About Those Irish Naming Conventions

 

As I agonize over lost Irish records, either civil or ecclesiastical, while searching for Anna Flanagan Malloy's parents in County Limerick, I've been trawling through tax records and any other forms that could at least point to a Flanagan name and say, yes, that family was there. Granted, the search has been convoluted, tedious, and frustrating—until I straightened up from my hunched-over position at the computer screen and realized this one thought: the Irish used traditional naming conventions.

Those Irish naming patterns could very well lead me to a likely answer. I say likely, because I may never find an actual document with an official signature that says, "I told you so." But let's take a moment to think this thing out.

According to information on Irish naming conventions, a first daughter would be named after her mother's mother—in other words, the girl's maternal grandmother.

Let's think about this for a while. Here I have Anna Flanagan Malloy, my father-in-law's great-grandmother, who left Ireland sometime between 1855 and 1860 and moved to the American city of Chicago. She it was who received that letter from her husband Stephen Malloy, advising her of his impending departure for Boston in 1849—barely a year after she had given birth to their daughter Catherine.

As far as I know, Catherine was the only child born to Stephen and Anna. Granted—especially considering Anna's age when Catherine was born—there could have been older children lost during the famine. But I don't know that. And I certainly have no records to show that. Nor even any family lore to fill in such blanks.

Considering that, if we consider Catherine to be Anna's only child, that also would mean she was the first-born daughter. In turn, that would mean—if we consider traditional Irish naming patterns—that Anna's mother should also have had the name Catherine.

That would also provide us with the clue, if we find any Flanagan siblings left in Ireland, of a first-born daughter named Catherine among those other Flanagan descendants, as well.

Will the pattern hold true? I certainly can't say. But of one thing I'm sure: it may be harder to find the actual documentation reaching back to that time period than it would be to assemble family groupings of Anna's possible siblings, back in County Limerick.

I will, however, keep an eye on that possibility as I return to the drudge work of drilling through those old tax and property records, looking for nearby Flanagans calling County Limerick their home.

The Lay of the Land

 

It may seem an abrupt jump to leave Chicago and head straight to Ireland in our quest to discover more about the extended Flanagan family of my father-in-law's roots, but there is a method to this meandering: eventually, I hope to explore some collateral lines. To do this, though, we first need to zero in on the lay of the land, back where William Flanagan and his sister Anna, deserted wife of Stephen Malloy, once lived.

Though there were many key Irish documents destroyed in political struggles of the early 1900s, there are enough left us which, combined with that precious saved personal letter to Anna, may point us in the right direction for research in the Flanagans' Irish homeland.

Stephen's letter to Anna, for instance, was addressed in care of a man named John Mason in the townland of Cappanihane. If we pull up records from Griffith's Valuation, which was completed in County Limerick in 1853, we can see, first, a John Mason listed as the holder of several plots of land in that same townland. More helpful to us, though, is the entry above that listing on the same page, where William Flanagan himself is listed on land in the townland just to the west, known as Cappananty (see line entry 7f).

In the property valuation, William's property is listed as a house, office, and garden. It is doubtful the edifice was of much value; driving by the location during our visit to Ireland, of what little we saw still standing in that area, all were modest—and decrepit—structures. But what is beautiful about that discovery is that, if you fast forward through time by visiting the Valuation Office in Dublin to consult the property records from that time onward, you can see one occupier's name lined out and replaced by another, then another, over the course of time.

The first line which replaces William Flanagan's name was that of someone named Catherine. After that point, the next name was lined out and replaced by yet another name as the property changed hands again.

Is this mention in Griffith's Valuation naming our own William Flanagan? I can't yet be sure. However, what is curious about that progression of names seen in the valuation records is that it is echoed by the ancestors named by some of my husband's DNA matches. While we have yet to figure out the Flanagan DNA connection, it may be worth our while to revisit this puzzle once again.

But For a Letter Saved

Here I am, grinding slowly through the microfilmed and digitized baptismal records of Flanagan descendants in 1870s Chicago. The pace is slow, despite the awesome advances in online search over the past few years. Even so, this may be no more than a dreary exercise in going through the motions; there is no guarantee I will find any more records from this family, once I move on to the 1880s. 

Thinking of this particular Flanagan line, it occurred to me that I wouldn't have been able to delve any deeper than I have into these Chicago records had it not been through one item: a letter sent in 1849 from Liverpool to County Limerick in Ireland. More to the point: but for that letter having been saved by its recipient, I would now be sorely lacking in any research direction for Anna Flanagan Malloy's roots.

How slim a thread upon which the realization of our family's history may hang. Yes, family research is indeed a case of here a little, there a little—but some of that information gathered here and there wouldn't make sense without the glue of some additional personal material. In Anna Flanagan Malloy's case, that otherwise missing glue would be the letter from her husband.

I've written before about that letter and what it revealed about Anna's possible home in Ireland. I first presented a copy of the letter in the early years of this blog, only months before our research trip to Ireland. Following that post, I added a copy of the actual envelope, which provided the location where Anna Flanagan Malloy was staying in her husband's absence. Only four years ago, I had revisited that letter once again, hoping to find anything more about Anna's husband Stephen Malloy. So far, I've drawn a blank, both about Stephen himself, as well as the Flanagan family.

The lesson that was missing from those experiences has been impressed on me as I revisit this research problem yet again: if it weren't for even having the letter to refer to, I would be hard pressed to move the search anywhere before Anna's appearance in the 1860 census in Chicago.

For those who are fortunate enough to have "packrat" relatives, that pile of hoarded papers may be just that—junk to be quickly discarded—or those papers could be the rare and precious key that links us to our family's otherwise obscured past. 

It Might be up to Ed

 

When faced with brick wall ancestors—those end-of-the-line predecessors who can't seem to give up their family secrets—sometimes the only solution to the problem is to draw the research circle wider and wider. That might be just what we'll do this month, as we try to determine the Irish parents of Chicago resident Anna Flanagan Malloy through cluster research—A.K.A. the Flanagan "F.A.N. Club."

When I look at all the names connected to Anna, her brother William Flanagan, and her daughter Catherine Malloy, one name keeps popping up: a man named Edward Flanagan. Brother? Cousin? Neighbor? Or just plain ol' friendly guy? It's hard to tell without launching into a study of the cluster of names surrounding Anna and her household.

Setting up a Flanagan family network on Ancestry.com seemed a first step, but searching for Edward Flanagan in Chicago records hasn't yielded many results—so far. However, thanks to the helpfulness of another Ancestry subscriber who posted copies of baptismal records, two children of another Flanagan descendant—Johanna Flanagan Lee—showed an interesting connection.

First, for a child that I wasn't even aware of—Johanna's son James John Lee, born in July of 1874—the godparents were listed as John Ponsonby and Catherine Flanagan. Could that Catherine be yet another Flanagan relative?

For a son born in 1877, George Aloysius Lee, I spotted that recurring name: Edward Flanagan, listed as George's godfather. There he was, Edward Flanagan—but try as I might, I couldn't find him listed in any census entry at the start of the next decade. Who was this man?

