The Other Dennis and Margaret

 

It may seem preposterous to spend time chasing after another family's brick wall ancestors when I can't even straighten out my own family history connections. However, given that a different Dennis and Margaret Tully keep showing up in my search for my father-in-law's great-grandparents by the same names, it would be worth my while to determine just how it is that other researchers think our ancestral couple is related to theirs.

True, there is one DNA match on my father-in-law's Tully side whose roots trace back through Canada to a Dennis Tully and Margaret Hurley—not our Flannery—from Ireland. That alone is enough reason to consider the possible connection. Add to that another discovery since then, showing a second solid DNA match whose tree includes the same couple, through a different line of descent. Margaret Hurley may not have married the Denis Tully in my father-in-law's direct line, but the man she called her husband is likely someone whose direct line leads back to a key person shared in our Denis' lineage. I smell a whiff of a triangulation in the air.

Before becoming elated over such possibilities, though, let's take a look at what can be verified about this Dennis Tully who married Margaret Hurley. Following the cues from what we learned yesterday of their (possible) daughter, Margaret Tully Baxter, I checked first in Watford, Ontario, where the younger Margaret was reported to have been born. Sure enough, there was a memorial on Find A Grave for the elder Margaret, who died in 1904. The same monument, which identified her as "wife of D. Tully," included an inscription noting Dennis' passing in 1909.

Since that at least provided us the indication that there was a couple by that name living in that area, the next step was to check census records for more information on this Dennis and Margaret. The most recent census record I could find was for 1901, still in the Warwick township of Lambton County in which Watford was located. There, the record provided an actual date of birth for Dennis—March 2, 1830—but left the entry blank for his wife, other than the year of birth as 1833. 

Another helpful bit of information from that census was the year of immigration. Dennis declared his arrival was in 1849, much in line with our Denis' timeline. Margaret followed in 1850, suggesting a search for a Canadian marriage record for the couple, rather than having to search through the near-illegible, densely packed church records in their native Ireland.

Before their last appearance in the Canadian census, I could find this Dennis and Margaret living in the same location for the 1891 census, as well as the 1871 and 1861 enumerations. Reconstructing the family constellation from those documents, Dennis and Margaret were parents to Brigid, Margaret, Mary, Johanna, Patrick, John, and Sarah Anne.

In none of those records did an enumerator provide an errant mention of just where in Ireland the couple originated, or any other clue which might bring us closer to our goal of figuring out just how this Dennis and Margaret connected with our Dennis and Margaret. While we can spend time building out their family tree in hopes that their children's future records might reveal further details on the parents' origins, it might help—to reassure us, if nothing else—to explore whether there are any Hurley records back in the County Tipperary homeland where our Denis and Margaret originated, or whether there were any other baptisms for a child named Dennis in that Ballina parish where we found our other Tully families.   

Wild Thoughts

 

You can just about sit back and watch this thought unravel.

Here we are in the month of August, tackling yet another brick wall ancestor from the list of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2021. It is the siblings of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Margaret Flannery Tully I'm in pursuit of. Given that the godparents listed on the baptismal records for the children of Margaret Flannery and Denis Tully must either be his or her siblings or in-laws, we've found a double-dip with the naming of sponsors John Tully and Kitty Flannery. Only...tracking them from that point onward becomes difficult.

As it turns out, John and Kitty were married, and had three children baptised in their home church in Ballina, County Tipperary. After that point, Margaret and Denis emigrated to Canada—and possibly, so did John and Kitty. Only I couldn't tell; the 1851 census for the place where they settled—Paris in Brant County, Ontario—labeled the wives as "Mrs."

The idea to trace John and Kitty and their children onward seemed to lead to yet another home—this time in Detroit, Michigan—before I lost track of John and Kitty once again. However, at last sighting, that family had children Margaret and Michael in the 1870 census. My thought was to trace each of the children into their future to see whether their death certificate would provide the names of their parents, giving us a thumbs up or thumbs down on whether we had located the right John Tully family or not.

Son Michael, at least in this Detroit household, was born in Canada about 1853. Someone matching that name and year of birth did die on December 28, 1921, in Detroit—but he was a single man. Not only that, but he was a man without family close by, apparently, for the informant on his death certificate was the doctor who performed the surgery which led to his demise. Seeing that, it is no surprise to discover, for the required lines on parents' identification, Michael's father was listed simply as "Tully" and his mother, "unknown."

