Getting Stuck on Sticking Points

 

Lately, I feel as if I am conducting negotiations between two parties who claim to be one and the same person. The sticking point is that these two men with different names seem to claim the same parents and the same year of birth. Yet, not being twins, that can't be possible.

The one son was baptized as John Cullinane in County Kerry, Ireland, on July 24, 1860. His baptismal record lists his father as Daniel Cullinane and his mother as Gubbenela Falvey—surely an attempt at providing a Latin version of the decidedly Irish name Gobnait. And then, poof! He disappeared from records, as far as I can find.

The other son, claiming the name Patrick Cullinane, may have been born on June 15, 1860. That, at least, is what someone thought when they reported that date for his birth. And yet, that Patrick also claimed that his parents were Daniel and "Debby"—the possible nickname for Gobnait or Gobineta (the likely Latin version mis-entered as Gubbenela).

That second Cullinane son may or may not have been the son of our Daniel Cullinane and Gobnait (or Debora) Falvey. That that detail can't easily be determined, however, means delving deeper into the identity of this particular Patrick Cullinane after his immigration from County Kerry, Ireland, to Boston, Massachusetts.

To make matters worse, Boston may have laid claim to not one but two or three men by that same name, Patrick Cullinane. And each may have married a woman who went by the same nickname as the others.

With marching orders like that, the rest of this month's search for the parents of Gobnait Falvey Cullinane—and thus her sister Johanna, my father-in-law's great-grandmother—may take some wild and crazy turns.

Bound for Boston

 

It should be no surprise to see Irish emigrants embarking for the American city of Boston. Of all the American cities, Boston may be considered the quintessential destination, even more so than New York City, another key port for immigrants. In the case of DNA matches descending from Johanna Falvey's possible sister Gobnait, Boston apparently was their ancestral port of choice.

There are still problems with following that branch of the Falvey family from County Kerry to America. Judging by my husband's DNA matches, as he is the surrogate tester on behalf of my father-in-law, who is long since deceased, Boston is among other locations where Falvey descendants have gathered. The ever-changing name for the matches' matriarch—sometimes Debora or Debby, sometimes Abby for Abigail—still plagues me with doubts that I am following the right family line.

Hopefully, during this week as we review the various branches of the Falvey line pointed out by their descendants' telltale DNA, we can review some of the documentation and determine whether there is any reason beyond name-switching to cause us to doubt we've found the right line. A cogent negative argument is just as important as explaining why a connection is correct. There are so many ways to go astray when researching these Irish lines with such potential to stumble on name twins and other genealogical hazards.

Before we zoom in on our most likely Boston immigrant connection, though, I need to settle the issue of why I cannot find the baptismal record for Johanna, herself. That has been bothering me for a long time. Despite searching page by page through baptismal records for the Kilcummin parish where the Falvey family went to church, I have yet to find a likely document. Tomorrow, we'll take that brief detour to make some notes on possible explanations, before we move on to examine the documents in the Boston area allowing us to track the descendants of Gobnait or "Debora" Falvey.

When Irish Names get Tangled With Latin

 

It may be all well and good to learn the traditional Irish naming pattern and then determine who an ancestor's likely parents might have been. But when we go searching for that brick wall ancestor's possible siblings back in the homeland, things can get tangled quickly.

The problem lies between the Catholic tradition of memorializing saints through bestowing their names upon the family's newborns and the sticking point of recording those acts of adoration in a foreign language. 

In the case of Johanna Falvey's family back in County Kerry, that foreign language of record, at least for the Church, was Latin, while the Falveys—undoubtedly for centuries—probably conversed day to day in their native Irish tongue. Not that there weren't Irish saints, but that all records were entered by priests in Latin.

Tracing the baptismal records of Patrick and Anna Falvey's children gives us not one, but two apt illustrations. Their daughter, baptized in February of 1830, was listed in the parish record as Gobineta. When I trace the lines of Falvey DNA matches backwards in time, I can see that she must have married someone in County Kerry named Daniel Cullinane. However. if I follow the baptismal records for the Cullinanes' children, the mother's name appears alternately as variants of Gobineta or totally different names, such as Debora. Tracing one supposed DNA descendant, that name also appears as Abby. Were these three different wives of the same Daniel Cullinane?

Take this other Falvey example, Gobineta's younger brother Demetrius, baptized in January of 1837. When I try to trace his line down to the present, I find nothing. But my husband has a DNA match whose ancestor was named Jeremiah Falvey—another given name that sounds just about as Irish as Demetrius. What's going on here?

