Saying Goodbye to the Last One

The trail leading from a small news clipping tucked among Agnes Tully Stevens’ personal papers to the reading of the will of her Chicago pastor ends with a funeral report of Father Flannigan’s last remaining sibling, Agatha. A lifelong public school teacher, Aggie was well known in her hometown of Norway on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

The report subsequent to her passing and funeral revealed further information on both her well-known brother Richard—whose legal career spanned decades of service in every role from trial lawyer to state Supreme Court Chief Justice—and her respected father, who evidently hailed from County Waterford in Ireland. Though my own searches failed to reveal where Father Patrick M. Flannigan was buried in Marquette, or bring me to any online record of his unmarried sister Agatha’s own grave, this local newspaper report led me right to the spot: a family mausoleum at Holy Cross Cemetery in Marquette.

The only thing missing from this funeral report is the very thing genealogy researchers look for in obituaries: the names of the survivors. While Agatha Flannigan had been the last one remaining of her siblings, she did leave behind at least one member of the next generation.

In order to find the names from that next generation, though, we first have to work our way further backwards in time.

FLANNIGAN RITES ARE

HELD AT MARQUETTE

            Greenland—Funeral services for Miss Agatha Flannigan, Norway, who died Saturday morning in Duluth, Minn., were held Monday morning in St. Peter’s Cathedral in Marquette and interment was made in the Flannigan mausoleum in Holy Cross cemetery.

            Miss Flannigan, a sister of the late Judge Richard C. Flannigan of Norway, was the last member of a family prominent throughout the Upper Peninsula. Miss Flannigan was born in Greenland, a daughter of the late Captain and Mrs. Flannigan. Captain Flannigan was born and raised in County Waterford, Ireland, and was engaged in mining for years in the old country. Emigrating to the United States in the 40s, he located at Greenland, becoming one of the pioneers of the Upper Peninsula and one of the first to mine copper in this region.

            Miss Flannigan, one of three daughters and ten sons born to Captain and Mrs. Flannigan attended school here, later moving to Marquette, where she also attended school. She later moved to Norway, where she taught school for many years. In her later life, she divided her time between the old Flannigan home in Norway, where she spent most of her winters, and her cottage at Spread Eagle, where she spent each summer.

A Father’s Sister

In order to trace Father Patrick M. Flannigan’s family roots, it only helped slightly to know that his brothers’ names were John and R. C. There are so many sons of Ireland boasting the given name, “John.” And trying to chase initials opened up more possibilities than I was prepared to pursue. Yes, it is true that having the clue of “Norway, Michigan” narrows those possibilities considerably, but I decided to first pursue a different tack: Father Flannigan’s sister, Agatha.

Here was a woman who, after all these years, still retained her maiden name. In addition, unlike so many Irish daughters, she did not sport one of those traditional Catholic girls’ names like Mary or Anna that would have gotten her lost in the crowd. With a name like Agatha, I thought surely I’d find a lead quickly, even if the surname was misspelled.

With that decision made, I strode out into the wild online world of digitized genealogical records. I made my first search terms “Agatha Flannigan” and “Norway, Michigan.” Surely this would be a winning combination!

It was…until I hit my first fork in the road: 1900 census? Or 1910?

Fortunately, I chose to play it forward, opting for the 1910 census. That saved me from missing the entry entirely for the 1900 census, as our gal was listed there as “Aggie.”

There, my next serendipitous discovery was that “R. C.,” Agatha’s brother, was actually the head of the household in which she resided. At least that’s the presumption I made once I saw the man’s first name—Richard—conveniently aligning itself with the first of the initials given in the newspaper clipping from which I had been working.

Agatha was listed in the 1910 census as a public school teacher. Still single at age forty-eight, she lived in the household of her brother Richard and his wife Anna, whose only son, Clement, was currently a university student. Two servants rounded out the Flannigan census tally.

Working my way backwards from that point, I confirmed information with each previous decade’s census record. In the 1910 census record covering the small city of Norway in Dickinson County, Michigan, Agatha’s parents’ birthplace was incorrectly—as I later found out—listed as Michigan. The 1900 census showed public school teacher “Aggie” again in the household of her brother in the city of Norway, Michigan—and thankfully rectified the error on Agatha’s parents’ Irish heritage. It showed Agatha’s birth occurring in February of 1861 somewhere in the state of Michigan.

Jumping past history’s unfortunate census gap in 1890, I checked for what became of the family unit in 1880. Unfortunately, the trail ended there—at least as far as I could find. Thankfully, long-time reader “Iggy” located a Michigan State census record for 1894, though only in a transcribed format. There, once again, was “Aggie” in the Norway, Michigan, home of her brother Richard.