One additional recollection—a detail I definitely will need to recover—was a listing of all the names buried in the family plot along with Johanna Flanagan Lee. Was that Edward Flanagan once again? I'll need to look it up in my files, as that entry certainly doesn't show among Find A Grave memorials.

While I might not know exactly who Edward Flanagan was, he certainly was rife with possibilities of key connections to our Flanagan family. Though so little is known about him at this point, it will certainly be worth our while to follow this rabbit trail. I suspect it might lead to a connection with our Flanagans, whoever they were. 

Six is All we Get

 

If you are looking for clues to help break through brick walls, a surefire way to overcome research roadblocks is to look to DNA. In the case of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Anna Flanagan and her mysterious fleeing husband Stephen Malloy, however, six DNA clues is all we get. Worse, there are no guesses on the ThruLines tool as to who their parents might have been. Nobody knows, apparently—at least, nobody who has already tested their DNA.

Of those six Flanagan and Malloy DNA matches we get, however, none is a distant relative. All matches descend from Anna's only daughter Catherine, who eventually became the wife of Chicago cop John Tully. With Catherine's six children, though, the possibilities are still limited. Only three married and had children: William, Mary Monica, and Agnes, my father-in-law's mother.

From those three children came the descendants who eventually became my husband's DNA matches. But even that became a limited resource. Looking at the possibilities, I began to wonder whether using a different form of DNA testing—mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA for short—might help uncover clues about Anna Flanagan Malloy's Irish past.

Here were the possibilities. From William came his only child, one daughter whose frail constitution didn't prohibit her from having children of her own, but each of those granddaughters of William chose to become nuns, perhaps inspired by the sobering loss of their mother. Agnes, the baby of Catherine Malloy Tully's family, raised six healthy children—five sons and one intrepid daughter whose only child was a son; again, no resource for possible mtDNA testing. But Mary Monica was a different story.

Mary Monica had one of those storybook romances from that bygone era. The family's doctor, who lived down the street and was far more a part of the local community than what we experience in current times, mentioned that his brother in Ohio had unexpectedly lost his wife and mother of his two young children, a toddler daughter and infant son. Would Mary Monica consider...?

The answer was yes, and Mary Monica set out from her home in bustling Chicago to a lifetime in a far different setting, that of rural Perry County, Ohio. From that union with widower Dennis McGonagle came nine children, all with different stories to share of the lives which unfolded after that move.

Four of those six DNA matches come from that same storybook romance. Two of those four are actively researching their roots and have been in touch with me to compare notes as we struggle with that brick wall impasse of Anna Flanagan and her husband Stephen Malloy. And though he may not realize it, another DNA match is the grandson of the Tully descendant who had, in a past generation, become the designated family recipient of the original letter from Stephen to Anna on the eve of his unexplained flight from Ireland to the New World, just before his disappearance. (A poor photocopy of that original letter is all that's left to witness that original goodbye between husband and wife.)

Meanwhile, what can a researcher do? I keep watching the autosomal DNA results at each of the companies where we have tests—and hope a matrilineal descendant of Anna might be willing to take a mitochondrial DNA test.

And I keep adding to the family tree in hopes of finding more distant cousins, especially those whose roots may reach back a generation before Stephen and Anna. After all, in the past two weeks, I've documented 395 more family connections on my in-laws' tree, which now has 40,615 individuals. And though the DNA matches come dribbling in at about two or three for each biweekly period, perhaps someday, one match will make that connection we've been waiting for.    

The Chokehold of the Only

 

It might seem that researching the ancestry of an only child would make life easier for the earnest family historian, but I'm beginning to differ with that assumption. Give me eight collateral lines to work with any day, in exchange for a mysterious single child of unknown origin. Only children put my research progress into a chokehold.

Such is the case with my research task this month. Until I find any further clues, I have to assume that Johanna Flanagan was an only child. Likewise for her cousin Catherine Malloy, whom I actually know was an only child, due to her parents' history. Catherine I can trace a little bit more easily than Johanna, because both she as an adult and her mother before her had the habit of saving every piece of personal papers possible—and eventually passing every such scrap down to the child in the next generation who inherited that same pack-rat proclivity.

But even Catherine's own mother became a mystery to me. Though I know Anna Flanagan Malloy had siblings, I don't know how many. One I know for sure also made the immigrant journey from Ireland to Chicago, but as far as I can tell, he never married and never had any children, effectively leaving me Anna alone to turn to when trying to research her Flanagan forebears.

There was one other possibility to turn to in this Flanagan gene pool: a shadow figure whom we can, by necessity, assume was the father of Johanna Flanagan. What his name was, or what became of him, I can't tell. Nor do I know whether he had any children other than Johanna, thus leaving us in the same research predicament once again: the research chokehold of the only child.

If I could discover the identity of Johanna's father—and thus, Anna's brother—perhaps that would lead to information on other lines of descent in the family. Whether those possible relatives became immigrants to America or remained in Ireland does not matter as much as the fact that it would release me from this research chokehold. I'm operating on the theory that there has to be an answer to this research dilemma somewhere.

Back in my original genealogy file cabinet—yes, back in the days when everything was kept on paper and had to be stored somewhere—I had a folder with the first clues about Johanna's family. This would be a good time to revisit the details stored in that folder—the clues which started me on this research trail. Tomorrow, we'll see if revisiting this research brick wall with fresh eyes might point us in a new direction.

Closing the Cover on Lee, Flanagan, and Malloy

 

It's the close of another month. How quickly they fly. This month, my task was to find out what I could on one secretive ancestor of my father-in-law: his great-grandfather Stephen Malloy.

While the disappearing Stephen Malloy gave me the slip yet again, it wasn't for attempts to track him through his wife's Flanagan line, or even through a Flanagan niece and her marriage into a Lee family in Chicago, all with roots back in County Limerick, Ireland.

The idea with my "Twelve Most Wanted" project each year is to select one ancestor per month to research—actually, more like filling in the blanks where previous work had left off. The hope is, in the span of a month's research, to answer one specific question. In September's case, my hope was to discover just where Stephen Malloy came from in Ireland—specifically, who his parents might have been.

All that eluded me just as mysteriously as the man himself disappeared after his arrival in Boston in 1849. I am still left with nothing more than a copy of the letter he sent to his wife that year, before boarding the boat taking him away from his home in Ireland.

There are, of course, tasks yet to accomplish. For each of the surnames, now that the records are digitized and available online, I can search through the baptismal entries to find possible siblings (standing in as godparents) in the home parish of Ballyagran. Likewise, on the Chicago side of the search, I can look for church records—if they are still in existence—for more recent events, such as Johanna Flanagan's marriage to John Lee, or the original baptismal record for each of the Lee children. Sometimes, for those born in one location but requesting sacraments in a far distant parish, the priest may make a note documenting the reply from the originating church. Notes such as that may be my only hope to see now-lost records preserved, at least in transcribed form.

There were, however, benefits in attempting to knock down this brick wall. Prime among them was the gleaning from reviewing old documents. Details missed in the first pass took on a different meaning the second time around. Others, though, just added to the confusion—like the detail from William Flanagan's own death record claiming that his arrival in Chicago was in 1875, when I was certain I had located him and his sister Anna Malloy in the 1860 census. 