Searching for guides to how the Irish handled the sometimes awkward mismatch between what was on the record and what was used around the home when mom or dad called that child for dinner, I had to locate more than one resource. The FamilySearch wiki provided a useful chart of "Given Name Equivalents" to help me with Gobineta and Demetrius, but I had to use the "find" function to locate some details.

Gobnait, as it turns out, was the actual Irish name. Apparently, the priest recording the Falveys' daughter in the baptismal records tried to compromise, giving a Latin twist to the decidedly Irish saint's name Gobnait. From the FamilySearch wiki chart, I can see that Gobnait was used interchangeably with Abigail and Debora. Thus, in searching for Gobnait Falvey's name in subsequent records, I'll need to be prepared to look also for these alternate names.

As for Demetrius, that baptismal name was not given as an alternate for another Irish name in the wiki chart, but I did find information elsewhere. A listing of Irish given names at rootsireland.ie informed me that the traditional Irish name Darby is sometimes substituted by Demetrius—and also is considered an alternate for Dermot or Diarmuid. Those alternates, in turn, showed up in some unsourced lists on some sites on the (now very) old RootsWeb—such as here, and here, if you can stand reading despite the aggravating placement of ads—and could also be a substitute for the name Jeremiah. Or you can simply turn to a reliable source like John Grenham and glean his quick listing of some Latin to Irish equivalents to find the same information.

Thus, finding DNA matches whose pedigree leads back to someone named Jeremiah rather than Demetrius, or Debora or Abby instead of Gobnait, may not be such bad news, after all. I'd say it's time to start building out those branches and checking the documentation connecting each generations from Johanna's siblings to the present.

Those Falvey Forebears: What the DNA has to Say

 

There is another tale to be told about these forebears of my father-in-law's brick wall ancestor, Johanna Falvey. That is the telltale report held within these family members' DNA. With Johanna being my husband's second great-grandmother, any third cousins descended from her would still be within the range of discovery, if any of those third cousins would think to test. (Hint, hint: there are a few sales popping up lately, and if not now, surely when the holiday season arrives would be a golden opportunity.)

Even DNA matches who could point out a possible sibling for Johanna would be sterling. Granted, such descendants would then be fourth cousins, a much smaller match. But they might still be able to wave enough DNA in their representative sample to raise the Falvey banner for me to spot.

That, in fact, is what I'm on the lookout for right now. Just at Ancestry.com's DNA, my husband has eleven possible Falvey connections. Six of them descend directly from Johanna herself, and I know how each of them fits into my father-in-law's family tree. In addition to that, there are four more who descend from a possible sister who moved to New Zealand, exactly the detail we had found in Johanna's own obituary. And yet another DNA match descends from a different sister.

Using the ProTools "Shared Matches" device at Ancestry, I can then extend those eleven discoveries to see other matches connected to our Falvey cousins. So far, those who immigrated to the United States seem to center in either Massachusetts or Michigan, likely signifying a connection to the same Falvey ancestors.

To discover the connection may require me to do some tree building on floating branches, to allow me to sort out which Falvey ancestors each match points to. This, of course, will take some time—but that is what this month may be all about. We'll certainly be doing some experimenting with ways to open up the stories behind these Irish Falvey ancestors from County Kerry.

Finding Falveys, the Next Generation

 

When I first discovered that my father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna had the maiden name Falvey, I thought I had hit the research jackpot. Surely, that was a unique name—unusual enough to grant me the keys to open that brick wall's hidden door. Then I pulled up a surname distribution map. That told me an entirely different story. In Johanna's native County Kerry, Falveys were everywhere.

Over the years—and even as recent as August of last year—I've chipped away at Johanna Falvey's story. Since after her marriage to John Kelly, she and her family were among immigrants to America long past the famine years, it was easy to trace her family's life in Fort Wayne, Indiana. But back home in Ireland? Not as much.

For this month's Twelve Most Wanted, I want to return to explore Johanna's roots. However, this time I'll try a more experimental approach. I believe Johanna's parents may have been Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming, but I need to test that theory, both with records in Ireland, and through those records embedded in our flesh and blood, our DNA.

