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. 

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.

Déjà vu Chicago

 

It's been a long time since I last took a serious look at resources in Cook County, Illinois. Sure, my father-in-law and his entire family lived there for generations, but researching his roots has since led me on a tenuous path to Ireland. Chicago and its genealogical resources have been a distant memory for me.

Thanks to a fellow researcher following another Lee family, who has been sharing resources with me, I've since had that déjà vu experience. Things shared in our email correspondence are starting to jog my memory. 

One helpful item sent was a directory of Catholic churches in the Chicago area, complete with information on each parish's history. The book, originally written by Jack Bochar in 1990 for the Czech and Slovak American Genealogy Society of Illinois and updated with a second edition in 1998, is thankfully available online at the website of the Archdiocese of Chicago. This is definitely a link I will keep handy as I puzzle over these family branches of the Flanagan line.

I also learned the updated way to access burial information for Catholic relatives in the Chicago area: look once again to the Archdiocese, where their website allows a timed access to burial information through the tab labeled "Locate a Loved One."

While these tips helpfully shared by a genealogy friend do take me down a memory lane of research efforts long since past, that real déjà vu feeling struck in earnest, thanks to an unexpected but serendipitous email from Family Tree Magazine. Who could have predicted that, just this week, they would include such a timely article as "Chicago: A Windy City Genealogy Guide"?

Reading through that list of Chicago resources certainly brought back memories of searches long since forgotten. I'm certainly appreciative of the reminder. It's been a long time since I last wandered through the  archival holdings of my father-in-law's hometown.

Moment's Over

 

If I had thought, yesterday, that now would be an excellent opportunity for fleshing out the Flanagan family line by spending some "focused time" on the identity of Edward Flanagan, that moment was over in a flash. Here's the report on my negative results.

First, heading to Chicago city directories—of which there are several, thankfully, to consult online—I discovered that searching for a possible relative named Edward Flanagan was not as simple a procedure as one might expect. As for the surname, there were at least five different ways to spell it: Flanagan, Flanaghan, Flanigan, Flannagan, and Flannigan—not to mention the typezian alternative, Flangan. Add to that the problem, in some years, of alphabetization not being of utmost concern, leaving the researcher to visually scan the entire section of the alphabet from F-l-a-n through F-l-e.

Because my only clue about Edward's possible relationship to the family was through his unmarked grave found at William Flanagan's family plot at Mount Olivet, I did see his date of burial was June 24, 1904. However, finding his record in death indexes for the county or the state didn't produce any likely matches, and searching through Chicago obituaries for that same year led nowhere. That he was dead was obvious, but any record of when, or even where, he died has eluded me.

There are other beguiling signs that someone named Edward Flanagan was connected to the family. A man by that name was listed as godfather for one of Johanna Flanagan Lee's sons. Looking forward another generation, Johanna had a grandson who literally carried that same name as his own: Edward Flanagan Lee. But who that first Edward Flanagan was, I have yet to discover. His identity will not be the key to unlock the mystery of how the rest of the Flanagans tie together, or where they originated in Ireland.

Re-Evaluating the F.A.N. Club

 

Research may seem to lead us in dizzying circles, but I still feel there is a way around a brick wall ancestor's roadblock—even if it is an Irish Catholic living in Chicago. In my quest to find Anna Flanagan Malloy's roots in County Limerick, Ireland, so far I've found few tokens of her existence prior to her immigration to Chicago in the United States. Though she is related to my father-in-law close enough to have been his great-grandmother, it is as if she had been as difficult to find as an ancestor several more generations removed from him.

Facing that research roadblock once again, I instinctively turn to her F.A.N. Club. This, an acronym for Family, Associates, and Neighbors, can help trace a missing ancestor through the company they kept on their life's journey.

In Anna's case, that close-knit group included her daughter Catherine, her brother William, and her niece Johanna. Catherine eventually married an Irish immigrant who arrived in Chicago via Canada, named John Tully. Anna's brother William showed up in Chicago in time for the 1860 census, and remained there, a bachelor until his death in 1893, though I have little to inform me about the man, other than that he had an impressive monument built in his memory at Mount Olivet Cemetery. And Johanna married an Irish immigrant named John Lee, leaving several children behind to honor her memory.

One place where I could make some F.A.N. Club connections was through the burial records for both William and his niece Johanna. For whatever reason, Johanna's husband was out of the picture by the time of her death in 1909, as she was not buried in a plot including John Lee. Rather, I found her burial listed in the family plot owned by bachelor William Flanagan, burial plot S-313 in section 15 of Mount Olivet.