By the time of this 1894 state census, Agatha was showing as being in her early thirties. I was worried that, if I pressed back another decade, I’d encounter another problem: surely that far back, she would be residing in the home of her parents, not with an adult brother. If that were so, then I’d be lost. I didn’t yet know the names of her parents.

The next task, then, was to find another way to determine her parents’ names. Playing it forward once again, I searched for any information on her passing. After all the success I had had in finding her owing to her less-common given name of Agatha, here I ran into a problem. And I found out that my original delight with this less-usual given name was quite premature, for it turns out that this Aggie’s first name was, indeed, that oft-used Irish favorite: Mary.

A transcription of a death certificate for Mary Agatha Flannigan surfaced in FamilySearch.org. Listing the place of death as Duluth, Minnesota, it was dated December 22, 1945. Her father was listed as James F. Flannigan. Her mother’s name was—disappointingly—given as simply, “Ellen.”

Then the questions began: was “Mary Agatha” the same as “Agatha”? If so, what was she doing in Minnesota instead of her native Michigan? I began to have doubts about this discovery. The fact that the online record was merely a transcription didn’t help. We all make mistakes from time to time.

Not being able to find an obituary compounded my concerns. But this is where—I think—the story starts getting exciting. Over the weekend, help began coming in. A generations-separated relative left a comment on the post in this series showing that newspaper clipping from my husband’s grandmothers’ belongings—the one that named Father Flannigan’s then-living relatives. That began a conversation on another branch of that family. Then, a fellow member of a wonderful Facebook Groups page, Chicago Genealogy, saw my query there seeking ways to find records from St. Anne’s Church, followed my link to my Flannigan posts here, and responded by posting news clippings in answer on her own blog.

I still have to figure out just what it was that inspired Agatha to leave her lifelong home in Norway, Michigan, and move to Duluth, Minnesota. But now I’m armed with her parents’ names. And the start of a really great conversation.

Isn’t the Internet just grand?!

Father Flannigan’s Flock

The pastor during Agnes Tully Stevens’ childhood, Father Patrick Michael Flannigan, was a beloved figure not only in the spiritual life of this one family, but for multiplied families throughout the south side community in Chicago known as Englewood. St. Anne’s Catholic Church, itself, was physically close at hand to the everyday life of the Tully family, located on the corner of 55^th Street and Wentworth Avenue, not far from the Tully residence on Garfield Boulevard.

Started as a mission church, St. Anne’s grew to become the mother church of many other fledgling parishes as the Southtown Catholic population exploded in the late 1800s. 

By the time Father Flannigan’s successor took the pastorate, the church was well on its way to becoming a vibrant community. In 1907, following Father Flannigan’s passing, the Right Reverend Edward A. Kelly—a name we’ve already seen in the 1910 census as we puzzled over Assistant Pastor Dan E. Reilly—began his tenure which spanned Agnes’ childhood into adulthood, marriage and the birth of her own children. During that time, St. Anne’s Church congregation grew to serve three thousand families, with an expanded parochial school that served one thousand students.

Father Flannigan’s leadership bridged that stage from fledgling mission outpost to vibrant community center. A sense of the centrality of his role in the church and community can be gleaned from the 1955 report published in The Southtown Economist on the occasion of St. Anne’s ninetieth anniversary. Complete with pictures of the entire complex, the article is worth reading, and for subscribers to Ancestry.com, can be found here.

Though it was, by 1955, nearly fifty years since Father Flannigan died, he was still being honored for his role as pastor at St. Anne’s Church by such comments in The Southtown Economist as:

            When Father Flannigan died, the Catholic paper of Chicago wrote, “No priest in the middle west is more generally known, or more highly esteemed…. St. Anne is one of the oldest and best organized parishes in Illinois.”

Father Flannigan was, himself, not from Chicago. Though the newspaper report of the reading of his will indicated his family was in Michigan, his death certificate showed that he was actually born in Ireland. The death certificate fixed his date of birth as sometime in the year of 1840, and also declared that he had been in the state of Illinois since 1861.

Unfortunately, Father Flannigan died during those times when the city didn’t see fit to record such helpful research hints as name of parents. But the certificate did state that he was to be buried in Marquette, Michigan, and gave a date of September 3, 1907—five days after he succumbed to pneumonia at the parish rectory.

As it turns out, Marquette, on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, is not very far from the Michigan town of Norway in which Father Flannigan's supposed siblings resided. Though I have not yet been able to find any record of Father Flannigan’s actual burial location, I have been able—along with the research help of regular reader "Iggy"—to locate several records of those Michigan residents of his family who were mentioned in the newspaper clipping passed down to me from Agnes Tully Stevens.