Tomorrow, we'll start with a brief review of who Johanna was, and what records eluded me, the last time I had attempted researching her roots. From that point, we'll explore just why Patrick Falvey and Anne Fleming might have been a reasonable choice to lead us back through time in the Falvey family history. And we'll meet some possible other siblings in that family constellation as we work our way through September.

Reminder From a Scrap of Paper

 

Notes written to myself show up in the most unexpected places, and at times when I least would expect them to remain pertinent. One scrap of paper, retrieved from a cranny where I was searching for something else, provided a timely reminder—yet, given the passing of time, taunted me and caused me to ponder what's left in the discovery's wake.

I had first written out the note—ironically on some scrap paper printed with the statement, "The greatest casualty is being forgotten"—during a class I was taking at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. The instructor had shared a quote gleaned from a volume of British history, which he felt was also applicable to the use of computerized research tools we were then accessing to trace our family history. I thought it was pertinent to what was unfolding in my own life and research.

The quote made such an impact on me that I later wove it into a post here at A Family Tapestry. It was a simple, straightforward observation:

Because so much less time is spent searching...for relevant material, more time can be spent assessing the meaning of the content.

And finding that note here, after spending a solid month not finding the details I had sought on Anna Flanagan Malloy's origin in County Limerick, Ireland, I realize this quote needs an addendum: the time spent searching is relational to the amount of relevant material still in existence and accessible. For those records never preserved—or the ones now facing the possibility of no longer being valued—no amount of dedicated search time will uncover their existence. We can only find what is already there to be found. The search prowess of technology is only as meaningfully valuable as the material it can surface for those wanting to know. 

Add to the Research Wish List: Legible Handwriting

 

For one last, desperate attempt at rounding out the extended family picture for Anna Flanagan Malloy, my father-in-law's great-grandmother, I returned to church records of the 1800s at the Catholic parish of Ballyagran in County Limerick. Those, if you remember, were spotty records; if they had been a complete collection, I'd have known by now which sibling or in-law had stood at the 1848 baptism of Anna's daughter as godparents.

Preserved baptismal records would have been a nice touch, but there was something else to add to that wish list: legible handwriting. The priest keeping the records for Ballyagran seemed to be in constant fear that someone was about to snatch the very records from his hands before the ink dried.

When I located the Ballyagran records online, I first looked at entries for the Flanagan family. Then, since Anna's niece Johanna Flanagan had married someone named John Lee, I was curious to see whether I'd find any connection between the two surnames back in their homeland. Doing a search specifically on that surname Lee limited to Ballyagran, I did find five baptisms and one entry for a marriage.

Here is what I found, as best as could be read, considering the abysmal handwriting. The earliest record was a baptism for Catharine Lee on September 21, 1842. Her parents were likely Thomas Lee and Brigida, a woman whose maiden name may have been Fox or Fos. Brigida's brother was the likely godfather, though I can't read his given name. Margarita Dineen was the godmother.

Next was Margaret Lee, baptised on March 3, 1843. Born to parents David Lee and another Brigida—maiden name recorded as Molony—she had godparents David Lee and Margarita...um...Nojan???

Johannam Lee was baptized on February 16, 1852. Father Jacobis Lee was likely called James in real life. His wife was listed as Maria McAuliffe. After that is where I run into more legibility issues: godfather Patritius Brunniham (?) and godmother Johanna McAuliffe.

The next two baptisms were much later, after a wide gap in the records. Jacobus Lee was baptized May 26, 1864, born to David Lee and another Maria with an illegible surname—not to mention sponsors Jacobus and Ellina with equally unreadable surnames. And on December 9, 1869, Danielem Lee, son of David Lee and Maria Neiland (?) was baptized in the presence of sponsors Michaele Boice and Brigida Lee.

The final record found was an entry for a February 1854 marriage of David Lee and Maria Nulan (?), which gives us a clue about the maiden name of Daniel's mother. If this Maria was indeed the same woman as Daniel's mother, despite the differing spelling of the surname, then the records are likely missing several baptisms in those ten years between the couple's two appearances in the church's records.

Such, apparently, was the case for much of the religious records of this particular Irish parish, giving a visible illustration of why it is so frustrating to find signs of our Irish ancestors on paper, even as recent as the mid-nineteenth century. 

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. 

When Every Piece Falls Into Place

 

One aspect of using DNA testing to flesh out a family tree is the added ability to glean missing details through what we discover about a collateral line's descendants. Some lines of descent can be easily filled in, pointing back to an ancestor, but other ancestors seem to yield nothing more than gaps in the information. That's the way it's been with my father-in-law's Flanagan ancestors from County Limerick, Ireland: a story full of gaps.