In the very years of such deprivation and death in Ireland, Catherine Malloy and her cousin Johanna Flanagan were born. Is it any wonder that there was a gap in the records kept by the priest in their home parish in Ballyagran? We sometimes lose sight, in our laser-focused quest to document our family's history, of the dire conditions our ancestors endured in that little dash between the dates of their life's trajectory.

Though I will again—some day—revisit this quandary, tomorrow begins another month. For this final quarter of the year, I will switch my research focus from my father-in-law's remaining research puzzles to tackle yet another set of problems. This time, we'll work on the questions lingering about my own father's mystery ancestors. These unanswered questions, all the legacy of a migrating couple determined never to let anyone know of their Polish roots, are beginning to unravel with the increasing accessibility of records worldwide. We owe a great debt of gratitude to those genealogy aficionados residing in other countries who, inspired by the same research zeal which motivates us, have found ways to make available for all their own nation's archived records.

Above: The 1893 Cook County, Illinois, physician's certificate of death for Irish immigrant William Flanagan, who died in Chicago on August 14 at eighty years of age.

 

Building the Other Guy's Family Tree

 

There are a number of tempting possibilities residing in the discovery of the Flanagan DNA match connecting William and Catherine of the Cappananty property in County Limerick through their possible son James and my father-in-law's own Flanagan line. After all, if DNA connects my husband with a descendant of James Flanagan, I'd consider the connection to William and Catherine a strong possibility.

Let's look at the clues pointing us in that direction. The Flanagan property in Cappananty, at the time of Griffith's Valuation, was labeled with William's name. Later, the property register was changed to Catherine's name, and eventually to James—most likely indicating some sort of family relationship.

On my father-in-law's side of the equation, his great-grandmother Anna Flanagan, who had married the disappearing Stephen Malloy, had only one child: a daughter whom she named Catherine. If during that time period of the late 1840s, Anna's regional custom was to adhere to the old Irish naming pattern, she would normally have named her oldest daughter after her own mother. Anna's daughter being named Catherine would thus point to the possibility that Anna's own mother was named Catherine, as well.

In addition, we know that Anna had a brother William, though we don't know where he fell in his family's birth order. If Anna's brother William were son of another man named William, that would mean the younger was third son of the elder. There was another brother—implied by the arrival in Chicago of Catherine's cousin Johanna Flanagan Lee—but we don't yet know his name.

On the DNA side, the line of descent from James presents challenges, as well. For a start, we need to remember there was a gap in available church records for the Catholic parish of Ballyagran which the Flanagans called their home. There were baptismal records available for James' son James, and for his daughter named Anna. And yet, there are several online trees which indicate a large number of children—most of them without documentation other than attribution to other Ancestry subscribers' trees.

The normal step in such a DNA quandary would be to roll up our sleeves and begin building our match's family tree. Step by step with appropriate documentation, we could paint a clear enough picture of the family constellation—if we could overcome what seem to be an insurmountable lack of records.

Still, there may be another way around this roadblock. Just as I attempted for the Flannery puzzle last month, we could examine those sparse church records to find names of baptismal sponsors, then build out the family connections based on the theory that godparents named were siblings or in-laws of the parents of the child.

We could also attempt to find documentation for the current trees posted on Ancestry. Or directly contact the DNA match to see whether that Flanagan descendant might have been the beneficiary of those coveted family keepsakes. Just as my father-in-law "inherited" his Tully grandfather's baptismal verification letter, someone from the James Flanagan line of descent may have been blessed with some private token of relationship, as well.

No matter how the deed is accomplished, though, it is apparent with some DNA matches that if we want to know more about our family, it falls our lot to be the one to build our own version of someone else's family tree. Whether "quick and dirty" as some DNA enthusiasts like to portray it, or a more carefully documented effort, there are simply times when we need to build that tree for ourselves.

Besides the James Flanagan line, though, there is yet one more possibility that needs our attention before the month is out: the line from the unnamed Flanagan brother who had a Chicago-bound daughter named Johanna.    

The "What If" Strategy Revisited

 

Sometimes, we stumble upon research possibilities which look good—except for one detail. That detail might be a missing document, or a date which looks like too much of a stretch to be believable. No matter what the research glitch, it leaves a hole in our proof argument demanding to be secured.

While I play around with the possibilities, juggling the facts I can support with the conjectures I cannot, I engage in what I call "what if" strategies. As we enter the final week of grappling with my research project for September, let's rearrange what we've gleaned on my father-in-law's Flanagan family, both in Ireland and in the United States.

We've seen that Anna Flanagan Malloy somehow made her way from her home in or near Ballyagran, County Limerick, to a new residence in Chicago. We know that she was in the neighborhood of Ballyagran in 1849, based on the letter sent to her there from her husband, Stephen Malloy, before his disappearance. We can find Anna with her daughter Catherine and her brother William in the 1860 U.S. census in Chicago. When they left Ireland, or how they arrived in North America, I can't yet tell, but I know each of them remained in Chicago for the rest of their lives.

Record of tenants in the region where Anna was staying when she received that letter from her husband showed only one property attributed to the surname Flanagan: a small house and lot leased to one William Flanagan. Later, that lot's tenant was listed as Catherine—then even later as James Flanagan.

Church records show that there was one James Flanagan in the area whose son by the same name was baptised in 1864. Could that elder James Flanagan be the same as the James Flanagan listed in the Valuation records for 1868? My "what if" conjecture would be: could James Flanagan be son of William and Catherine Flanagan? And could our Anna be James' sister? After all, it would have made sense for Anna, once her husband left, to return to her parents' home, especially if she were a young mother with a one-year-old child to care for.

While we lack a paper trail which could demonstrate—or negate—such a possibility, we do have another type of record at our disposal: autosomal DNA. It turns out that my husband, who is Anna Flanagan Malloy's great-great grandson, has a DNA match with a descendant of a James Flanagan. If the elder James, father in that baptismal record, were brother to our Anna, with this DNA match, we'd be comparing third cousins once removed.

According to Ancestry.com, where the match was located, the two Flanagan descendants share a mere seventeen centiMorgans. What are the possibilities for a match at that level of shared genetic material? Consulting the charts at DNA Painter, it is quite possible. Third cousin once removed, for seventeen centiMorgans, occurs in the top tier, according to statistics provided by Leah Larkin at The DNA Geek. In other words, the likelihood of this being a possible connection for a third cousin once removed is twenty three percent.

But what if that isn't the case? After all, there are other possibilities, as well. Even if they were less likely, the connection could have been farther away—say, fourth cousin—or even closer, as in third cousin. The measure of the genetic connection doesn't quite pinpoint the relationship; it just provides us assurance that we're in the right general area.

That, of course, is a start. It confirms that, whoever was the original tenant in that one Flanagan home in the Catholic Ballyagran parish, he was related to our Anna. And whoever his property eventually got passed to was likely one and the same as the James Flanagan whose son's name was preserved in that 1864 baptismal record. Though that isn't a "for sure" thing, it at least gives us license to play that "what if" strategy with a bit more confidence.