Still, I decided to follow through and see whether Michael could have been buried in a family plot. After all, his death record indicated he was buried at Mount Olivet. Looking for his memorial there on Find A Grave, though, was not helpful, for the photo of the simple stone indicated a birth year of 1861, not 1853. Furthermore, the headstone listed only the initials "M. J." rather than a given name. Searching the cemetery for any other Tully listings gave no useful results.

Although following Michael's trail did not lead us to answers, what about his sister Margaret? In searching for a Margaret Tully in death records in the Detroit area, I used Michiganology—formerly known as Seeking Michigan—which performs searches for previous names, such as maiden names, as well as the more straightforward searches for current name. Since I didn't know whether Margaret had married, this was necessary, and did lead to a possibility.

The only death certificate I could find, in the vicinity of Detroit, was for a Margaret Baxter, wife of Henry, who died on Christmas day in 1935. The death certificate handily provided the name of her husband—Henry—for further research. For my main purpose in locating the record, it did tell me the names of her parents—but it was not the information I was hoping for.

This Margaret was listed as daughter of Dennis Tully and a woman by the name of Margaret Hurley, with both parents born in Ireland. This Margaret was said to have been born in Watford, Ontario—handily for immigrants, on a straight path from Paris, Ontario, to the state of Michigan across the international border.

The date of Margaret's birth, however, was not the 1849 estimate we had extrapolated from the 1861 census in the household of our John and "Mrs." Tully. Her date of birth had been given as November 25, 1875—not even close to the date we first observed.

Hold your horses about the discrepancy of her parents' identity, though, for in researching this Margaret Tully Baxter, there were two unusual details that gave me some wild thoughts. The first was that déjà vu feeling telling me I've seen that name before—even paired with that set of parents. The second was a detail which I only stumbled upon, once I looked up this Margaret's memorial on Find A Grave.

The volunteer who posted Margaret's information was helpfully thorough in placing a copy of the woman's obituary on the memorial. Going the extra mile, the volunteer also alerted me to a discrepancy: the Margaret who married Henry Baxter on May 8, 1889, most certainly could not have been a child born in 1875. And she wasn't. In the actual marriage record, "Maggie" provided her age as twenty three, yielding a year of birth closer to 1866—still not the 1849 of our John Tully's census entry, but certainly not 1875.

More important, though, was the discovery that, in this marriage record at least, this Margaret claimed her father's name was indeed John Tully. And the "Mrs." to go along with that John? Mary McGuire. While the witness to the marriage was conveniently someone named Michael Tully—her brother?—there are too many frayed ends to tie this story together and fasten it to our Denis Tully and Margaret Flannery.

And yet...

The reason the names of the couple Dennis Tully and Margaret Hurley sounded so familiar to me is that, in searching for my Denis and Margaret, I often ran into other trees containing those names. More than that, my husband has a Tully DNA match whose founding immigrant ancestors were named Dennis Tully and Margaret Hurley. In the past, I've always dismissed that as a case of errors in a paper trail, but the DNA match gives pause to reconsider. The fourteen year age discrepancy between our Denis Tully and his neighbor John Tully in the Canadian 1851 census could have indicated a cousin relationship between them, or an uncle to nephew. With a forty to fifty centiMorgan connection with this DNA match, we could be considering a third or fourth cousin connection—or as distant as an eighth cousin relationship, according to the Shared cM Project at DNA Painter. 

No matter how close or distant that connection may have been, stumbling upon this Margaret Tully Baxter—whoever she was—may help guide me back to another clue for the Tully family constellation in County Tipperary, Ireland, where the story started.  

Nice Thought . . .

 

A research project—at least for me—begins with a question. My goal is to find an answer to that question. The right answer, of course, would be a nice touch. In the case of tracing the lines related to my father-in-law's Irish ancestors Denis Tully and Margaret Flannery, it apparently also involves pursuing a twisted course.