When every piece does fall into place, though, there you can find your answers. In the case of Anna Flanagan Malloy, the woman whose husband sent her an ambiguous letter which left her chasing him to America, there has been one Flanagan DNA match which seems to point back to Anna's own roots, yet I couldn't be too sure.

This DNA cousin's direct line pointed back to a Flanagan man living in the right place at about the right time to suggest he might be Anna's brother. Then, too, he could have been a cousin. With big gaps in the Catholic records for that particular religious parish, it was impossible to find any marriage or baptismal records to provide convincing proof of the two Flanagans' relationship.

Thankfully, over the years since I first found that key DNA match, others related to that family have opted to do their own DNA test. Coupled with Ancestry.com's ProTools, I could then build out that Flanagan tree in a floating branch within my father-in-law's tree, to more clearly see the relationships contained within that branch. With test results for each of these Flanagan candidates, I can now test my hypothesis to see whether that Flanagan ancestor would be our Anna's brother, or merely a cousin. Hopefully, the numbers on these five current DNA matches will be sufficient to soon answer that question.

With a Little Help From Some Friends

 

The trouble with using DNA tests to determine the missing people in our family tree flares up when we have a bit too many blanks among our ancestors' descendants. Right now, I'm still struggling with the missing parents and siblings of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Anna Flanagan. I do, however, have a very few DNA matches who may well fit into that branch of our family tree. The question is: just how do these living people fit into the puzzle left behind by unnamed ancestral members of the Flanagan collateral lines?

Thankfully, in this Irish Flanagan case from County Limerick, I can reach out for a little help from some genealogy friends. Yesterday, I mentioned reviewing some old notes from one Flanagan match. Following the details provided in those old emails, then combining them with observations gleaned from other Ancestry subscribers' Flanagan trees, I have been able to build out some additional lines for my own tree.

That, in turn, has allowed me to spot surnames of DNA matches who had eluded me in earlier attempts at match-making. Children of a Flanagan daughter now sporting a married surname unknown to me can be just as puzzling as any other Irish descendant—until a genealogy friend points out the connection. That is the value of reaching out and connecting with other researchers. In some cases, those genea-friends can even turn out to be distant cousins.

Now that I've been able to add some married names to my tree (still in a floating branch, as I'm ever the cautious one), it's time to take a fresh look at a handful of DNA matches who have had me stumped. Maybe this time, their results will fall handily into this Flanagan puzzle and help me calculate whether their ancestor was our Anna's sibling, or merely another cousin living in the same Irish townland.

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.

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. 

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.

Picking up Where we Left Off

 

One of the challenges facing those of us who only have limited time available for research is batching our time in such a way that we can pick up where we last left off. When I was teaching school full time, that meant summers and winter holiday seasons provided my only "free" time for research.

Now, thankfully, I have chunks of time sandwiched into my schedule on a more regular basis—plus, we have the luxury of computer-assisted search prowess which is expanding all the time. Still, every time I set aside a research project, I need to leave myself notes for where I need to pick up, the next opportunity I have to pursue a specific ancestor.

As we enter the month of August, my formidable goal will be to massage all those incomplete Irish governmental and church records to coax them into giving up their secrets on my father-in-law's great-grandmother Anna Flanagan Malloy. I already know, mostly from private letters preserved by pack-rat family members, that she and her brother William originated in County Limerick. According to those family records, their Catholic parish was known as Ballyagran.

If we turn to government records from that area in the time period before the two siblings' emigration, a possible townland might be Cappananty. There, at least according to Griffith's Valuation, our William Flanagan might be the one recorded in the assessment document.

So, what do we need to find next? There, exactly one year ago, according to the recap after my last attempt at searching for the Flanagans, my plan for revisiting this research issue included

• looking for additional governmental records which may have come available online, even for the time periods long after Anna and William's departure for Chicago, to seek records of possible cousins still in Ireland
• finding additional resources in Ireland to explore for this research problem
• building out the family tree to identify other descendants of not only Anna, but her unnamed mystery Flanagan brother in Chicago—and possibly back in Ireland
• reconnecting with any Flanagan cousins contacted in past years to compare research notes since the last time we talked.

For a quick first stop, tomorrow we'll look at four DNA companies where my husband has tested to see whether any new Flanagan connections have since uploaded their results, and to review whether any old connections at Ancestry.com in particular can lead to new insights, thanks to last year's addition of the ProTools subscription.