  

The Trail to the Ones Left Behind

 

When we are able to paint only a partial picture of those relatives left behind by our immigrating ancestors, is there a way to use what we know to find our ancestor's way back home? In the case of Anna Flanagan, wife of the disappearing Stephen Malloy, we at least have the assistance of facts gathered about her brother William.

It was William's impressive stone memorial which informed the world—and, thankfully, my little researching self—that the journey which landed him in a Chicago cemetery began in the Catholic parish of Ballyagran in County Limerick. That minute detail, combined with the address on the letter sent by Stephen Malloy to his wife Anna, pointed us to his humble beginnings in the townland of Cappananty, site of only one property in the 1850s Griffith's Valuation bearing that man's surname.

Whether the William Flanagan of the Valuation was one and the same as the old bachelor of Chicago, I can't yet tell. After all, the man leasing the Irish property could well have been his father. At any rate, the beauty of the Irish property records is that they didn't remain static with the one assessment done by Sir Richard John Griffith. A visit to the Valuation Office in Dublin can reveal the history of the property as it changed hands over the decades—and that was indeed what I was able to do, nearly seven years ago.

Reviewing the notes from that research journey now—review being one way to rediscover the details missed the first time we struggled with this puzzle—I can see the Cappananty property passed from the original entry for a William Flanagan to a woman by the name of Catherine Flanagan by 1855. While that property record, itself, does not tell me which William or Catherine that might have been, it at least identifies some names belonging to that one Flanagan family circle in Cappananty.

Taking that property record forward in time, we again see a change in name for the lessee in the year 1866. In red ink, Catherine Flanagan's name was lined out, and eventually replaced by another name with a note, "68." That name—presumably added by 1868—was another Flanagan. This time, the name was James.

It was interesting to stumble upon that name James in this review. During the past week, frustrated by the gaps in church records for the Ballyagran parish—leaving those gaps precisely placed where baptisms might have occurred for Catherine Malloy and Johanna Flanagan—I decided to search all baptismal and marriage records for the Ballyagran parish, regardless of dates, using John Grenham's website gateway to Find My Past. Not much came up in that search.

Not much, that is, except for one: the baptism of one Jacobus Flanagan in 1864, son of Jacobo and Elizabetha.

Looking at names like those surely prompts the reader to assume that is not English we are reading in that transcription. Sure enough, that is the original Latin of the Catholic baptismal entry. Checking one list providing corresponding English or Irish names for their Latin versions, we see that the son, Jacobus, was more likely named James—same as his father.

Finding a father and son named James Flanagan in 1864 in the Ballyagran parish opens my eyes to a possibility. This James, the elder, could have been the Flanagan named as lessee of the one Flanagan property in the townland of Cappananty which once was attributed to Catherine Flanagan, and before her, a man by the name of William.

Though I can't yet be certain of this, what if Catherine was widow of William, and mother of the elder James? What if that Catherine was also mother of Anna—who named her own firstborn daughter Catherine, in good Irish tradition being the namesake for the child's maternal grandmother? And could the William Flanagan who died in Chicago himself be son of another man named William?

The time frames may be stretched too far for these flights of fancy to be solid possibilities. After all, our William was said to have been born in 1813. If he were indeed son of a man named William, by Irish naming tradition, he would have been the man's third son.

Assuming by that point that the elder William had only three children—in other words, no daughters interspersed in that time frame—and given a spacing between births of two years apiece, it would calculate to a marriage about 1808. If, as was reported to be customary, the elder William, as groom, was twenty two years of age at that date, he would have been born in 1786. Thus, the stretch: if this were the correct person to be our William's father, an 1855 death would have yielded the ripe old age of sixty nine years.

Not that that couldn't have happened—but it provides a detail which suggests we examine alternate connections. But, why connections at all? After all, Flanagan is a fairly common name. Yet, there was one more detail which I needed to consider. There was something else connecting our American Flanagans with the Flanagans of this postage stamp sized property in Cappananty.  

Major Roadblocks, Minor Revisions

 

Let's admit it: at this point, we are stuck with the puzzle of what became of Stephen Malloy, my father-in-law's great-grandfather. Perhaps, as his 1849 letter to his wife Anna indicated, he did indeed sail from the English port of Liverpool, heading to a new life in Boston. As far as the family knew after that point, the man simply disappeared.

Anna, Stephen's wife, did not let that deter her. She, too, took passage to America, though I don't know how—let alone exactly when and where—she arrived. All I know is that she ended up not in Boston, but in Chicago.

Stephen Malloy's disappearance thus becomes a major roadblock to my research goals. Seeking out further details on how Anna and her daughter arrived in Chicago, however, amounts to minor revisions. And these discoveries are indeed possible, considering the fragments of information we can glean from other records.

For instance, perhaps Anna traveled alone; perhaps she didn't. We can't yet tell. We do know, however, that Anna's young daughter Catherine—her only child—lived with her at the point when we found documentation of them in the 1860 census. Then Anna, along with Catherine, lived in Chicago with Anna's brother, a single man by the name of William Flanagan.

It is there in Chicago that we've pieced together as much of the story of Stephen and Anna as we could find—everything from the scant information on death certificates of that era to family lore explaining what they had heard about the disappearing Stephen Malloy. And while Stephen's story still presents what seems like an impenetrable enigma, it is the smattering of details we can gather on the rest of the family which, in yet another review, may lead us to answers—or at least revisions of our understanding of the story.

Take Anna's brother William. The family's story was that William had been arrested for a minor crime and sentenced by the British authorities to "transportation" to Australia to serve time. It turns out there was a record for one such William Flanagan in 1851. The case was decided in County Cork, not in the location of our Flanagan residence in County Limerick—but keep in mind that Anna's and William's home church parish reached across the county line, close to the main road leading south to the city of Cork.

While William was eventually "discharged"—as I learned during our visit to Ireland several years ago—in reviewing this detail now, I see the date of that decision was May 9, 1855. This date may become helpful to us in pinpointing the family's move to America.

Of course, we must not rely on only one document to build our case here. Keep in mind, I'm not entirely sure this entry in the Irish National Archives database is our William Flanagan. Taking a look at other indicators of the family's date of immigration, though, we find approximate corroboration.

For one thing, Anna's own death certificate bore the report that she had been in the state of Illinois for thirty years from her 1885 death. Granted, that detail was gleaned from someone else's report—an unnamed person, at that—but seeing the added comment on the certificate, "Mother of Mrs. John Tully," one could presume that the reporting party was indeed her daughter, the former Catherine Malloy.

That one document pointed to an arrival date—at least in Illinois—in 1855, aligning with William Flanagan's release from his sentence. Let's look for one more indicator: daughter Catherine's own report of her arrival in the United States. Although the one place where I found it was a document which was horribly overwritten, that 1900 census record also asked the question in a second manner: how many years was she in America? Catherine answered forty-five years, once again pointing to an arrival in 1855.