Pastoring the People of This Parish

Armed with a list of names of the siblings of Father Patrick M. Flannigan—and grateful for the bonus of the relatively less-common “Agatha” amidst those oft-repeated Irish naming traditions—I had thought it would be a simple task to locate this priest’s family heritage.

How wrong I was.

Oh, it’s not that I can’t locate R. C. Flannigan or Agatha Flannigan among the many online resources for governmental records—and I’ll get to writing about that in the next few days.

It’s just that I can’t juxtapose Patrick with those other names. In fact, if it weren’t for this listing found among Agnes Tully Stevens’ personal papers, I wouldn’t be able to document Patrick’s position in that family constellation anywhere within the past fifty years.

There will be time enough to write about Father Flannigan’s brothers John and R. C., as well as his spinster sister, Agatha. While I am still searching for that smoking gun of relationship, though, let’s start with what we can find about the Reverend, himself.

The very last segment of the newspaper clipping from Agnes Tully Stevens’ collection concludes with a focus on the priest, and I’d like to follow suit—except that, despite having this article and confirmation via his death certificate, I cannot even find a record of his burial, as planned, in Marquette, Michigan. Nor can I locate any obituary.

Thankfully, the man’s reputation long outlasted him. A February 20, 1955, Southtown Economist article about his church’s ninetieth anniversary uncovers more details on his ministry.

Back in 1877—and in the midst of a church building project—the Rev. P. M. Flannigan stepped into the role of pastor of St. Anne’s Church on the south side of Chicago. Guiding the building project to completion, Father Flannigan and his parish dedicated the new building on July 11, 1880. By the time of the 1955 anniversary celebration, the building had become one of the oldest churches still standing in the city, but when Father Flannigan had first arrived, the area was wild prairie, sparsely dotted with small cottages.

Under the guidance of Father Flannigan, other building projects were also completed, including the addition of a new rectory, convent and grade school. The once-rural area, eventually growing into a bustling residential center, fueled that growth, turning St. Anne’s into one of Chicago’s largest parishes.

In the thirty years that Patrick M. Flannigan served as pastor at St. Anne’s Church, he not only provided spiritual leadership to a thriving church body, but also participated in community issues of his day, including some, like the political questions regarding building elevated railroad tracks in the area, which puzzled me—until I discovered more about his family.

By the time of his death in 1907, Father Flannigan was personally known by a wide variety of notables from Chicago, even up to President William McKinley. Among the honorary pall bearers at his funeral were then-Governor of Illinois Charles S. Deneen, Chicago meat-packing magnate J. Ogden Armour, and U. S. Senator and part-owner of the Chicago Tribune, Medill McCormick.

So much more can be said for Father Flannigan’s leadership in the pastorate of St. Anne’s church. Seeing how that parish figures so prominently in the lives of the Tully and Stevens families, we’ll revisit this topic later.

For now, taking in the concluding remarks in Agnes’ newspaper clipping gives a glimpse of the respect afforded the pastor from his peers in the ministry.

 

Praise for Dead Priest.

            Father Maurice J. Dorney, pastor of St. Gabriel’s church, paid tribute to Father Flannigan this afternoon, declaring that the priest was one of the most loved churchmen of Chicago.

            “Father Flannigan’s action in leaving the bequest for the masses for souls in purgatory was typical of all good catholics,” he said. “When a catholic dies there is usually such a provision in the will, but not always for so large a number of masses.”

A List of Those So Blessed

The little news clipping that Agnes Tully Stevens saved of her pastor’s last testament continued its report by actually naming the recipients of Father Patrick M. Flannigan’s largesse.

I’ve often wondered why Agnes saved the newspaper article about the will, yet not of the actual obituary. Was there another connection between her and this priest? Of course, there is that nagging question I have: what caused her own Flanagan forebears to gather in Chicago from opposite ends of the globe? 

The difference in spelling between this priest and Agnes’ relatives hasn’t troubled me. Anyone seeking ancestors in census records of the 1800s knows how creative an art spelling used to be—although I do have to admit, the more-educated Rev. Flannigan consistently spelled his surname the same since the earliest record I have of his signature upon the 1874 marriage license of Agnes’ uncle William and his bride, Sarah Swanton. Despite that spelling discrepancy, could this Father Flannigan be the one drawing those others with the homonymic surname to Chicago?

As I write this, the thunderstorm outside is pelting my skylights with quarter-inch-wide pellets of hail. In the spirit of one unsure, right now, of the fate of my internet connection in this electrical storm, I’ll cut today’s post short and save my discoveries of Father Flannigan’s relatives for tomorrow. For those of you who really do believe it’s spring, please feel free to jump in with any discoveries in the meantime.

List of the Bequests.

            The following were the bequests:

            Home for the Aged, 5148 Prairie avenue, $1,000.