What was interesting to spot was the burial of another Flanagan in that same cemetery plot. Someone named Edward Flanagan had died in June of 1904, after William but before Johanna, who was included in the Flanagan family plot. I had known about this Edward for quite some time, but still cannot place him within the family. That name has appeared in various family records, such as a sponsor for one of Johanna's children. Perhaps it's time to set aside work on Anna, her brother William, or even her niece Johanna, and spend some focused time on identifying this particular Edward Flanagan. If he is part of the family's F.A.N. Club, we need to put him in his proper place—not to mention, perhaps he will be the one to point us back to Ireland, even though the others couldn't do so.

Free Form

 

When all the usual resources don't materialize the family history records we are seeking, it's time to take a different approach. For Anna Flanagan Malloy and her niece, Johanna Flanagan Lee, lacking key records, I'm left with nothing else but to go free form.

According to definitions, the term "free form" implies a structure lacking a standard shape or following fixed rules, an irregular pattern or asymmetrical shape, something outside conventional rules. Yes, maybe even—shock and horror!—following one of those rabbit trails off into the misty purple.

Apparently, identifying those two women in census records, vital records, or even newspaper reports has provided only the barest outline of who they were or, more critically, who they were related to, and where they all came from. I'm beginning to wonder whether wandering the historical streets of Chicago and just using my five observational senses might reveal more than those missing but necessary documents of genealogical practice. I need to broaden my horizons and, most importantly, think outside the box.

Case in point: I recently reached out to another Lee researcher, who brought up a point I hadn't considered.  While her Lee family is likely not related to my father-in-law's relatives, this researcher's Irish family had indeed settled in the same place as ours: Chicago. But in correspondence with this researcher, brainstorming our mutual research dilemmas, she mentioned that one branch of the family had immigrated on a path from Ireland through Canada.

Duh. I should have thought of that. Wasn't it another line in my father-in-law's past which had taken that very approach? And I was so elated when I discovered that end run around U.S. Immigration records. Of course, Canada would be a reasonable detour for emigrating subjects of the British Crown.

While I don't have any documentation for either Johanna or Anna entering the United States through the usual ports, that doesn't mean I shouldn't think outside the box. Perhaps there is a reason why I can't find their entry into this country.

What other aspects of their existence in their newly-adopted home might have been missing from the usual record sets? There, again, taking a free form approach may be my only alternative. Tracking their residences, year by year through city directories, may sound like grunt work, but such efforts may prove necessary for ancestors who refuse to otherwise be found. After all, Johanna and her possible relative, Edward Flanagan, had to live somewhere in the years before I found her, married with children in 1880—or Anna Flanagan after her appearance in the 1860 census, drawing a blank until the year of her death in 1885, listed as "Mrs. Ann Mulloy." Where was she hiding during those twenty five years?

They, Anna and Johanna, had to have been somewhere in Chicago in the interim. Going free form may be the only research technique I can use to find them, just sniffing them out, year by year, in the highways and byways of Chicago.

Checking the Neighborhoods

 

It was a sure bet—I thought—that Irish immigrant Catholic families of the 1880s in Chicago would have been sure to have their newborn babies baptized, so I continued looking through records of the Church of the Holy Family to spot verification of John and Johanna Lee's youngest children. When I found none of them listed in the digitized files, I wondered if the family might have moved to a different parish.

Since the Catholic Church traditionally set up local parishes based on geographic areas, organized under dioceses, it made sense to discover which parish might belong to a Catholic family's neighborhood. Thus started my hunt to find Catholic Churches in the Chicago area, based on any newer addresses of the Lee family. Since Johanna had died in 1909 at a different address in Chicago—3414 Parnell Avenue—I entered that address in a search engine and asked for the nearest Catholic parish for that neighborhood.

The search result pointed me to Saint Gabriel's Church which, conveniently, has digitized baptismal records available online at FamilySearch.org. I'm still in the process of searching through that record set, page by page, because not all entries are in date order. However, even before I've completed that search, I can say I doubt I'll find the youngest of Johanna's children listed there. Perhaps the Lee family hadn't moved to that location until long after the arrival of their youngest children.

The next step was to find a way to locate Chicago city directories. It was time to go through the listings, year by year, to pinpoint the Lee family's location. From those addresses—assuming the Lee family had moved from their original address during the years when their youngest children were born—I could then search for the appropriate Catholic parish for accessing baptismal records.

