This Blog is About a Struggle

 

Family history adventures often turn into unanswered questions:

• Why did they leave Ireland?
• Why did they move to Chicago?
• Why are they so invisible?

As much as I've tried to answer the questions I've had this month concerning Anna Flanagan from Ballyagran in County Limerick, her missing husband Stephen Malloy, and even her later years as a single mother in Chicago, it looks like I'm closing out another month without the documentation I've been struggling to find for decades. 

Don't look now, but tomorrow, I'll begin the process again with another mystery ancestor from my father-in-law's Irish heritage. This time with a guess about a possible second great-grandfather, I'll repeat the process in another Irish location in neighboring County Kerry.

Will I have better luck the next time I try this? Doubtful. This quest—and thus, this blog—is about a struggle, repeated as many times as my family has enigmatic ancestors, whether grandparents, great-grandparents, or even generations before that time. Most have stories which stretch beyond the reach of documentation, whether religious or governmental. 

This struggle, no matter how annoying, is what keeps drawing me back into the fray. With every new record set added online—hey, MyHeritage just made available Irish dog license registrations from the National Archives of Ireland, as did Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org, just to give an idea of how desperate some researchers can be about finding their Irish roots—my hopes get amped up at the start of another round of searches.

If all the answers fell easily into my lap at the first try, I guess this wouldn't be such an adventure. Perhaps it would become more of a round of predictable dances with ancestral partners which, after enough iterations, would become unbearably boring.

Thankfully, that is not the case. But when the going gets rough and I can't see any answer in sight, I need to remind myself that this has always been about a struggle. It's the challenge that keeps us going.

It's Only "Classic" 'til October 1

 

Here I was, getting ready for my biweekly count and looking forward to a new ancestor to pursue at the start of next month, when I decided to sneak a peek at that ancestor's ThruLines results on Ancestry.com.

Right now, Ancestry DNA is going through a revision process, which in my view means a whole lot more clicks just to get to the same information. In other words, there are some breathless beta versions which simply deserve a click back to the original program. 

I get it that some people may find revisions informative, helpful, or just the very spark to make things exciting again. On the other hand, I use Ancestry every day, and the DNA tools several times a week. I like to find things where I put them the last time I used them.

Trying to provide feedback to Ancestry—they provided a hyperlink, which once clicked, supposedly leads to a page where such can be offered—led me only to a blank page with a perky "Ask Leaf" dialogue bubble. I declined. I didn't want to ask him anything; I wanted to tell about something.

Thankfully, Ancestry provides a button for those who wish to revert to the way things had always been—in other words, back to the classic version. When I tried that last night, though, I saw—to my dismay, I might add—that the DNA classic view will only be available until October 1.

I guess that means I'll have to put on the brakes and slow down enough to take in the scenery in this new DNA drive. The classic option is only temporarily classic. Soon it will not only become antiquated, it will be non-existent.

As is often said in October: "Boo!" (Hoo!)

Well, on to other matters. The rest of the Ancestry universe still continues to serve my quest to expand my in-laws' family tree, though not as rapidly as before I began wrestling with my father-in-law's Irish ancestors. I only managed to find forty nine additional family members to add to his tree in the past two weeks, most of whom were collateral lines or floating branches expanded in my futile attempt to follow Anna Flanagan Malloy's F.A.N. Club. Right now, my in-laws' tree has edged up to 44,318 documented relatives.

Thanks to some unexpected DNA matches—both at Ancestry.com and elsewhere—I was able to add six more individuals to my own tree. Right now, that tree is parked at 41,969 people, waiting until I turn to my dad's Polish roots in October. I'd be ecstatic if I could find some Polish DNA matches, but that is a search better taken elsewhere than my international subscription at Ancestry, unfortunately. 

Right now, with my focus on my father-in-law's roots in Ireland, we've got plenty of time to delve into yet another near-impossible immigrant story, which we'll do at the start of September. Maybe by then, I'll make my peace with the ever-changing website bells and whistles at Ancestry.

Why Chicago?

 

One question I've always had, while researching my father-in-law's ancestral roots, was why his Irish ancestors chose Chicago as their immigration destination. After all, ports of arrival for such European immigrants were usually known to be geographically logical places like New York—and, specifically for the Irish, Boston. One well-known online periodical, A Letter From Ireland, brings up that very point in listing the most likely destinations for Irish passengers to the United States, noting heavy settlement in America's urban northeast.

Single mother Anna Flanagan Malloy, on the other hand, arrived in Chicago. How did she come to such a decision? Granted, her brother also arrived there, possibly looking for work in a city with a growing need for laborers. That said, I have yet to determine just what it was, exactly, that William Flanagan did for a living.

I took my question—why Chicago?—to the Internet to see what could be found, in hopes I'd uncover some conclusive evidence to explain why these Irish seemed to bypass the more reasonable (and easily accessible) east coast options for a trip of nearly an additional thousand miles overland.