            Home for the Aged, Fullerton and Sheffield avenues, $1,000.

            St. Joseph’s hospital, $1,000.

            St. Elizabeth’s hospital, $1,000.

            Alexian Brothers’ hospital, $1,000.

            St. Vincent’s Infant Asylum and Maternity Home, $1,000.

            John Flannigan, a brother, at Leadville, Col., $1,000.

            R. C. Flannigan, a brother, at Norway, Mich., $1,000.

            Agatha Flannigan, a sister, at Norway, Mich., $1,000.

            Katie Cook, a niece, of Iron Mountain, Mich., $1,000.

            --ttie Lynch, an old family servant, $500.

            The will was dated Sept. 7, 1906.

Spell This One “Flannigan”

From a piece of paper so old that, if I don’t take exquisite care, it actually disintegrates in my fingers, I glean a news report of what a Chicago priest left behind at his passing. The undated news clipping, from the collection of personal papers left behind by Agnes Tully Stevens, was cropped so closely that it omitted any mention of the source of the publication. From the content, however, I can surmise it was printed some time in early September, 1907.

The subject of the article is Father Patrick Michael Flannigan, the long-time pastor of Saint Anne’s Catholic Church—the same church that the Tully family had attended from the date of its inception. Father P. M. Flannigan—that was the way he signed his records—died in Chicago on August 29, 1907, at the same address on Wentworth Avenue where another priest we’ve already discussed later resided.

The newspaper report itemized the generous bequests of the late Pastor, which in the interest of space, I’ll continue on tomorrow’s post. First, let’s take a look at the article’s introduction, which provides a glimpse into what the man considered important as he contemplated the end of his own ministry.

 

Flannigan Will Provides 1,000

Masses Be Said for Those

in Purgatory.

__________

Testament Bequeaths $12,500, Most

Of Which Goes to Relatives and

Institutions.

__________

            One thousand masses to be said for souls in purgatory was one of the chief provisions of the will of Father Patrick M. Flannigan, the aged pastor of St. Anne’s Roman Catholic church, whose body was taken to Marquette, Mich., for burial last Monday. The priest also provided for 100 masses to be said for the repose of his soul. The instrument was filed in the Probate court to-day by Attorney P. J. O’Keeffe. The priest gave away thousands of dollars while he lived. In the will he disposed of $12,500, most of which he divided between his brothers, sister and a number of Chicago catholic hospitals and asylums.

Thinking About Tackling Those Flanagans

There is a small clipping of a news article stowed in Agnes Tully Stevens’ papers that has had my curiosity piqued. It is a report regarding a specific priest’s will.

Keeping in mind that Agnes, following in the footsteps of her own mother, had spent a lifetime keeping in touch with various priests of her acquaintance—and possibly family relationship—it may not seem unusual to find such a report stashed within her papers.

Then again, considering that the name in question happened to be Flanagan—or at least a close spelling variant—it makes me want to delve into the possibility of any connections.

And so, chomping at the bit, I can’t wait any longer. I’m going to attempt to trace this report backwards.

But first: the reason I’m curious about the Flanagan name. That is the maiden name of Agnes’ own grandmother. Remember the woman who, receiving an enigmatic love letter from her husband upon his unexpected passage to Boston in 1849, ended up moving from Ireland to Chicago with her young daughter? I’ve always wondered why her destination was Chicago. I’ve wondered the same thing when I found her brother, William Flanagan, surfacing there, too, after a detour via Australia.

William Flanagan—or Flanigan, or any of a number of oft-used spelling variants—was Agnes’ grand-uncle, living near her childhood home until the summer after her fifth birthday, when the elder relative passed away. As far as I can tell, William was unmarried and, of course, childless at the time of his death. And yet, he left a hefty memorial to mark his grave. And a funeral card tucked amidst those papers that Agnes kept.

Perhaps it was not the five year old who was remembering Uncle William. After all, he would have been no more than a faint memory to such a youngster. Seeing that Agnes served as keeper of her mother’s repository, it is more likely that Catherine Malloy Tully was the one who passed down the black gilt remembrance from G. S. Utter and Company Memorial Cards.

Marked carefully on the reverse, “115 Franklin St., Chicago”—and in finer print, “Removed from 155 Randolph St.”—the G. S. Utter Company was evidently more careful in attending to the details of their own former address than to those specifics of the party the card served to commemorate.

Then, again, which spelling is actually the right one? Flanagan? Flanigan?

I have a photocopy of William’s obituary showing “Flanigan.” Perhaps the memorial card merely chose to follow suit. However, I think I will go with the version preserved in stone. It provides the verdict as “Flanagan.” The death certificate, I might add, concurs.