Finding Chicago city directories is not a one-stop-shopping process. ChicagoAncestors.org pointed me to some directories digitized at the Newberry Library, such as this 1880 city directory. Looking under the entry for "L," then heading to the Lee surname, I quickly found twenty one listings for John Lee. Fortunately, I already knew from the 1880 census that our John Lee was a cooper, so that entry was easily distinguishable, and I saw that he was still living at the family's old address. So much for finding a new church for his children's baptisms.

To find city directories for other years was a challenge. Blogger "Sassy Jane" (Nancy Loe) provides a resource page, "Free Chicago City Directories Online," filled with clickable links for Chicago area directories and other resources, which was helpful. ChicagoAncestors also sent me back to Newberry for a directory for 1885, revealing a change of address in 1885 for our John Lee to a home on Forty Second Street. Once again seeking the closest Catholic parish for the Lee family's new neighborhood, search engines pointed me back to Saint Gabriel's.

While I'm still having no luck finding mentions of Lee children at Saint Gabriel's—at least for our John and Johanna—I realized I had a third mention of a possible Catholic parish for the family. On Johanna's own obituary in 1909, it mentioned the funeral was to be held at "Nativity Church." For this, I'm off again, searching for any records and history of that congregation to find mentions of the Lee family and point me to the right neighborhood for the family.

Nothing is Ever Easy

 

It may be hard enough to actually locate the digitized record set needed to find that elusive ancestor, but once that collection is found, proceeding to the long-sought document should be rather straightforward, right? Wrong. Nothing is ever easy, especially in genealogy. There's always a snag along the way.

Thanks to a generous Chicago researcher, I now had the link to the records for Holy Family Church in Chicago, home parish for Irish immigrants John and Johanna Lee. According to the 1880 census, John and Johanna lived an easy walk from one of the city's longest-standing Catholic parishes.

Despite realizing that this set of microfilmed reels was not indexed for computer searches, I was ready to hunt and peck my way through to family history answers. Information on the collection told me that the first film contained the alphabetized handwritten index to help find the records, organized year by year, so that was step number one for me.

Since I had scrolled way too far in that collection for my first jumping-off spot, I found myself stuck in 1879. I decided to begin my search with John and Johanna's fourth son John James Lee, who was born in October of that year. Problem: there was no sign in the index of anyone surnamed Lee, let alone someone named John James Lee. Thinking perhaps he was not baptized in the same month as his birth, I scrolled through the indexed names, month by month, until I reached January of the subsequent year. No sign of John James Lee.

By that point, I was so close to the entries for 1881, I decided to continue the search with John James' younger sister Lillian, who was born in July of that year. Surprise: no entry for Lillian, either.

Perhaps going in the opposite direction might yield better luck. Hey, who am I kidding? I already knew that my new-found genealogical genie had located that earlier Lee child's record. George Aloysius Lee, born in June of 1877, should be in that index. Holding my breath, I took a look.

Thankfully, there he was, his entry in the index indicating that he was baptized on June 22, 1877. If I cared to view the actual entry the priest made in the ledger, I could go to page 167 to see for myself.

That, of course, I didn't need to do, as I already had a copy of that record, thanks to the helpful Ancestry.com subscriber who shared her research finds. And I knew that two children younger than George would also be in the church's records.

What of the older children? Since the 1880 census seemed to indicate that the family still lived in the area of that particular parish, I had expected to see the Lee children included there. After all, even if the family moved away, the parish's territory covered an immense part of the city of Chicago, nearly seven miles wide.

With four more Lee children yet to find in baptismal records, I'll need to continue the search. My main purpose at this point is to find the names of each child's godparents, and hope that the Irish tradition for selecting sponsors had a strong hold on this immigrant family. I need some clues about siblings in these babies' parents' generation to reconstruct a missing family tree for both Johanna Flanagan and John Lee.

Thanks to Some Genealogical Kindness

 

If it weren't for the help of others in the genealogy world, how many chances would we have missed to find the details we're seeking on our brick wall ancestors? Thanks to someone posting baptismal records online to share with whomever needed them, I learned that the home church in Chicago for Irish immigrants John and Johanna Lee was named Holy Family. But which Holy Family congregation? As it turned out, searching online brought me to at least two, if not more similarly-named churches.

