as do a thorough search through church baptismal records back home in County Tipperary. As we widen the family network, we'll also keep an eye on any DNA matches related to this Flannery line to see what leads they may provide.

Granted, this month may be a repeat of last month's exhaustive searches through Catholic Church documents, but we'll do so, pen in hand. Any clue to help build this cluster of Flannery connections may lead us to the goal we're seeking: to connect Margaret Flannery with her siblings and parents, whoever they were.

Ancestor #9: Finding the Flannery FAN Club

 

Sometimes, it takes a village to find an ancestor. In the case of my father-in-law's Ballina bunch from County Tipperary, Ireland, my only hope of isolating the right Flannery ancestral line for the wife of Denis Tully may be to explore the entire village. At least, the work will call for a re-examination of the F.A.N. Club—Family, Associates, and Neighbors—of Irish emigrants Margaret Flannery and her husband, Denis Tully.

I had worked before on Margaret Flannery, my father-in-law's great-grandmother who married Denis Tully in Ballina, County Tipperary. It was far easier to find her with her family after they immigrated to Canada, but there were certainly signs that the Flannerys had lived in Ballina. The question still remains, though, about Margaret's parents and siblings—and who among them also made the voyage to Canada.

Fortunately, since the last time I worked on this ancestor for my Twelve Most Wanted in 2023, I've connected with two DNA matches researching the same surnames in the same county—an excellent bonus from genetic genealogy companies which provide the research tools to reach out to our distant DNA cousins. By the time I get to researching Ancestor #9 this fall, I will have covered quite a bit of background information through books and videos, thanks to a lively exchange of emails with these two researchers, in preparing to tackle this ninth challenge.

Unlike my goal for the other months during this Twelve Most Wanted sequence, September will enable me to broaden my horizons in searching for the parents of Margaret Flannery by taking into consideration those associates and neighbors whose names kept popping up along with hers, from Ireland to Canada. Even if we don't discover Margaret's parents' names, we'll hopefully build a network of relatives and other associates whose connections may help move the process forward another step or two. 

It's (Not) a Wrap

 

In genealogy, it's never "a wrap." There is always more work to be done, another generation to find, elusive documents to track down. That, at least, seems to be the story for my father-in-law's Irish side of the family. We've spent a month—again!—chipping away at his great-grandmother Margaret Flannery's side of the family, but with little more to tell than we had gathered after the last attempt. And now, that month is over.

I've got a bit of reading to do before tackling this family line once again, now that I've purchased Irish Migrants in the Canadas. Once again, I'll comb through the listed family trees of my husband's DNA matches at five different companies in hopes more distant Flannery cousins have tested. But my real hope will be to stumble upon yet another Flannery descendant who inherited that packrat, er, keepsake tendency to never discard any slip of paper in the family's records, no matter how insignificant. After all, if it weren't for descendants of two of Margaret Flannery's children holding on to a written confirmation of their baptismal record from the parish of Ballina and Boher back in County Tipperary, I wouldn't even have known her maiden name.

From this point onward, we'll move to another challenge in my father-in-law's family history, but this time it won't be an Irish immigrant. Last winter, when I planned out my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors to research for this year, I could already tell that I might be facing three brick wall struggles in a row with his side of the family.

So, for my third research challenge, I decided to switch to another member of the Stevens family—but one blended in to the family by marriage to a widower. Tomorrow, we'll start a new month with an introduction to the only Stevens grandmother my father-in-law and his siblings ever knew.

Not a Moment Too Soon

 

Just as I was puzzling over the lack of direction in searching for Flannery ancestors—as they say, not a moment too soon—a book arrived in the mail for me. And though I'll close out my official Twelve Most Wanted search for my father-in-law's Flannery ancestors with the close of this month, this book will form my continuing education plan for not only this family line, but for that of all our family's other Irish immigrants to Canada.

The book was recommended to me in a reader's comment here at A Family Tapestry in a previous year when I had tackled this same family history question. Being an excruciating procrastinator, I only ordered the book this past month, while reviewing the work I had done on the Flannerys in past years' blog posts. And since I tucked in a week's trip to a conference in Houston this month, the book's arrival on my doorstep meant waiting until I came back home—just in time to wrap up the month's research and move onward.