Very likely, chain migration played a key role for some Irish immigrants, but I've yet to find the initiating family member—or former neighbor from back in County Limerick—who made the decision to try Chicago over those much easier eastern targets. Compelling reasons drawing later Irish arrivals included the expanding infrastructure in Chicago: the canals and railroads that made industrial expansion possible were often built on the backs of Irish immigrants.

There must have been an aggregate of forces remaking Chicago into the fourth largest Irish city in America by the start of the Civil War. What, among all those causes, beguiled our Flanagans to make Chicago their choice still eludes me. Reviewing what I knew of the Flanagans' F.A.N. Club did little to expand my understanding. If anything, it made me realize how invisible the poorer of those Irish immigrants may have been in those early years in Chicago—or how vitriolic the rhetoric hurled between opposing sides in those early years in Chicago.

Even checking the development of the area known as Hyde Park, once an independent township before incorporation as part of the City of Chicago, did little to reveal any details about the extended Flanagan family, some of whom had settled in or very near that area. I still cannot find census entries after 1860 for some of these descendants until the turn of the subsequent century.

Perhaps it was the city itself, through its size and rate of growth, which kept those family members invisible. Granted, their entries in census enumerations, if found, might not have been sufficient to answer the questions I had about these relatives' whereabouts and background. But it serves to point out the frustration of researching family whose history still draws a blank, despite best efforts.

Reminder From a Scrap of Paper

 

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

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

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

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

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

A Few Housekeeping Routines

 

Before I reluctantly leave this Flanagan research topic for yet another year, there are a few housekeeping routines I like to put into practice every time I exit one of my Twelve Most Wanted. During the rest of this week, I'll be making sure to take care of these necessary chores.

First on the list is to ensure that any discoveries I listed on my main tree at Ancestry.com also get carried over to other sites where I maintain family trees. Today I stopped in at FamilySearch.org to make sure all was updated there and that I hadn't missed linking any known documentation to Anna's branch of the family.

Of course, I was also hoping that some unknown distant cousin who could spill all the scoop on this mysterious Malloy caper had posted a tell-all explanation, but that was not in the cards for this year, apparently. Anna's family connections are still as tenuous as the distant DNA matches I've found who might be descended from her brother—but then, again, could just as well have been related to an ancient cousin.

I have reasons for making sure to post updates on discoveries to multiple genealogy websites. One reason, naturally, is to see what others have already posted. More than that, though, is the hope that what I share will eventually be spotted by some future someone who does know where Anna fits in, but hadn't yet shared that information. There are distant cousins out there, I firmly believe, who have yet to discover that we are family who need to connect and answer each other's questions. I just want to leave behind some genealogical crumbs to lead those cousins to my front door. I'm certainly looking forward to chatting, if that occasion ever arises. 

Starring Some Question Marks

 

The challenge with researching Anna Flanagan, my father-in-law's Irish immigrant great-grandmother, was using her married name to locate any further information on her. Researching a given name like Anna—which sometimes could morph into Anne, or even the more plain Ann—was challenging enough, but joining that with the component of her married name provided multiple additional woes.

While I mostly have written about Anna using her maiden name, once she arrived in the New World, it was her married name which would enable me to track her whereabouts. The problem was that that surname took on multiple appearances, depending on who was writing the record, as Anna herself, like many Irish Catholic immigrants of that time period, could not read or write.

The surname that pinpointed Anna, once she landed in Chicago, could take many forms. In the 1860 census, handwriting made her surname look more like Mullory than Mulloy. Yet in a Cook County death index, her name was rendered in 1885 as Anne Maloy, as did her obituary. To complicate matters, her death certificate, issued in Chicago by the City Board of Health, noted her name to be Ann Mulloy. Other records kept by the family sometimes mentioned the surname as Malloy, other times as Molloy. The options for seeking this woman in records back in Ireland—to say nothing of Chicago—kept multiplying.

With all these question marks—spelling the name with an a, an e, an o or u, and whether to double the l—caused a train wreck of search options. Rather than put the search on multiple tracks, I decided to replace those question marks with stars, as in the asterisk symbol used as a wildcard in computer searches.

Taking that idea back to Irish records, I pulled up the Irish Catholic Parish Records, set a keyword as Ballyagran, the name provided as the family's originating parish in County Limerick from her brother William's own headstone, and entered the surname as M*l*y. That way, I figured, I'd capture each of the spelling possibilities I had encountered in other search results.

Granted, I didn't count on the many other possibilities that could surface with that code—including unexpected results like Moloney and Mackley—but the result did give me thirty possibilities from the Flanagan family's home parish. Unfortunately, none of them included the possibility of Anna's marriage to Stephen Malloy, nor even the 1848 baptism of their daughter Catherine.

It's true that there are several gaps in the church records of Ballyagran for that time period—leaving me bemoaning the invisible Irish—but I had to give this a try. I'm still left with as many question marks as I had before this attempt at finding Anna under her married name, but even the negative results are necessary to complete a thorough search. 

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.