I first took my search to the records digitized at FamilySearch.org. Through their wiki, I discovered that there were plenty of resources for those seeking Chicago ancestors. Referred from FamilySearch, in a long list of repositories, I found a list for Catholic Churches in Chicago. Posted on the now-static RootsWeb site, the list didn't seem to exactly include a church named Holy Family, but it did mention one called Saint Francis of the Holy Family. Problem number one: the name wasn't quite the same as what I'd found on the posted baptismal records. Problem number two: the hyperlink clicked through to...nothing.

Another link brought me to a FamilySearch collection of records from Catholic Churches in the Chicago area, but that didn't seem to bring up any records for the family I was seeking.

I took my search to the search engines. There, I found two possibilities. One was a Chicago church called Our Lady of the Holy Family, but reading that organization's history, it seemed to be a newer parish. The other church was called, simply, Church of the Holy Family.

That parish seemed to fit the specifications more closely. The church's history, for one, made it the perfect fit. And its location was close enough to the Lee family's home, according to the 1880 census, to be within walking distance from their home on Fourteenth Street.

The only problem was locating a copy of digitized records for this church. According to FamilySearch, only records of closed parishes are held by the Archdiocese of Chicago; if the church is still serving a congregation and the records aren't digitized online, then what?

Thankfully, I had reached out to the source of that Random Act of Genealogical Kindness and asked about the baptismal discoveries she had posted on Ancestry.com. Within a matter of hours, there in my inbox at Ancestry was not only a series of useful links for Chicago research, but the specific record set she had used to access those Lee baptismal records from the Church of the Holy Family. Sure, it's a set of records on microfilm reels to be searched the old fashioned hunt-and-peck method but, grateful for the guidance, at least now I can start the process.

Retracing Steps

 

When you don't have every detail documented for a brick wall ancestor, there is only one thing to do: retrace your steps and check for more records to fill in the blanks.

It was thanks to some random acts of genealogical kindness that baptismal records for at least two of Johanna Flanagan Lee's children were shared on Ancestry.com. I had already spotted that, not due to my own efforts, but solely because of Ancestry's hints system. I had remembered cranking through the microfilm at a FamilySearch Center in decades past for my father-in-law's Chicago ancestors, but I was pretty sure I had never done anything so tedious for the Lee branch of the Flanagan family, so I was grateful for the discovery.

Little did I know how grateful I should have been. Since I had gone through this process in the past, I assumed it would be just as easy to do so now—if not easier, thanks to modern conveniences like computerized searches through digitized records, not to mention AI assistance and Full Text Search at FamilySearch.org.

Wrong. Looking at FamilySearch yielded no easy answers, though explanations in the heading for one particular collection did remind me of vital facts about Chicago records: 

• City of Chicago marriage licenses were separated from Cook County records...but only from 1894 onward
• For each hundred names in the index, the first set is for Cook County, then followed by City records
• The female index did not begin until 1878

Most important, though, was one main, overarching, glaring detail: if you were looking for a record before July 24, 1871, your luck was out. That's when the great Chicago fire wiped out most records for the city.

Considering that Johanna Flanagan and John Lee had a child as early as 1875—at least according to their entry in the 1880 census—one could conclude that history had snatched their marriage record from the jaws of complete destruction. It could be quite likely that they'd have married closer to 1874, at least in my thinking.

Wrong—at least if we can trust the Statewide Marriage Index at the Illinois Secretary of State's website. No matter which way I searched—groom's name only, Flanagan spelled as Flanigan, searching statewide versus Cook County records only—I came up with...nothing. Not, at least, for this couple. There were certainly many other men married in the state who claimed the name John Lee.

I returned to one of the baptismal records posted by the Ancestry subscriber, this one for a son born before the oldest child showing in the 1880 census. Details attached to the record noted that the church where the baptism occurred was a congregation named Holy Family Catholic Church.

Whether there were any records digitized at FamilySearch from that congregation, I couldn't yet say, so it would be important to check for availability. At any rate, it would also help to learn more about the congregation, itself. That, as my first step, I'll save for tomorrow's post.

Finding Flanagan Collaterals

 

One of the best ways to work around ancestral brick walls is to examine the family's collateral lines. Those descendants of aunts and uncles can sometimes lead us to connections we'd otherwise miss. In the case of my father-in-law's Flanagan line, that is exactly what I'm hoping will clear up the mystery about his great-grandmother Anna Flanagan Malloy's origin in Ireland.

I've been working on this Flanagan family connection for years—in fact, ever since I first began writing daily entries in A Family Tapestry. In one of my earliest Flanagan posts, I mentioned discovering a second obituary for Anna's bachelor brother William Flanagan, in which not only was Anna's daughter Catherine mentioned as William's niece, but a second niece was named: Johanna Lee.