What arrived on my doorstep was a 424-page paperback second edition of Bruce S. Elliott's Irish Migrants in the Canadas. As professor emeritus of eighteenth and nineteenth century social history at Ottawa's Carleton University, Bruce Elliott used the book's platform to delve into a different approach on examining Irish immigrant arrivals specifically from County Tipperary in Ireland—the perfect focus for my Flannery research problem.

While the index does not appear to include any specific entries on the surnames I'm studying, that is not the point of the volume—although several immigrant families are mentioned specifically by name, which can be helpful for some family historians. The value of the work is to guide us through the bigger picture of the immigration patterns found through the author's extensive research both in North America and in Ireland. The underlying historical forces which coalesced to impel many in County Tipperary to migrate, particularly to Canada, will help form the basis of our understanding of why our own ancestors chose that particular route.

When the time comes for me to revisit my unfinished research on the Flannery family in the County of Brant in Ontario, having studied the chapters in this book will have provided me a broadened understanding of the impetus behind the Flannery family's decision to leave home and family for new possibilities in a New World. 

Who's Left Behind?

 

After bemoaning my possible fate of conceding loss to another brick wall ancestor, I got to wondering: who was left behind? After all, the Flannery folk who made it to Canada must have left behind some of their relatives in their homeland in County Tipperary, Ireland. And there was one document which I could consult to at least console myself that the Flannery trail hadn't yet gone cold: Griffith's Valuation.

Thanks to signs of approximate birth years for the youngest members of the Flannery families in the 1851 Canadian census, I can estimate dates of each family's arrival in their New World. For my Denis Tully family, his wife Margaret Flannery must have given birth to baby William by 1849. Likewise for the Edmund Flannery household, where baby John made his Canadian debut about 1847. And John Tully's wife, likely Kitty Flannery, gave birth to Margaret in Canada by 1849.

Granted, that puts all three families as leaving Ireland before those dates, and long before the completion of Griffith's Valuation back in the "North Riding" region of County Tipperary, the emigrants' original home. But even though Griffith's was said to have been completed in that county at the end of June of 1853, the resultant catalog of tenants there might give us an idea of the names of Flannerys left behind.

Ballina, the Catholic parish where many of our family's Flannery and Tully relatives were baptized—also the name of the townland where the church was located—was in the civil parish of Templeachally. Having a map to determine the relative placement of these townlands and civil parishes in County Tipperary certainly helps when taking a look at the list of heads of households in Griffith's. 

So who was left in Templeachally after our Flannery relatives left for Canada? Doing a search in the North Riding portion of County Tipperary for Flannerys in Griffith's Valuation, I found names like Michael, John, and William, as well as Anne. Of course, that was a search based on the spelling as Flannery, but as I've already seen from baptismal records, that surname could morph into many different spelling iterations, so repeating that search may yield more names to consider. And based on residences given in some baptismal and marriage records, searching in those nearby civil parishes may also point out other possible relatives remaining behind (and who survived the famine).

While that listing doesn't point me in a precise direction, it does at least give me a universe of possible first names to consider as I work my way through the maze of Flannery connections both in County Tipperary and across the ocean in Ontario, Canada.

Brick Walls, Canadians, and D N A

 

There comes a time in every family historian's life, I suppose, when one needs to concede arrival at a brick wall. In the case of my father-in-law's Flannery roots, that point may well be looming. On the one end, I'm stuck wandering in circles after the 1851 census, back in Ontario, Canada, seeking whatever became of his great-grandmother Margaret Flannery, while back at their pre-1850 origin in County Tipperary, Ireland, all signs of life for either her Flannery family or that of her husband, Denis Tully, disappear in the early 1830s.

It is, however, still hard to give up. That is what prompted this weekend's turn to DNA results. I experimented at first with searching for other matches whose family tree includes the surname Flannery. Several results popped up—even one whose own surname is actually Flannery. There is, however, one problem with building out our Flannery tree to the present time to connect with such matches: for those who live in Canada, I have few resources to help research living Canadians.