Finding What's Missing

 

Being stuck on a research question—where I've currently been left, stumped—can leave one walking in circles. It feels like I've been trying the same approaches over and over again for some of my father-in-law's Irish ancestors. While I wonder whether the brick wall isn't his great-grandparents as much as the overall Irish predicament of the mid-1800s, a nagging thought makes me consider whether I'm missing something. There's got to be an answer out there somewhere, if only I could find it.

I had thought about turning my questions over to a search engine, or to AI resources. With that idea in mind, I thought it was timely to spot Randy Seaver's post in Genea-Musings earlier this week, in which he asked ChatGPT5 about twenty record types we should be sure to include in  any thorough family history search.

Actually, I had put some question to such resources last month while struggling with John Kelly, another great-grandparent from my father-in-law's ancestry. I had wondered why the man's family seemed to dance between two different townlands, and asked Google's Gemini what significant differences there might be about the two townlands, despite their contiguous situation. The result, while not answering my genealogical questions, was informative.

Now, in my search for Anna Flanagan and her brother William from Ballyagran, I went back to a map of the area, showing both the village of Ballyagran as well as the townland where I believe I had found William in Griffith's Valuation before he left for America.

Looking at the map again, I spotted the cemetery we had visited during our family's trip to Ireland back in 2014. The map shows the name as Castletown Conyers cemetery. During our visit, we could clearly see the ruins of the church yard as we walked through the old burial ground, but had no way of knowing whether that was the original church for the Catholic parish where William and his sister Anna had once worshipped. 

While I realize I'll need to revisit questions like this once again, I took my questions to online resources to see what might pop up. Almost immediately appeared a new-to-me resource for cemeteries in Ireland. The Irish Graveyards website provided an aerial view of the compound, a map of the burials, as well as a chart of burials, including individual photographs of headstones (if still in existence).

I'll still need to search through the thirty five pages of notes for this one sizable cemetery—though obviously Anna and William were gone from the area long before their own passing—but it also occurred to me to hold on to this resource, not only for the Castletown-Conyers site, but for all other sites also available on the website. It seems like a useful resource, and another approach besides what is already available through other online cemetery websites.

Of course, I'll need to review what I've already found in searching for the Flanagans, and check that inventory to see if there are other resources I still need to add, not only from sources of documentation, but through the posts on the Flanagans that I've written in the past. It's important to build upon what we've already found, but also to explore new horizons.

Map above courtesy of Google Maps.

Meet Anna

 

There are some ancestors whose stories we fall in love with, and Anna Flanagan's story is such a one. Though I've researched her in the past—she was my father-in-law's great-grandmother—there is so much that remains a mystery still. I'm hoping a concentrated look at the details of her life will bring something more to light as we get this early jump on the eighth of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026.

What I do know about Anna is rather basic regarding the beginning of her life. I know she was born about 1810—if we can believe the report of her age in the 1860 census following her first appearance after emigration from Ireland. There in Chicago, she was listed by her married name, Ann Mulloy, but she was not living with her husband. Rather, she was in the household of someone named William Flanagan—turned out to be her brother—and her thirteen year old only child, Catherine.

Thanks to the information etched on Anna's brother's headstone after his passing in 1893, we can be fairly certain that the Catholic parish of Ballyagran in County Limerick would be her birthplace as well as his. Unfortunately, existing baptismal and marriage records for that location do not extend back far enough to provide documentation for either of those two births from Anna's own family. And I've yet to locate her marriage record or her daughter's baptism.

Prompted by a copy of the letter sent by her husband, Stephen Mulloy, on the eve of his (possibly unexpected) departure for Boston, I did manage to confirm his name appeared in passenger records, just as he had told her he'd be doing. Whatever happened to him after that point, I have yet to discover, despite searching through multiple spelling variations in the Boston area. Nor can I find any record of Anna crossing the Atlantic in search of the man, or her daughter's passage at a later point in her childhood, as the family surmised had been the case.

Anna's story picks up just as abruptly in Chicago with the 1860 census. Through the many more-readily accessible documents from that point until her death in 1885, it is easier to glean an impression of this woman through the events in her later life shared through letters and family reports. Yet it is those early years before her emigration—and that of her two brothers—that still mystifies me. Hopefully, this year will allow us a peek into the rest of that story.