At that point, I hadn't yet learned just how Johanna connected to the rest of the Flanagan family, but I was glad to have discovered that link. Since then, I've worked on Johanna's tree enough to document all her descendants plus their descendants, in some cases for three or more additional generations.

There has been an additional Flanagan connection to revisit: identifying Johanna Lee's father. He may well have been the additional Flanagan man buried in an unmarked grave within William Flanagan's family plot at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Chicago, the immigrants' adopted home. Or perhaps that man was Edward Flanagan, identified as godfather of one of Johanna Lee's sons, meaning a likely brother. Whether these two identities lead us to a clarified family constellation for Johanna, I can't yet be sure, but it is important to investigate this further.

In addition, there may have been a connection back in the Flanagan and Lee homeland in County Limerick, Ireland: a man by the name of James Flanagan. He, it turns out, may well have been the ancestor of a DNA match showing in my husband's test at Ancestry.com. On the other side of Johanna's family, Griffith's Valuation points to someone leasing property in a nearby townland known as William Lee, perhaps connecting us to Johanna's husband's family.

With all these leads, there will be much to follow up on in this coming week—or perhaps longer, depending on how accessible records may be for these Flanagans and their related lines.

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. 

It's the Little Things that Count

 

When using DNA to connect with matches who share second great-grandparents, those distant cousins share very little genetic material in common. But when the goal is to push beyond the brick wall ancestors just one more generation, it's the little things that count. As I mentioned yesterday, third cousins can share under two hundred centiMorgans—and the number can slide far lower than that. It's that little amount that is consuming my research time lately.

Anyone who might be related to Anna Flanagan through, say, an as yet unknown sibling, would share a very small amount of genetic material with her direct descendants, indeed. With that in mind, I conducted yet another hunt to see whether I could find a potential match among the many who share as low as ten, twenty, or thirty centiMorgans with my husband.

I used the approach of creating a custom cluster on Ancestry.com, naming one specific match as my key target. Keep in mind that, though this match has the Flanagan name in her tree, I don't yet know for sure that she is related to the same Flanagan line in County Limerick, though our email discussions over the past few years have led me to believe this could be a possibility.

I created the custom cluster to have, at its lowest amount, a centiMorgan count far smaller than the usual clusters offered at Ancestry. The result of my request provided forty one matches. Oddly enough, two of that group matched my husband on his maternal side, rather than the expected paternal side. I set those two results aside and did not consider them, though I have seen some matches in the past in which the wrong side of the family had been attributed as the nexus. I also know that, reaching back that many generations among American descendants can sometimes produce other lines in which someone from the paternal side coincidentally also ended up marrying someone from my husband's maternal side.

From that point, I went one by one through the remaining thirty nine matches produced by this custom cluster request. Where I could determine through viewing each candidate's "shared matches" option which branch of my father-in-law's Irish roots might claim each candidate, I eliminated those from other branches from my search.

In the end, I was left with...nothing. None of that grouping seemed to indicate roots either linked to Flanagans or descended from the Ballyagran area of County Limerick. There was, however, a surprise: a few matches who had the surname Lee in their roots. Lee, I had found out from prior years' experience, was the married name of a niece of Anna Flanagan who had also emigrated from Ireland to the Chicago area of the United States.

While none of these Lee matches were the same as the Lee family I had researched, they also were Irish immigrants who hailed from the Chicago area, the same area where Anna Flanagan had settled, prompting me to revisit that Lee connection I had found from so long ago. We'll take a look at that tomorrow, especially because there is one issue nagging at the back of my brain: there don't seem to be any DNA matches pointing to my husband's Flanagan-Lee side of the family.

Next Steps

 

At the close of a research project—and that end does come, no matter what the cause hastening it—I always like to provide a to-do list for the next time I tackle the topic. Especially for this Flanagan question, I'll need to keep several next steps in mind.

This month's project involved research on two fronts. On the one hand, knowing that my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Anna Flanagan Malloy, eventually settled in Chicago, this month I searched for more information on possible Flanagan relatives who also may have joined her and her brother William in emigrating from their home in County Limerick, Ireland. This work will need to be continued, especially as I uncover any more on the second front, Ireland.

That second front, thankfully, involves a precise location in County Limerick: the townland of Cappananty. It also includes some distant DNA cousins who also trace their roots back to the Flanagans in that specific townland. The drawback is that, currently, the only records available to me online are some baptismal records, valuation records, plus the 1901 and 1911 census enumerations.