Privacy is highly valued, and rightly so, but I can think of so many resources I have in my own country to find living descendants of my family's ancestors. Many of them are accessible on genealogy services like Ancestry or MyHeritage, while Internet search engines can handily go beyond that to fill in the blanks. But for Canada? No matter how close Canada may seem to me, that is a different research world entirely.

Sometimes, as the saying goes, you can't get there from here. Not easily, at least. Though those Flannery descendants may have migrated to the western portions of Canada as our family has done in the United States, that border between neighboring countries seems impermeable.

There are ways to get around that impasse, as I've discovered while researching an Irish puzzle a while back. Even searching using Google.ie rather than the usual Google suffix here in America brought up a different set of search results for my Irish question. It will likely be the same for my Canadian puzzle this month. It's just a matter of digging deeper, checking resources, and experimenting with different approaches. 

And then, there's always that old fashioned approach, too. You know, just sending a message directly to that DNA cousin. Even in our high-tech world, the personal touch can still bring us a long way.  

Capturing the Clusters

 

Trying to find some clue in Irish baptismal records regarding the extended family of Margaret Flannery, my father-in-law's great-grandmother, I gleaned all the information on Flannery children baptized in the Ballina Catholic parish in County Tipperary from its earliest records up until about 1850. My next step was to find the names of each child's godparents, then to capture those names in clusters of likely family members.

My reason for capturing the clusters comes from an article on baptism traditions from the website Ireland Reaching Out. The main direction in that article assured me that the godparents selected for any given child were either siblings or siblings-in-law of either parent of the child to be baptized.

Thus, after gathering all the Flannery baptisms in the Ballina parish and separating them out by townlands of residence, I then looked for family connections through the godparents. While the idea seems sound enough, there were a few roadblocks. First was that some priests did not enter the place of residence for the parents. But following that objection, the second problem was that it was challenging trying to read the handwriting of the priests tasked with entering the baptismal records. And of course, spelling variations were all across the board.

Some of the clusters of names became obvious, such as the sponsors for children of John Flannery and Norry Johnson, some of whom also had the same surname as the child's mother. Some of the surnames of godparents caught my eye immediately, such as the surnames Ryan—name of another Tully family in-law in a subsequent generation—and Keogh, surname shared by Edmund Flannery's wife, Margaret Keough. These names might be obvious because I already know what became of the family in subsequent generations—or perhaps they are providing an indication that those same surnames have recycled through the community for many generations of marriages preceding ours.

Now that I've harvested all the data to the best of my chicken-scratch-reading ability, I'll review all the names to see whether I can cluster them by location. There is, however, one further problem with hoping that will provide a streamlined answer: while it seems the god-parent selection process seems firmly set, I have no way to intuit when a family might have deviated from the norm. If a pattern does show up, all well and good. If it doesn't, then it will be back to DNA to see whether any further Flannery matches surface through that approach.

Finding the Path

 

Baptismal records for Catholic ancestors who lived in Ireland pre-famine years can be hard to find—and once found, can be hard to read. Right now, I'm on a mission to capture all the entries for Flannery family members who might have been related to Margaret Flannery, my father-in-law's great-grandmother. My hope is to find the path from her Catholic parish in County Tipperary to the townlands where her family lived.

All the Flannery records I'm searching are from the Catholic parish in Ballina, but I already know from our family's visit there in 2015 that the priest from the church in Ballina also served as a sort of circuit rider, leaving the actual town to circle through the townlands to baptize and administer other sacraments of the faith. The records he kept usually indicated the actual location of the parishioner's residence.

I began my search by setting up a table to organize all the Flannery baptismal records for the Catholic parish of Ballina. Then, I looked for each entry which included a child surnamed Flannery. I noted date of baptism, mother's maiden name (if given), name of each godparent, and residence. Children born to the same set of Flannery parents were listed together under their parents' heading.

Then, I looked to find the locations of each residence. Right now, I've located several different locations, showing me that there were a number of different townlands where Flannery kin had lived during the time frame of my search—from about 1833 through 1850.

Among the most often repeated locations in the townlands of County Tipperary was one called Ballycorrigan. Searching on townlands.ie showed me that Ballycorrigan is just east of Ballina, a reasonable walking distance to the church. John Flannery and his wife Norry Johnson lived there, as well as William Flannery and his wife Kitty Keough, and Patrick Flannery and his wife Sally Ryan.