Having reviewed the documents I already had noted in my records, I can now at least estimate a year for their arrival. Furthermore, rather than the assumption which was held previously by the family—that Anna and Catherine arrived first from Ireland and then, somehow, William joined them from Australia—we can assume the trip may have been made by all three on the same passage.

Additionally, there is a strong possibility that those three Flanagan descendants—William, Anna, and her daughter Catherine—were not the only Flanagans to travel to Chicago. Years ago, I explored another woman who, in some references, was mentioned as a Flanagan related to these others. I had followed her family tree as much as possible in the past, but the work was incomplete due to lack of some records. Revisiting this other Flanagan relative one more time, perhaps we can find some additional connections to explain more of the extended family's saga.

Above: One possible entry from the Ireland-Australia Transportation Database at the National Archives of Ireland's website indicates a William Flanagan who had been sentenced in County Cork in 1851, but ordered to be discharged in 1855.

The "What If?" Strategy

 

In the process of searching for our specific ancestor, it is tempting, once finding a reasonable document, to assume that is the proof we are seeking. That's never a foolproof approach, though. There are several reasons why we seek more than one document to confirm the details of an ancestor's life story.

For one thing, we need to consider what I call "name twins." There is a strong possibility—especially given common names of folks living in population centers—that someone else could be given the same name as the ancestor we are researching. A wise alternative is to seek several documents along that person's life trajectory to confirm we are following the same person's history. 

Likewise, keeping track of not only the timeline but the locations where significant life events occurred is important for ensuring we are still researching the same person. Impossible feats of travel, given restrictions of the time period, would be a clue that we have jumped track from our ancestor to someone of the same name but different family.

In the case of my father-in-law's mystery great-grandfather, Stephen Malloy, we have a situation where the family received one report of his demise which might be quite believable—until we begin asking questions about the circumstances.

Questions, as it turns out, are a good device to employ in genealogical research. We always need to consider possible alternative explanations. And in Stephen Malloy's case, there are questions.

One question we had mentioned yesterday: the fact that Stephen's wife Anna chose to remain unmarried for the rest of her life, despite being free as a widow to remarry—indeed, in that day and age, especially with a child to support, that would have been the norm. Was there any doubt about that story that her husband had been killed in Boston?

Another question flows from the very details found in the passenger record of the ship upon which our Stephen was supposed to have been aboard. The age for that man was cited as twenty six, and yet his supposed bride would have been thirty seven that same year—hardly a believable age spread for a couple during that time period.

The least verifiable of my doubts comes from the overarching history of the region which Stephen Malloy left in 1849. Ireland had experienced some civil unrest, both politically and from a sectarian point of view, and Stephen's abrupt and seemingly mysterious defection plays with my own doubts in ways not likely to be substantiated without further evidence. I begin to wonder: why did Stephen Malloy leave home so abruptly? Could it be that he never made it on board the ship in Liverpool? If he were fleeing trouble back home, could he have assumed an alias?

Perhaps my questions might never have found a satisfying answer—except that now, we have search capabilities unparalleled in previous generations. While I can take the tedious route of searching Boston newspapers for crime reports of the murder of one Stephen Malloy, I can also search for alternate explanations by other means as well.

One possible alternate explanation could be that Stephen did make it to Boston and decide to settle there, making a new life for himself. Searching online records did reveal one document which gave me pause to consider these alternate possibilities: a petition for citizenship filed by one Stephen Mulloy in the state of Massachusetts in 1855.

According to the document, this Stephen arrived in Boston on or about the first day of April in 1849, only a few days after the date given on the passenger list for the Anglo American. The document also provided his date of birth and current age: born December 24, 1827, he claimed to be twenty eight when he completed that 1855 document. Thus, he was nearly—but not quite the same—as the age of the Stephen Molloy on the passenger list.

Though the tantalizing detail of the record was that this man, too, was born in County Limerick—location of the home where our Stephen sent his letter to his wife in 1849—his age, being so much younger than his supposed wife Anna, gives me pause to wonder whether this traveler was the same man as our Stephen. Indeed, records of this man in the Massachusetts 1855 state census, where he was boarding with a Reardon family, could lead one to presume he was waiting for his wife's arrival from Ireland—but the subsequent state census in 1865 showed him a married man with two children. Hardly our Stephen Malloy. Or was he?

There are, of course, other possible explanations for our Stephen Malloy's disappearance. Coming here in 1849, of all times, he could possibly have caught gold fever and headed for California. He could, once in this country, have assumed an alias. Either of those scenarios could have reached a climax of finding him shot to death—but even with today's search tools, we might never find the full story.

With that, we have some other search options to explore before the month is out and we turn our attention to other research goals. At this point, the best way to determine next steps is to talk it all out. We'll grapple with the possibilities tomorrow.

Back to Boston

 

One plus to revisiting our family history research trail over the years is the possibility that additional documents may have been uploaded to digitized collections. This was indeed what I had discovered while grappling with my father-in-law's puzzle concerning his great-grandfather, Stephen Malloy.

Having left his home in Ireland via Liverpool in a hurry, Stephen had written to his wife Anna, telling her that he was bound for Boston. While the name of the sailing vessel matched up with passenger records I've been able to find almost two hundred years later, that was the last confirmation of what had become of him.

Family stories didn't help the research effort. According to the oral tradition passed down by the family, Stephen Malloy had made it to Boston, alright—but some time after his arrival, he was shot and killed.

That's what his descendants had said, repeating the story generation after generation with no proof to substantiate the claim. I decided to look for myself—but that was years ago. Sure enough, I found his name on the right passenger list, arriving in Boston about March 27, 1849. But what about his death? Surely someone would have made an official note of such a crime.

Back at that time, I did stumble upon a possible record. It was, however, only a transcript, as many of the records available for genealogical purposes were at the time. 

The record basically reported the death of one Stephen "Maloy" in Boston during 1850. The date looked reasonable, and since I'd already discovered the numerous spelling varieties used for Stephen's surname, an entry for "Maloy" didn't disturb me too much.

Clicking through on a second tab for the reference, labeled "source," gave me more information on this entry. It provided me with the name of the original document from which this indexed collection had been drawn—helpful information, indeed, if I wished to track down the source for myself to view anything more than a mere, possibly error-laden, transcription.

At the time I first found this entry—this was years ago—all I could do was presume this was the indicator of Stephen Malloy's demise, just as the family had insisted was his fate. Later, fortunately, the document itself was digitized, enabling me to see for myself the full story. In fact, there were several versions of the record made available, from typed transcript back to what appears to be a time-worn original version of the record itself.

Once I was able to view the actual document, I learned that, once again, our Stephen Malloy had thrown me off his track. The entry for the 1850 death was indeed for someone in Boston named Stephen "Maloy," but it was for a babe in arms aged one year and five months—hardly of an age to be husband of Anna Flanagan or father of Catherine Malloy.

The child, son of John and Elizabeth Maloy, was certainly not our Stephen. But what if the family could have been related to Stephen? After all, why did Stephen choose to migrate to Boston? He could, as did many Irish immigrants, have rather chosen the route to New York City—or chosen the more prudent expense of transportation to the British portion of North America, and head for Canada.