As I build out the family line for James, that possible brother—or cousin—of Anna Flanagan Malloy, I'm not only working on connecting those several distant DNA matches. I'm also watching for clues in naming patterns through the generations, seeking consistency which might inform likely names for Anna's own siblings left behind. I'm also keeping my eye on news about reconstructed record sets previously assumed to be lost to time. And I'm exploring other resources for information, such as websites actually housed in Ireland. International research needs more than just an "international subscription" to an American website; sometimes the key to finding records regarding our international roots is to examine what is available in that country, itself.

I'll need to keep building out those Flanagan and Lee collateral lines, both for the Chicago immigrants and for those family members still listed in records back home in County Limerick. That alone will be plenty of work for the next time I revisit this research brick wall. And, of course, I'll continue the conversation with those DNA matches already contacted, as well as adding new matches who fit specifically into this line. Hopefully, with enough DNA cousins in the picture, we all may be able to come up with a reasonable answer to what happened to the Flanagan siblings both during and after the Great Famine.

For now, another month is almost here—and time to shift to another research project on my father-in-law's Irish roots.

Considering James Flanagan

 

Could the ancestor of a DNA match lead us to the answer we've been seeking about Anna Flanagan Malloy, my father-in-law's great-grandmother? All I know about her Irish origin so far is that her brother William claimed Catholic parish Ballyagran in County Limerick as his native home, and that she received a farewell letter near that spot when her husband sailed for America.

As it turns out, the DNA match I'm considering claims an ancestor by the name of James Flanagan. That ancestor shows up in two baptismal records from that same parish of Ballyagran. In each of the baptisms, James is named as the child's father (in Latin, as Jacobo), along with Elizabeth Hanrahan as the child's mother. 

The older of the two children, a son whom they named James, was baptized on November 7, 1864. Following that birth, their daughter Anna was baptized at the same church on July 14, 1867.

It was interesting to look at the actual handwritten record, specifically to view the names of the godparents. While I'm having trouble deciphering the handwritten entry for son James' sponsors, the names of Anna's godparents nearly jumped right out at me: Ellen Gorman and William Lee. While I can see that the Gorman (or O'Gorman) surname figures in this DNA match's family tree in later generations, what I was keen to notice was the mention of someone with the surname Lee.

Lee, as you may remember, was the married name of another Flanagan relative who eventually migrated from County Limerick to Chicago in the United States. Johanna Flanagan Lee was mentioned as niece of William Flanagan, whose sister Anna was my father-in-law's great-grandmother. While I still don't know who Johanna Flanagan's parents were, it is encouraging to even find mention of another Lee family member in the vicinity of our Flanagans' origin.

Up to the point of the Great Hunger—the cause of so many making their exit from their Irish homeland—tradition had it that godparents were selected based on their relationship to the parents of the child being baptized. Thus, a child's sponsors would be either the sibling or the sibling-in-law of either parent. After the famine years, the tradition wasn't as tightly adhered to, so one can't be sure that William Lee had to be an in-law of James Flanagan or Elizabeth Hanrahan. But I'll certainly keep that possibility in mind as we look through more records in pursuit of this possible Flanagan family connection. 

Where the Flanagan Family Worshipped

 

While we are struggling to determine more about the Flanagan family members after their arrival in Chicago, perhaps it might help to pause the search and explore what we can find on the place where the family worshipped. 

We learned from the baptismal records for three of Johanna Flanagan Lee's children that the family's church was known as Holy Family Catholic Church. Upon learning that name, you might have—as I had—presumed it was yet another of many Catholic Churches in the area. Come to find out, it was worth the effort to learn a bit about the people and places important in our ancestors' lives.

Holy Family Catholic Church was apparently the second-oldest Catholic Church in the city of Chicago. In addition, it has the claim of being one of the few buildings to survive the 1871 Chicago fire—despite the rumor that the barn of one of the church parishioners was where the fire actually started.

More to the point of our inquiry, Holy Family Catholic Church was originally a congregation comprised mostly of Irish immigrants. Eventually, the church grew to claim over twenty five thousand parishioners, so it is no surprise to learn that some estimate one third of today's Chicago Irish-American residents can trace their roots to this church. Should any family historian care to research their roots via the baptismal records from the church, they would be in great company; since the parish opened in 1857, there have been over fifty six thousand people baptized there.