A second place with several Flannery families was named Curraghmore. Farther still from the church in Ballina, Curraghmore was actually in the next civil parish to the east, a place called Kilmastulla—another name I've found on the baptismal records for Flannerys.

The next step for me will be to look through those baptismal records for children of possible Flannery sisters of the men already found in the records, to see if I can spot any further patterns, using traditional clustering methods like the names of godparents. My hope is that some patterns will emerge to provide suggestions as to how to cluster each of these Flannery families with possible siblings. We've tried that approach before with Margaret Flannery's husband's Tully line, although that attempt turned out to be rather inconclusive. Hopefully, something more obvious will emerge for the Flannery line next week.

Signs They Were There

 

The further I reach into old Canadian—and then Irish—records, the more I see signs not only that our Flannerys and Tullys were there, but ways that they continued to connect. Take this July 1847 baptismal record for John Flannery, son of Edmund Flannery and Margaret "Quogh" in the Roman Catholic records of Ontario, Canada. For the godparents of this son born on June 24, the priest had listed John Gorman and Margaret Tully. Tully had been the married name of Edmund's suspected sister Margaret, and Gorman is a surname spotted as neighbors of our original Denis Tully family from the 1851 census.

Denis Tully, my father-in-law's great-grandfather, had married someone named Margaret Flannery, but being that they were both immigrants to Canada West from Ireland, I needed to trace their path back to their homeland. What signs could I find that the Flannery family was there in County Tipperary as I had supposed? That was my next step.

Fortunately, there were several signs, embedded in the scrawl of religious documented in the all-but-underground Catholic church of the time. Referring to the 1851 census where we had already found them in the village of Paris in Brant County, Ontario, I knew their children's names: Patrick, Cornelius, and Michael. (Youngest son John, as we've already seen, had been born after the family arrived in Canada.)

Yet looking to baptismal records back in County Tipperary, in the area surrounding the town of Ballina, I couldn't find a record for any of these children of Edmund and Margaret. What I did find was a record naming those parents for two other children, children who apparently died in the late 1840s—and possibly became the impetus for the family's decision to migrate to Canada. Those two were Ellen, baptized in April 1843, and Edmund, baptized in 1845.

Those two baptismal records garnered a few interesting details. For Ellen, the record represented the parents as "Ned"—a possible nickname for Edmund—and gave Margaret's maiden name as Keogh, a more likely spelling for her name than the Quogh rendition in her son John's Canadian baptismal record. For Ellen's younger brother Edmund in April 1845, his parents were seemingly listed in a rush: "Edmd" for his father, with Margaret's name likely abbreviated as "Marg.," read possibly in error as Mary.

While looking at these baptismal records, I also gleaned the names of each child's sponsors, just in case those names turned out to be significant to us in our current chase for DNA cousins. For Ellen, the godparents were John Keogh, likely Margaret's brother, and Winny, a woman whose maiden name keeps appearing in family records but seems difficult to render properly: Finn? Linnel? For Edmund, the godparents were Laurence and Mary Mullins.

Sometimes, it seems that to find the key to connect the extended family constellation, we need to reach ever farther in records. I find myself in that place, working with this Flannery line, so I did a search on a collection of Irish baptismal records, limiting the results to County Tipperary and Ballina. I'll glean all the pertinent names, including sponsors, and see if I can find any patterns among the Flannery names. After all, traditional Irish naming patterns may help me make some presumed connections to compare with the distant Flannery cousins I'm working with online.

In the meantime, in perusing those County Tipperary records for Flannerys, I couldn't help but notice one marriage record which also linked to our Tully line: someone named John Tully—but not ours—marrying someone named Kitty Flannery. These two likely also followed my father-in-law's great-grandparents from Ballina to Canada, if they are the same as the John Tully family in the 1851 Canadian census. Though I haven't yet been able to figure out just how this John Tully connects to our Denis Tully—hint: he is not Denis' son by that same name, as that is our fully researched direct line—this time we'll take it from the Flannery side and see if we can connect Kitty to her relatives in County Tipperary, as well. 

Rebuilding the Tree

 

Can you build another person's family tree?