Last week, we began inspecting the Irish Catholic baptismal records for the children of Denis and Margaret Tully in hopes of discovering, through their choice of godparents, the names of their own siblings. While that doesn't yet provide us with the names of their parents, it is at least a step in the right direction. 

From that effort, we learned that among the possibilities, there might be siblings named John Tully and Kitty Flannery. What was interesting to learn was that, following the route of Denis Tully and his family from County Tipperary in Ireland to the County of Brant in present-day Ontario, Canada, another family showed up in the 1851 census with some similarities in name and ages.

Tracing that family of John Tully, his incompletely labeled wife "Mrs." and their Irish-born daughter Mary beyond that Canadian 1851 census could lead us to further information to either confirm or reject the hypothesis that they were one and the same as the John and Kitty Tully in the parish of Ballina, back in Ireland. That, at least, was my thought.

As my father-in-law's Tully ancestors were wont to do, this Tully family did not seem to stay long in one place. By the time of the 1861 census in Brant County, our Denis was still living in the same location in the village of Paris, but gone were John Tully and his family. While there were possible matches in other locations in Canada, one likelihood was that John and Kitty may have been one of the first among the Tully family to migrate yet again, this time to the United States.

As it happened, there was a Tully family somewhat fitting the description, living in Detroit, Michigan, at the time of the 1870 U.S. census. With the head of the family named John, born about the same year as that indicated in the 1851 Canadian census, the household also included a wife by the name of Catherine—of which the diminutive "Kitty" would be a logical nickname. In addition, there was in that Detroit household a daughter named Margaret, who had been born in Canada about 1851—not quite the 1849 suggested by the Canadian census, but reasonably close.

Unfortunately, gone was the older sister Mary, who by then could have been married—or deceased. In her place was a younger child, this time a son by the name of Michael, born about 1853.

With this mixed bag of results, it seemed too inconclusive to tie together the three record sets concerning John and Kitty Tully, though I wasn't yet willing to concede that I was following a false lead.

My thinking at this point is to trace what can be found of this John and Catherine Tully in Detroit, their daughter Margaret and this new entry of a son named Michael, to see if any subsequent records might reveal more of their identities. Parents' names listed on the death record of either child—Margaret or Michael—could provide conclusive evidence, if we are on the right track. Otherwise, well, it's always helpful to know we've tested a hypothesis and the answer is "no."  

Double Duty

 

For a second month now, I've been working on piecing together the story of my father-in-law's Irish immigrant ancestors, but that is not the only project which has occupied my time. I've also spent a fair amount of time assembling the details on an extended family tree for my mother-in-law's roots. It is no surprise, then, as I arrive at another of my biweekly progress checks, to realize that the count on my in-laws' tree is zooming ahead.

That is a good sign, for two reasons. Not only do I hope to move beyond the stalemate where some brick wall ancestors currently have me stymied, but in piecing together a tree for my mother-in-law complete with collateral lines, the result allows the record to serve double duty with another project I'm tackling.

That project is to create a tree representing the descendants of early settlers in the county my mother-in-law once called home: Perry County, Ohio. All her direct ancestors called that place home sometime between the date of Ohio statehood—1803—and the years leading up to World War II. Because so many residents of that small county's communities have historically been related to each other in several ways, I chose that same time range to form the parameters for a volunteer DNA project I administer specifically for descendants of those families to compare their test results.

Creating that tree has become a task to untangle a spaghetti bowl of familial connections. The same surnames keep popping up in different branches of the family, coming close enough to demonstrate what is meant by "pedigree collapse." Beyond that research clue, getting to know the extended lines in one county over many generations has helped me get familiarized with the families living in that region, and how they weave in and out of multiple collateral lines over the decades.

Having worked on that project bit by bit over many years now, it's not surprising to see that my in-laws' tree now numbers 22,878 documented individuals, with 259 new names added in just the past two weeks. The tree has become a tool to help guide me through DNA matches who lead back to Perry County—not to mention, one way to allow me to feel like I'm at home in a county which I've only been able to visit two or three times in the past. And hopefully, with a little more work on one aggravating ancestral branch of that family, I should—someday—be able to negotiate my mother-in-law's matriline and make sense of those mitochondrial DNA exact matches which still have me stumped. 

That, however, will be a goal for another year.