That Stephen's wife Anna may not have been entirely convinced of his tragic death was evident in that she, a devout Catholic, remained unmarried for the rest of her seventy three years—or, perhaps, she just never gave up hope that she'd see him again.

I, on the other hand, in revisiting this research puzzle couldn't help but take a look at all the other documents which have more recently been digitized and placed online for our benefit. While this may be a wild and crazy conjecture on my part, I couldn't help but notice that there were other records from the Boston area concerning men of the same name during that time period.

While a game of "what if" should never have any part in the final proof argument drawn up at the conclusion of a difficult ancestral search, it certainly doesn't hurt to at least consider other possibilities while we are still in search mode. And there was one possibility in particular which made me think twice.

 

Note: both search results, shown above in insets, are from Ancestry.com, as indicated by the hyperlinked text next to each example shown.     

Falling Through the Gaps

 

How big a mug do we need to contain the genealogy crocodile tears we'll cry into our beer today?

It's February 17, 1848, and Anna Flanagan Malloy has just given birth to the daughter who will become her only child. She and her husband Stephen name the child Catherine—presumably, in the old Irish naming tradition, after Anna's own mother.

We already know what happened after that. At some point in the next year, Stephen finds it necessary to run to Liverpool where, on the eve of a subsequent departure, he dictates a hasty letter to his wife, alerting her that his next stop would be across the Atlantic Ocean in a place called Boston. From there, he disappears.

Meanwhile, from our hundred-seventy-plus year vantage point, we discover that, in an oh-no-you-don't-either moment, Anna grabs her daughter and heads to America...only she and Catherine inexplicably end up not in Boston, but another thousand miles further in Chicago.

Surely, we think, there must be a way to muddle through this research puzzle and determine the prior history of both Stephen and Anna. More certainly, we assume we can find some documented trace of baby Catherine, who at least could claim native birth on the Emerald Isle.

Apparently, this is not so. There is one barrier to our research plans. As John Grenham wryly put it in a recent blog post, "Nothing like some birth records to get a good fire going."

Ah, the Irish. Can you blame a starving man for seeing things from a more practical perspective?

In case you haven't yet stumbled upon the work of John Grenham, let's take a moment to consider the man and his efforts on behalf of Irish genealogy. There is a lot to be said of him.

In typical British understatement, for instance, blogger Alistair McGowan reports, "John Grenham is probably Ireland's leading genealogist."

Probably.

John Grenham is certainly known for his useful guide on Irish genealogy, Tracing Your Irish Ancestors, updated in 2019. Far more than that one publication, he has contributed decades of work on projects as an accredited genealogist in Ireland. Much of his work is now housed on his own website.

Let's take our issue with Anna Flanagan and her daughter Catherine Malloy to the Grenham website to see what we can find. Just looking at some basic charts and graphics will help illuminate our research difficulties.

First, let's see what we can discover about the surname Flanagan. After all, we've already noted that Anna, after her husband's departure, likely resided with some Flanagan family members in County Limerick. At about the same time as Stephen's departure in 1849, though, the surname Flanagan was widespread throughout Ireland, making it difficult to determine whether her roots were indeed in that specific civil parish where she received her husband's letter.

Malloy, on the other hand, was a surname centered in very few population centers. Of course, that is considering only one of many spelling variations; searching for Molloy, for instance, would produce a vastly different picture, covering almost the entire island, with the exception of the southwest region. Again, we find little to help us pinpoint where our elusive Stephen Malloy might have originated.

If we instead focus on finding the baptismal record for their daughter Catherine, as we discussed yesterday, once again we encounter a problem—but not of the same type as the widespread surname distribution we've mentioned above. This time, it is perhaps more akin to the conjecture offered only partially in jest by John Grenham: the availability of baptismal records in the specific Catholic parish where Anna and her daughter resided.

The Grenham site, along with many other resources, offers a date range of record availability by geographic location. Since we already know the Catholic parish where Anna and her baby were living at the time of Stephen's letter, let's take a look at what John Grenham provides for the parish of Ballyagran.

Bottom line: quite a bit...if you aren't looking for a baptismal record any time between August 30 of 1847 and September 22 of 1850.

As it so happens, an Irish child born on February 17, 1848, would likely have been baptised almost immediately, if not within a few days after birth—but, if born in the Catholic parish of Ballyagran, falling exactly within a three-year gap between a significant run of document availability ranging from 1841 through 1880. In other words, confirmation of Catherine's baptism is unfortunately no longer included in the church's records.

And so, we cry in our beer.

Something inside of me struggles to keep up the search. But...but...I sputter...there must be another way around this research dilemma. What about picking up that first trail, the one tracking Stephen Malloy across the Atlantic to Boston? 

Indeed, what revisiting this research brick wall teaches me is that it is useful to retrace our steps over the years. Going back to revisit the Stephen Malloy dilemma this month, after having laid aside the problem for years, did yield some new information—just not what we would have hoped. We'll check that out next week.

Above: Sign on road approaching the village of Ballyagran in County Limerick, Ireland, seen during our visit there in 2014.

 

Pivoting Around a Brick Wall

 

When we are faced with an insurmountable research brick wall, one approach might be to pivot and sidestep the issue, instead of being fixated on one sole route to our answer. Thus, making no progress in finding the origin of my father-in-law's great-grandfather, Stephen Malloy, we'll turn our attention today to his only daughter, Catherine.

Because Catherine was in my father-in-law's direct family line, we know the rest of her story. Born somewhere in Ireland, we know only that by the time she was barely one year of age, her mother was living in County Limerick. That detail we glean only from the fortunate discovery of the envelope of a letter mailed to her mother upon her father's abrupt departure for America.

Catherine and her mother, Anna Flanagan Malloy, eventually immigrated to the United States, as well, but not to the destination her father had indicated when he outlined his own plans. Anna brought her young daughter to Chicago. Whether the choice was made because Anna's brother, William Flanagan, had also moved to that midwest city, I can't tell; all I know is that the mother and daughter both spent the rest of their lives calling that city their home.

From that era of their lives in Chicago, I learned that Catherine married another Irish immigrant named John Tully. The year of their marriage—1870, as suggested by a subsequent census report—may explain why I've been unsuccessful in locating any documentation for that event. Following that event—whenever it occurred—Catherine and John became proud parents of six children: five daughters and one lone son.

Catherine's death in 1922 provided confirmation of both her parents' names and the specifics of her date of birth—17 February 1848—giving us a clearer idea of her age when her mother received the farewell letter from the emigrating Stephen Malloy.

Given that Catherine was actually born in Ireland, and considering that her parents—well, at least her mother—had been Catholic, it would stand to reason that Catherine would show up in baptismal records sometime before her mother's departure in pursuit of her husband. Yet, taking a look at online resources for Irish Catholic baptismal records in the county where Anna lived when she received Stephen's letter, there is no sign of a baptism for daughter Catherine, no matter how I manipulate the spelling of that surname.

The next thought was, if nothing was showing in County Limerick that could match the family we're seeking, could it be possible that Catherine was born elsewhere? After all, there might be a chance that Anna, knowing Stephen was seeking a way to head to America, might have left the home where they, as a married couple, had settled to move back in with family in his absence.