No, I didn't ask whether you could copy someone else's family tree; I said actually do the work yourself and build a tree from another family's starting point. For some of our DNA matches unlinked from any family tree data, sometimes that is our only choice: roll up our sleeves and build the tree ourselves.

Not that I'm in that exact situation. The tree I'm building now will hopefully become part of my own father-in-law's tree, but for now, I'm not quite sure, so this is an experiment. My goal is to find a connection for my father-in-law's great-grandmother Margaret Flannery, wife of Irish immigrant Denis Tully from Ballina in County Tipperary, Ireland.

As it so happens, finding Denis Tully's household in the 1851 Canadian census revealed some neighbors of interest: the family of a man named Edmund Flannery. As if that weren't enough of an impetus, further down the same census page I discovered another immigrant Tully man whose wife happened to be a Flannery. Family members? Perhaps we'll see in this week's brief tour of what can be found, looking both backwards and forwards on that Flannery family tree.

My first step has been to add, then detach, Edmund Flannery from Margaret Flannery's part of my father-in-law's tree. That way, he is still in my database, but not in a position which might mislead an unsuspecting researcher to copy that detail—which, for now, could just as easily be a mistake as a presumed sibling.

From there, I'm beginning to add Edmund's children to that same database, under their disconnected father's record. So far, I've only been able to add Edmund's oldest son, Patrick. Included in Patrick's line was his wife, Margaret Gorman, Canadian-born daughter of Irish immigrants whose place in that same Canadian census was only one page prior to Edmund's own household.

Patrick and Margaret's family included several daughters and one lone son, at least according to the next document where I found Patrick's growing family listed: the 1891 Canadian census. From eldest to youngest in stair-step fashion, they were Mary, Margaret, Ellen, Agnes, James, and Kate.

As I've been busy adding documentation as confirmation of the connection—and in hopes of building the tree out further, in case it garners some additional Flannery DNA connections—the facts I'm uncovering jog my memory, and I realize I've run into Patrick before. Long before, it turns out, I found him on another failed research expedition to uncover our Margaret Flannery's roots. Patrick Flannery was the unfortunate sixty three year old man found drowned in a mill race in 1895.

What's a mill race, I had wondered at the time. Thanks to some help from a reader, and an incredible stroke of good fortune in that the only year the Essex Free Press had been placed online then was for that same year—1895—I at least learned of Patrick Flannery's sad demise. Since then, of course, much more material has come online, and I have found the death record for our Patrick, informing us that his death was—thankfully—an accidental drowning and not due to foul play. And, oh, that he was born in County Tipperary, and that the reporting party, at least, was from Paris in the County of Brant, our Patrick's Canadian home. But not much more than that.

From that eldest Flannery son Patrick from the 1851 census, I'll continue the same research project for his younger brothers. Hopefully, today's much-improved access to more online records will yield me better results than the last time I attempted this same project. In the meantime, we also need to take a look backwards to see whether we can find any documentation now on those Irish-born sons of Edmund Flannery back in County Tipperary.

Friends and Flannerys

 

Does that F.A.N. Club notion really hold? Could immigrant neighbors really have been more than just friends? Was it family or just coincidence that after a trip of more than three thousand miles, Denis Tully and his wife ended up with neighbors surnamed Flannery?

It all started with an ink blot and a curious hesitance to enter the actual name of married women in the 1851 census for the village of Paris in Brant County, Ontario. There was my father-in-law's great-grandfather Denis Tully, listed with his forty three year old wife, entered simply as "Mrs." Only a few lines below that in the same census record was an entry for another family with the surname Flannery. Predictably, the wife's name was also entered as "Mrs.," but the husband's name was aggravatingly obscured by an inconvenient ink blot.

Edman, I guessed—but I could hardly be sure. What kind of name might that have been? Besides not wanting to be socially forward about women he didn't know, this enumerator apparently hadn't shined in spelling during his school years.

No matter. What I did want to know was whether Edmund—as I presumed the official had meant to write—might have been an in-law of Denis Tully. After all, Denis had married a Flannery, himself. Perhaps ink-blot Edman might have been his brother-in-law. If so, I couldn't resist the thought that Edman might lead me back to the place in County Tipperary, Ireland, where both the Tullys and the Flannerys were said to have originated.