The Invisible Irish

 

There's another problem I encountered during my fruitless search for the identity of Edward Flanagan in Chicago: the huge gaps in time between each sighting of a Flanagan relative in Chicago records. These Irish immigrants might have blended into the cityscape merely from the sheer numbers of their countrymen who also chose this new-to-them home, but when looking for specific individuals, they sometimes disappeared from records for decades at a time. I'm beginning to wonder whether they had discovered the knack of becoming invisible.

Take Anna Flanagan Malloy and her daughter Catherine. True, tracing a surname like Malloy was a challenge in its own right. I found Anna under multiple spelling variations from Malloy through Mulloy. But after her appearance in her brother William's household in 1860, I couldn't find her again in census records. Not until her obituary in 1885 did I find any mention of her name.

Likewise for her daughter Catherine who, following that one census appearance with her mother in 1860, disappeared from view until the 1900 census, long after she had married John Tully. Before that century mark, she was more likely to be found in the church records of her children's baptism, or in the obituaries of family members. Governmental records in the city seemed to turn a blind eye to some Irish immigrants. Perhaps in the sheer numbers of urban life, immigrants disappeared into the grayer fringes of the picture.

Gaps left from 1860 to 1900 represent a significant portion of adult life, not to mention the life story of multiple immigrants' journeys. I am trying to discover alternate ways to document these ancestors' existence, but perhaps this will call for more inventiveness and creativity than a genealogist is accustomed to mustering. Learning the ropes of life in 1800s Chicago has been my sideline this month, but I'm running out of alternate routes to explore.

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.

These Stars Weren't so Lucky

 

No matter how stuck we might be with a research brick wall, there is always wiggle room for further exploration. Before we turn to the collateral Lee family, tomorrow, to shed any light on Anna Flanagan Malloy's origin in County Limerick, there is one other option: seeking whatever became of her husband, Stephen Malloy, after he left home abruptly to sail for Boston.

Because several records already found with that surname—whether for Anna, her daughter Catherine, or Stephen, himself—sported a number of spelling variations, I figured the asterisk would be my go-to tool for this task. Rather than searching for Malloy, then Mulloy, then Meloy, I'd simply do the whole package, once and for all, using the wild card symbol to look for M*l*y. (Spoiler: while the idea seemed sound in principle, it turned out these stars weren't so lucky.)

Apparently, as Irish surnames go, that one device opened up far too many possibilities for me to handle. Maloney, Mullarky, Mulcahey, and even McCully and Modley entered the fray. It may have seemed like a good idea when I started, but the sheer number of choices made the technique unwieldy for this case.

To complicate matters, I also found a will in Massachusetts for someone by that same name, Stephen Malloy, who married and had two children before he drew up his will in June of 1882. Even then, I'd say chances are slim that this Stephen Malloy and Anna's missing husband by that same name were one and the same, but it was an interesting discovery. Perhaps the search for whatever became of Anna's husband will be a question which never finds an answer. Of that, I'm not entirely sure yet, but one thing I do know: this search will not be one for which use of a wildcard will find a sure-fire solution.

About Anna's Husband

 

There are some extra details to know about Anna Flanagan, our eighth of this year's Twelve Most Wanted, to help us find her roots in County Limerick in the mid-1800s. As difficult as it may be to find someone with a surname like Flanagan, at least coupled with Anna's husband's name, it might make the challenge a little less daunting.

At least, that's what I thought. Looking for the marriage records for the Catholic parish of Ballyagran, where Anna's brother William had claimed his roots, I realize that not many church records have been preserved. The listing, according to the National Library of Ireland, leaves a big gap right where I'd guess Anna and Stephen Malloy might have gotten married.

The marriage date is only a guess, based on the date of birth for the couple's only child. Catherine, presumably born in the same place where her uncle William claimed his roots, and where Stephen's farewell letter to her mother was addressed, arrived in either 1847 or 1848, depending on the dates provided by later records in the United States, where she and her mother eventually moved after her father's disappearance.

I have yet to find any marriage record, but knowing how my eyes just love the blurry digitized microfilm records, I'll probably cry over that mystery once again, just to be sure. At least we still have something to search through.

Complicating matters is another detail: just how to spell Anna's husband's surname. Whether in Ireland or in Chicago, where Anna eventually migrated, her married name was treated to multiple variations in the spelling department. Sometimes Mulloy, sometimes Malloy or even Melloy—or take away an "l" to make it even more challenging—this is clearly a case of employing wildcards for the search.

All I know for sure is that one day in February of 1849, Stephen sat down—most likely with someone who could write the letter he dictated—to send fond farewells to his wife and let know that, due to a warning he had received, he was leaving from Liverpool, bound for Boston. That was the last that Anna heard from her husband.

On the other side of this story, nearly one hundred seventy years into her future, the envelope that she saved along with that letter guided us in our travels to County Limerick, and brought us, perhaps, to the very parcel of land where she lived while awaiting word from her husband. Even if institutions were not able to preserve records about a specific ancestor, I'm grateful for our own family members who realized the importance of preserving the few details they could find among their relatives' mementos.

Meet Anna

 

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

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

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

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

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

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.