But where would that "elsewhere" have been? Keeping in mind our search task would include seeking several spelling variations for that surname, I looked for baptismal records under "Malloy," then "Molloy," and even "Mulloy." Despite the search engine engaging in some liberal handling of spelling variations as well, not one match came up with the correct set of parent names, no matter where in Ireland the results pointed us.

So where was she? Obviously, Catherine Malloy was born somewhere in Ireland. That I haven't been able to find her—or her mother—in passenger records might have been one issue, but surely there should have been some sort of baptismal record before the mother-daughter duo left their homeland. 

There was, however, yet another problem with which we—as all other researchers of Irish family history—need to contend. We'll cry into our ready beer mugs tomorrow as we examine our research dilemma.

Reframing the Question

 

If we cannot find the answer to the research question we've posed, why let that stop our progress? Let's try reframing the question.

In the case of Anna Flanagan and her disappearing husband, Stephen Malloy, we've been unable to find him in the townland—or even the civil parish—where he mailed his last message to her. Granted, searching for the surname Malloy can be challenging; in the few documents where I've been able to locate his surname, it has been spelled in just as many different ways.

Indeed, searching for Stephen—or anyone with his surname—could be a challenge. As we've noticed from researching others from this location and time period, spelling could be a flexible skill. That surname could be rendered Malloy, as we've seen in some records once Anna settled in Chicago, or it could have been recorded as Moley, as the letter had been addressed to Stephen's wife. In fact, besides the most common spelling of Molloy—derived from the Irish phrase meaning "proud chieftain"—and Malloy, the name had been anglicized to several other formats, as far ranging as Mulloy is from Miley.

With the number of possible spelling permutations, in order to conduct a reasonable—to say nothing of exhaustive—search would test the patience of even a saint as Irish as Saint Patrick. While I continue to pursue such a quest in the background—genealogy and sausage-making and all—we can attempt to answer our research question by reframing it.

We need to remember that there was a third party in the matter of this letter from a disappearing husband to his wife: Catherine, daughter of Stephen and Anna. Born in Ireland sometime before the date of Stephen's 1849 letter, surely Catherine would have left a paper trail of her own. As the child of Catholic parents, if nothing else, she would have been baptised—possibly even in the parish of Ballyagran of which her uncle William Flanagan was so proud. She, too, would have made the journey across the Atlantic at some point; after all, she ended up in Chicago before the 1860 census.

Thus, if we are stuck with the question of Stephen Malloy's origin in Ireland, perhaps we can momentarily sidestep him to pinpoint where the family lived before 1849 by searching not for Stephen or his wife Anna, but for records concerning their young daughter Catherine. 

Stephen's Side of the Story

 

How many times do we discover one useful detail about the ancestor we are pursuing, only to find the information isn't quite enough to satisfy all our questions?

Take Stephen Malloy, great-grandfather of my father-in-law. The tantalizing detail about Stephen was that my father-in-law's family actually still had in their possession a letter which he had written to his wife, Anna Flanagan Malloy, on February 20, 1849. The downside was that that letter became the first and last token of his existence which anyone in the family had of the man.

The letter, despite its abysmal handwriting and decrepit condition—chunks of paper missing from what might have been key details in the message—still provided enough clues for a modern-day genealogist to do some fact-checking.

From the surviving details, we can glean such facts as where the letter was written—in Liverpool, not in Ireland—and Stephen's plans. He was immediately to set sail for Boston aboard a ship called the "Anglo-Americanio." Spelling not being the strong suit of the letter's scribe, it would be quite reasonable to assume the ship might rather have been named the Anglo-American. In fact, one vessel bearing that name docked in Boston harbor on March 27, 1849—five weeks after the date on Stephen's letter, a reasonable travel time for that era.

The bonus detail—at least for our research goals—was discovery of someone named Stephen Molloy listed in the passenger records for that ship. According to the scanned record, Stephen was headed from Ireland to the United States at age twenty six. He claimed to be a mason, and was apparently not traveling with any discernible family members.

Despite that serendipitous finding, realizing that Stephen's age in 1849 put his year of birth approximately in 1823 did not sit well with the discovery that, according to Chicago records at the end of her life, his wife Anna was likely born around 1812. In other words, that would make Anna, mother of Stephen's daughter Catherine, eleven years older than her husband—an unlikely scenario, given that time period in Ireland.

Furthermore, looking back at the tax records for the civil parish in County Limerick where Stephen's letter was sent to his wife, while we can find the encouraging sign of one Flanagan residence nearby, there is no mention of anyone by the surname Malloy. Nor Molloy. Nor any other spelling permutation of that name.

Stephen Malloy may have been sailing from Liverpool to Boston on the Anglo-American, but where did he come from before departing for his New World destination?

Above: Header for the scanned passenger listing for the Anglo-American, arriving in Boston from Liverpool on March 27, 1849; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

Detour to Chicago

 

While it may be no surprise to discover that one's Irish ancestors ended up in such a place as Chicago, it may seem an abrupt detour, in the process of unfolding the story of Anna Flanagan Malloy, to suddenly be jerked across thousands of miles to consider one William Flanagan living in Chicago. However, in order for you to fully appreciate my joy in finding a William of such a surname in the tiny townland of Cappananty in County Limerick, Ireland, requires us to temporarily zoom forward in our story's timeline.

My first clue that there was anyone named William Flanagan associated with Anna Malloy came in the form of a headstone. Not in Ireland, but in Chicago. An impressive monument for a supposedly single man—and likely a mere immigrant laborer at that—William Flanagan's 1893 memorial directed one's eyes heavenward, but it was what was written on the plaque itself which caught my attention: 

Wm Flanagan

Native of

Parish Ballygran

Co. Limerick Ireland

Died

Aug. 14 1893

Aged

80 years.

Other than the omission of one solitary letter—an additional "a" belonging in the Catholic parish name of Ballyagran—William Flanagan's headstone in Chicago was an immensely helpful discovery in pinpointing the place for us to eventually visit during our travels to Ireland. But it also led to other confirmations.

Locating William in the 1860 census meant discovering that he, a single man, lived with a woman—at least according to the barely legible scrawl of the enumerator of that Chicago district—by the name of Ann Mulloy. Better yet, this "Ann" had a daughter with her named Catherine, by then of an age calculated to yield a birth year of 1847, close enough to suit our purposes. All three residents of this household were born in Ireland. 

Though the 1860 census included no explanation of relationship between members of the same residence, I know from research into subsequent years that Ann—Anna—and William were siblings. The verification, itself, was indirect, but sufficient. The 1885 death record for Anna carried the handwritten note that she was "Mother of Mrs. John Tully," the now-grown daughter Catherine who had been left fatherless at her dad's disappearance in 1849. And William Flanagan's own death notice, published in the Chicago Tribune that August 15, 1893, mentioned that same "Mrs. John Tully," daughter of Anna Flanagan Malloy, as "his niece."

Add those together, and we get William as brother of Anna. But the Flanagan siblings were in Chicago, and Anna's original goal was to trace her husband, Stephen Malloy, to his destination in Boston. Why the thousand-mile discrepancy?