That is still my question today, though I've since found plenty of indicators that there were other Flannerys in and near the Catholic parish of Ballina. Reason I'm revisiting this question: another DNA connection has contacted me about a possible Flannery link in Canada. We're forming a Flannery collaboration. While we are comparing notes, it might be helpful to outline what I know about this Flannery family in Brant County before stepping backwards in time to their origins in Ireland.

That 1851 census showed a household with four children, having a similar pattern to our Tullys: all born in Ireland, with the exception of the baby of the family, born after the family's arrival in Canada. In this case, the baby was John Flannery, and at the point of that enumeration year, his upcoming birthday would have made him four years of age—in other words, sometime during the year of 1852.

Along with John—and after a significant gap in ages—were his older brothers Michael (aged 15), Cornelius (aged 17), and Patrick (aged 19). I've tried tracing these sons forward in time, as well as looking for their Flannery father back in County Tipperary. Now that I've found a possible Flannery cousin to compare notes with, thanks to a referral by another DNA match, we'll spend the rest of the month seeing what can be found on the extended Flannery family. 

A Flannery Family Focus

 

Would it be possible to solve a family history mystery in the span of ten days? Could we, if we've already tackled the question twice before, manage to handle it before the close of this month? I'm not sure, but I'm willing to give it a try. After all, my planned research project for this month has fizzled out—yes, I can be a wimp that way—and I need to find something to replace it.

Into this perfect research storm steps an unsuspecting DNA match who provides the inspiration. Actually, this researcher is a genealogy friend of a friend, referred to me by another DNA match who is also working on the same line. Together, we are tackling various aspects of the trail-gone-cold of my father-in-law's immigrant great-grandparents Denis Tully and Margaret Flannery. After a volley of emails with this new-found connection, I decided I found my blogging answer: make the Flannery family line my focus for the rest of July.

Oh, we have tackled this project several times in the past. Sometimes I feel as if it were all to no avail—my immediate reaction when thinking back to the two times I've blogged about the Flannery family in 2015 and, more recently, just last August. But now that I look back to some of the posts on the Flannery family here at A Family Tapestry, I realize I did make progress. It's time to regroup and move a step beyond.

So this is it: the Flannerys will be our focus for the remainder of the month, both in County Tipperary, where they originated, and where they emigrated, a place which was once called Canada West. There are several neighboring Flannery families I've discovered in the past few times this surname has been reviewed, so tomorrow we'll take a look at those loose ends and see whether we can find a clear path forward.

Some Fly; Some Crawl

 

When it comes to genealogy, some weeks of research just fly by. Others barely crawl. These past two weeks have been examples of the latter.

With hope eternal, I always return to those research puzzles which keep me stumped, concerning my father-in-law's fairly recent Irish roots. I'm not sure why, but each time I revisit these research questions, I hope for a better result than the last time I passed by this way. Perhaps I should learn from such experiences.

That said, the numbers show what I mean. It's time for my biweekly progress report, and on my father-in-law's tree, I've only managed to add sixty four new names. While that may seem like a decent number, it pales in comparison to the months when I work on either my mother-in-law's line or my own mother's ancestry. Still, my in-laws' tree has 33,122 people documented now. While most of the past two weeks' progress can be attributed to adding cousins descended from the Flannery and Tully line couple I've been struggling with, at least there is some momentum.

On my own parents' tree, since I have ongoing projects still churning out results in the background, it was interesting to see about the same level of progress as with my in-laws' tree. I added sixty three new individuals to a tree which now totals 33,899 documented individuals, mostly descendants of collateral lines to help me with placing DNA matches in my tree.

With my father-in-law's Irish roots, it is becoming more clear to me that the only way to determine which lines are related to him may well be through DNA testing. Unless more records are discovered in Ireland, my only other hope is that further developments in Ontario, Canada, may uncover the records needed from that portion of the family's multi-step immigration process.

At this point, I'm banking on the Canadian side of the equation far more than I can ever hope for the Irish part. The realities of historic record keeping can sometimes take a harsh toll on our hopes to learn more about our family's roots.