The church itself, located at 1080 West Roosevelt Road, once was a parish encompassing a distance of nearly seven miles, far beyond just the downtown area. However, looking at a map of the area, I can spot some of the streets named in our search for the godparents mentioned in those baptismal records we've reviewed. And Johanna and her husband, John Lee, had moved their family to Fourteenth Street by the time of the 1880 census, still within the boundaries of the church parish.

However, whether the Lee family still lived near the church by the time of the 1881 birth of their daughter Lillian—the first of their children whose baptismal record I could not find listed in the church's index—I haven't yet been able to determine. This will, I suspect, require a second search through those listings or those of other Chicago Catholic Churches, all which will take time. The goal, as before, will still be to see what family-linked godparents might have been identified on those baptismal records—if we can find them at all.    

Our Man Flanagan

 

Chasing after clues about Edward Flanagan, the man named as godfather of Johanna Flanagan Lee's son George, has yielded very little. That he might have been Johanna's father is unlikely, given the impracticality of her father fulfilling the role of godfather for her child. But whether this Edward Flanagan could have been her brother, while a possibility, still leaves me with doubts.

Since we had found two entries for men by that name in the Chicago city directory for 1878, a logical next step was to go back and check the 1880 census once again—this time, eyeing all the different possible spelling variations. With that approach, two possibilities presented themself: twenty two year old Ed on Laurel Street, and the twenty one year old Ed on Fifteenth Street.

Ed on Laurel Street was an Irish immigrant boarding with the Sullivan family, who apparently was joined on his trans-Atlantic adventure by George Flanigan, possibly Edward's younger brother. The other Ed was living in the home of his parents, John and Elizabeth Flanagan. While this Ed's parents were born in Ireland, Ed and his older siblings were born in New Jersey, painting a far different immigration story.

Granted, either of these two young men could have been the correct identity for a godparent of John and Johanna's son, even if they weren't relatives. The baptismal traditions from the Old Country may well have been disregarded so many years after immigration. This may leave us at a loss for how to reconstruct a picture of the cluster of family members who may have immigrated together—but not so severely hobbled us as to cause us to give up the search. There may be other ways to explore this mystery.

One possible way is to take a break from genealogical pursuits and step back to absorb the history of the place where those Flanagans now called home. Since church was such an important part of Irish life, learning something about the family's new church home may provide some pointers.

For one thing, I noticed that the three baptismal records that had been shared by another Ancestry.com subscriber all focused on births from the 1870s. However, when I located the online resource to view all the baptismal records from the Lees' church in Chicago—Holy Family Catholic Church—missing from the index were all the children born after the 1870s. This would include daughter Lillian in 1881, son Edward in 1883, another son David in 1884, and daughters Deborah in 1886 and Mary Elizabeth in 1888. Each of those documents would give us more opportunities to explore whether family members were named as each child's sponsors.

While we're stuck on this pursuit, let's take some time to set aside the certificate search and learn a bit about the church in Chicago where the Lee family attended and had their first three children baptized. Then we can figure out what, if anything, changed for the Lees, once those children of the 1880s were added to the family.  

It's All in How You Spell It

 

Finding Edward Flanagan mentioned in documents related to the extended Flanagan family of my father-in-law might have been encouraging—until I tried looking for other mentions of the man's name. I suspected our man Ed might have been difficult to trace in 1880s Chicago mainly because there was no standard way to spell his surname.

Since we had last seen him—or at least someone with that same name—in the 1877 baptismal record for Johanna Flanagan Lee's son George, I thought a copy of the Chicago city directory might sort things out for us. Fortunately, there was a digitized copy of the 1878 directory online at Ancestry.com, so I took a look for our missing Edward Flanagan.

Was he there? Well, maybe. There was one listing for an Edward Flanagan, a clerk living at 47 Ray Street. But don't let out a cheer just yet. There was another clerk named Edward Flanigan living on Thirteenth Place. Fortunately for us, there were no more Edwards among the listings for the Flannagans, Flannaghans, or Flannegans who also lived in Chicago at the time.

But a Flanigan on Thirteenth Place? Hadn't we seen that street name before? That, as it turned out, was one connecting link between John Lee, father of the baptized George Aloysius Lee, and the godfather listed on his older son's baptismal record: they both had lived on the same street in Chicago. Granted, streets in Chicago could run the length of the city, so that might not tell us much. And while this Edward Flanagan was said to have worked as a clerk, not a cooper, perhaps they all could have worked for the same employer.