We'll need to return to the Flanagans' old home in County Limerick to revisit that question. This time, we'll trace the story from Stephen's side of the puzzle.

Above: Photograph of portion of the headstone for William Flanagan, buried at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery in Cook County, Illinois, United States.

The Inevitable: Taxes

 

As the saying goes, nothing in this world can be as certain as death and taxes. For governments, that means two certain sources of records. And for genealogists, it translates into two sure resources in which to locate our ancestors.

For those of us who can claim Irish ancestry, one such source of records came in the form known as Griffith's Valuation. Sir Richard John Griffith, appointed first by the British government to conduct a boundary survey of all the political borders in Ireland, subsequently conducted Ireland's first "tenement" survey. This survey—the instrument which eventually became known as Griffith's Valuation—was meant to assess the value of all properties, not just those of the landed gentry, for the purpose of determining liability to pay the Poor rate for support of the destitute within each Poor Law Union. 

While paying taxes is seldom an act we welcome, the fact that our ancestors were implicated in such obligations is something we can celebrate as family historians: in that very act, they left a paper trail behind them for our benefit. Especially in Ireland, we can be grateful for such records, as very little else in the way of census or other governmental records of the nineteenth century is left us.

That said, zeroing in on the location of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Anna Flanagan Malloy, thanks to the letter sent to her on her husband's departure for America, was something I could hardly wait to do. If nothing else, I was curious to see whether any records could confirm the whereabouts of these brick wall ancestors.

Consulting the free online resource for Griffith's Valuation at the website Ask About Ireland, I checked first for any sign of a Flanagan family in the civil parish of the townland to which the letter was sent. Clicking on "Griffith's Places," rather than entering a surname, I wanted to see all the surnames in the region surrounding the destination of Anna's letter.

There were twenty four entries for the civil parish of Corcomohide listed in the transcription. Only one came up with the surname Flanagan. Keep in mind that Griffith's valuation did not list the name of every resident of the parish, only those, as head of household, who were attached to the assessed properties.

From that transcribed listing of the "occupiers" of the parish, it is possible to pull up a copy of the actual handwritten ledger by clicking on the icon for that choice. Doing so for the only Flanagan listed—his name was William—I noticed his entry was in a different townland than that of the letter sent to Anna. While the entries for the townland of Cappanihane—complete with listings regarding landlord John Mason—did not include any Flanagans, William Flanagan's name was included within the nearby townland of Cappananty.

According to the handwritten record, William Flanagan's entry included a house, office, and garden. His property, judging by those surrounding it, was rather on the modest size. Whether William was one of those in the district bordering on "destitute" or whether this was a layout suitable for a single dweller rather than head of a large household, I couldn't tell. In fact, I couldn't even tell whether this Flanagan was related in any way to our Anna Flanagan Malloy. But the fact that there was even one Flanagan located in the area was encouraging.

That the one Flanagan in the area was named William was also a welcome sign—but in order to explain that, we'll have to take a giant step forward, both in time and distance, to see the connection between Anna and someone named William Flanagan, on the other side of their lifetime, thousands of miles away in a place called Chicago.   

Lists of Links and Ways to Find Them

 

From the maze of geopolitical divisions in 1840s Ireland—now that we've sorted out the precise location where we hope to locate Anna Flanagan Malloy—we can determine where, if anywhere, we can find records containing her family's names.

We are fortunate that my father-in-law's great-grandmother Anna had one keepsake which she, and then her daughter and descendants after her, kept as the only reminder she had remaining of the husband who, after writing her, was never seen by her again. From that letter, we can surmise that its address reveals either the place where she lived in 1849 or, at the very least, the location of her family's landlord.

From that address—the townland of Cappanihane in County Limerick—our next step is to explore what records might still be available to examine for any signs of the family's whereabouts. Whenever I explore a new research location, my first step is to orient myself with maps and brief descriptions of the region or town (if applicable), and then delve into lists showing possible resources for further genealogical research.

A first step in that tour of lists, of course, is to explore the FamilySearch.org wiki, but in the case of this townland or even its next-step geographical division—the civil parish of Corcomohide—there is not much information to be obtained at this resource. Wikis, in general, provide a quick way for researchers to collaborate on compiling resources, but lacking any input from these volunteers, we can see—at least in the case of this wiki at FamilySearch for Corcomohide—the bare bones generic template provided by organizers to guide volunteers in adding any specifics.

In other words, there is not much available, at least at FamilySearch.org in their wiki, to guide us in researching family roots from that particular civil parish—yet.

Another resource for guidance I've often consulted when approaching research in new-to-me regions is Cyndi's List. However, while there is a category specific to County Limerick in Ireland, of the sub-categories (which currently include nearly one hundred links), I found little of substance that can't be obtained through other means.

A resource touted by some researchers, Linkpendium, likewise contained several links for County Limerick, most of which were either outdated or could have been obtained by other means.

When all else fails—and why wait until that point?!—I turn to general search engines like Google, even when researching genealogy. Sometimes, my approach is to employ the specific suffix of the country I am researching when accessing the search engine—in this case, it would yield the address google.ie to allow me to search the same way people in Ireland use the website for their searches—but this time, I didn't even need to go that route. I found some useful resources even by employing the Google site specific to my own country.

Granted, there were some pockets of information I could glean from the usual resources. FamilySearch, I've long since discovered, may have more than one way to describe the information I'm seeking. Searching for specific topics on FamilySearch by employing Google to do so—use Google to search the term FamilySearch.org plus the topic or specific term I'm seeking (the townland of Cappanihane, for instance)—sometimes brings up three or more options, such as this clickable list of all civil parishes located in County Limerick, or this chart of those same civil parishes, linking them to their corresponding barony, poor law union, Catholic parish, and Catholic diocese. Helpful resources, indeed.

From this foray into the genealogical side of Google, I was reintroduced to the updated resource posted online by the diocese of County Limerick, called the Diocesan Heritage Project. From the cross-referenced chart at FamilySearch.org, I could see that the Catholic parish for Corcomohide was known as Ballyagran and Colmanswell. The Diocesan Heritage Project entry for "Ballyagran-Colmanswell" provided some history for the changing parameters of the church parish.

Besides the dates and names of locations within the parish, the Heritage Project provided one detail which urged me to research further. According to the website, the first parish priest for Ballyagran was a man listed only as "Fr. Flanagan."

Flanagan!

Scrolling down the website entry for the parish, I also noticed a chart listing the names of all the parish priests by year. Though certainly not the earliest listing, there was a James O'Flanagan listed as priest from 1842 through 1850, the same years in which our Anna Flanagan and her family might have lived in the area. Whether Flanagan and O'Flanagan was the same family at that time—or whether James O'Flanagan was the same man as the priest mentioned in the Diocesan Heritage Project as "the first parish priest"—I can't yet say.

One thing I can tell, at this point: there were at least two people named Flanagan living in the region of that church parish when Anna received her letter from her husband, Stephen Malloy.

Now to see if we can find any further records for Flanagans in the civil parish of Corcomohide—wherever the records might be kept.