It was, however, encouraging to at least find a sign that there was indeed an Edward Flanagan in existence in 1880s Chicago, no matter how you spell his last name. Now all we need to do is to find out what became of him after that point.

 

Getting a Good Look at the Godparents

 

For those of the poorer Catholics born in Ireland around the time of the Great Famine, the selection of their godparents was a ritual carefully spelled out by custom. In Ireland, every godparent selected for that role was either a sibling or a sibling-in-law of one of the child's parents. Thus, getting a good look at a child's baptismal record could provide information hidden in plain sight about other members in the parents' families, all based on the godparents listed.

But what about those destitute Catholics who fled the famine? Did they keep up that baptismal tradition overseas?

We considered that question last year while exploring some of my father-in-law's Irish ancestors who migrated to Canada. The upshot of that pursuit? Apparently, proximity of near relatives lost to the convenience of near neighbors, once the family arrived in the New World. The question this year is: did the same thing happen for those who migrated to the United States? Let's begin by taking a look at the baptismal records we've found so far.

First, a newly-discovered son, James John Lee, was born in Chicago in 1874 to Johanna Flanagan and her husband John Lee. The baptismal record in July of that year showed the baby's sponsors (or godparents). Right away, we light up when we see the names: John Ponsonby and Catherine Flanagan. We're presuming the selection of Catherine might be following the old Irish tradition from back home, showing us a possible sister for Johanna, who was also a Flanagan. But let's wait until we take a closer look.

Thanks to his rather unusual surname, John Ponsonby was easily spotted in the 1880 census, taken six years after John stepped up to serve as godfather for baby James John Lee. Encouragingly, John was married to a woman named Catherine, who reported that she was born in Ireland. Their household was completed by a two year old son, whom they named—tantalizingly—Edward, same as the mystery Flanagan man I'm chasing this month.

Don't get your hopes up, however. That Catherine's maiden name was not Flanagan, as it turns out, but Fox. The proud Lee parents' connection to John Ponsonby was more likely to be either by residential location or occupational ties.

That same 1880 census showed John Ponsonby living on Thirteenth Place in Chicago, the same street where the baby's father John Lee lived, according to the 1878 city directory. Looking at those two documents also reveals the likely real reason for John Ponsonby's connection to John Lee: they both worked as coopers.

So who was Catherine Flanagan? Short answer: I don't know—yet.

As for Edward Flanagan, the one named as godfather for John and Johanna Flanagan Lee's son George Aloysius, we need to go through that same process once again. We'll see what we can find on Edward tomorrow.

Determining Perspective in Photograph Labels

 

When sorting through family photographs bequeathed to me from prior generations, I'm grateful for those which have actually been labeled. Even so, some of those labels leave me almost as clueless as their unmarked counterparts.

Take, for instance, the photograph I mentioned yesterday. It plainly identified the man in the picture as someone named Will Nellis. I know where I got the picture—a son of Agnes Tully Stevens had it in his possession before he died, and his wife gave it to me, hoping I could figure out the identity. My first step, before actually doing that, needs to be determining the perspective of the person who wrote that label on the photograph.

My first consideration involved speculation about the handwriting itself. Who wrote that label? I thought immediately of Agnes' own daughter, who had labeled another family memento with a tag along the same lines. That one, for another cousin, took me quite some time to figure out, despite the convenience of being provided with a name and a relationship. 

Comparing handwriting between the two photographs, I noticed that while they were similar hands, it was more likely that each was written by a different person. In order to figure out just who Will Nellis was the cousin of, I'd need to determine the identity of the person who wrote that label. Since the photograph was among several passed along to me from among Agnes' own papers, that would be the first guess. However, I need to remember that I received her daughter Pat's photos and memorabilia from that same source. Not only that, but the dimensions and appearance of Pat's photos commemorating an event in 1929, and this other one from—maybe—Agnes may reveal that they were all taken at about the same time.

For now, I'll test the working hypothesis that "coz" refers to a cousin of Agnes Tully Stevens, granddaughter of Anna Flanagan Malloy and first cousin once removed from Johanna Flanagan Lee. While Will Nellis doesn't necessarily need to be a relative from the Flanagan side, posing for a picture while holding a Flanagan baby certainly does seem to provide a clue.

It is possible that this hypothesis may remain unsubstantiated when we actually start looking for people by that name in the Chicago area, where this picture was likely taken. That, too, is an assumption which will become part of my collection of working hypotheses, as will an estimate of the date when this picture was taken. While each of these components are now merely guesses, I've got to have some place to launch this search. We'll begin by using these parameters.