A Brush with History

 

You never know what to expect when going through someone else's discarded photo collection. For family history researchers, the hope is always that a picture found will lead to a new family connection. That was certainly what was at the back of my mind when I followed a tip to retrieve my mother-in-law's many mementos at a local antique store, and it certainly has been the case for the items I've been able to research in the last few months. But not quite the same story for today's discovery.

Not all the photos in Marilyn Sowle Bean's holdings were pictures of family members. That is not surprising, even though as an only child of a divorced couple, she seemed to have lived a life as a loner, from what I knew of her later years. 

Among the expected pictures of the children of her mother's many siblings left behind in Wisconsin were some I had yet to connect to the family. Though it was both her custom and that of her mother to carefully label each photograph, there were some which were identified in a handwriting not familiar to me. One in particular—a wedding photo—included an entire history of one bride's special day.

Lyn Octum + Robt Wulf   Nov 21 - 1958

Bridesmaid - Sandy Boyen - student nurse from Cal. Hosp.

groomsman - Bob's brother Steve - came (flew) down from Alaska with Bob's mother + step dad

Lynn's flowers - white stephanotis - white orchid.

Church was beautiful - decorated with white + yellow mums. Pastor Wold preached.

Of course, all that information included on the reverse of the photograph just cried out for someone to confirm the details. After all, my usual thought is that someone might want to have this picture—and I'd always be glad to send it to a family member.

I quickly realized that whoever wrote the description on the reverse of the photograph must have been connected to the groom's side of the bridal party, especially when I realized the bride's name was actually Lynn Ottum, not Octum. A lovely write up followed the 1958 wedding in the North Hollywood, California, Valley Times on December 18.

"Lynn Marjorie Ottum Becomes Mrs. R. W. Wulf," the headline declared, revealing the type of details genealogists like to glean, including the names hidden behind those irritating initials. "R. W." signified Robert William. Flying down from Alaska with his brother Steven—serving possibly as the pilot?—was his mother, the former Alice Elizabeth Ocker who, after the death of her sons' father Claus Howard Wulf, married Wilbert Wilson.

Unfortunately, the 1958 wedding eventually became the 1969 divorce. Curious to see what became of the couple afterwards, I was surprised to discover Robert Wulf's Find A Grave memorial not much longer after that, at barely thirty five years of age. There had to be a story behind the stark stone marker breaking the news to me.

Searching online for any further information led to several lengthy news articles, but each of them was headlined with someone else's name; mention of Robert's name was buried in one of the last paragraphs. Apparently, along with three other people, he died in a plane crash in a remote area outside Aspen, Colorado, where he had been working as a ski instructor. At first, it was unclear whether he might actually have been the pilot, but investigations of the crash indicated another man—possibly a novice pilot—was at the controls while Robert occupied the secondary control seat for the flight.

Seated in the back of the ill-fated craft were a man and a woman. It was this man whose death on July 24, 1972, triggered the news wires to pick up the story. Adult son of a woman who for her seven failed marriages was once dubbed the "poor little rich girl," he was "daredevil race driver" and eventual entrepreneur Lance Reventlow, scouting the area for a potential site for a ski resort he planned to build in Aspen.

While most reports carrying the news of the crash focused on Reventlow, there were some local articles written specific to this other passenger, Robert Wulf. Centered around his mother, they revealed that she had moved from Alaska to northern California, where she served as secretary for a local doctor in Auburn.

Though there were news reports of Robert's passing, none I found included any mention of possible descendants. As for the woman who had been his wife—Lynn Ottum—she since was married again and eventually disappeared from any detectable public mention, quite possibly rendering each member of this once-couple the last leaf on their respective family branches.

Photograph of the November 21, 1958, North Hollywood Ottum - Wulf wedding. Standing left to right: bridesmaid Sandra Boyum, bride Lynn Marjorie Ottum, groom Robert William Wulf, best man Steven Wulf. Photograph currently in possession of author until claimed by a direct family member.

Excerpt from newspaper article above from page 22 of the North Hollywood Valley Times, 18 December 1858, courtesy of Newspapers.com.

   

A Tully - Flannery Two - fer

  

If we can't lift the specifics on our Irish family's ancestors directly from documentation, our next best option is to dive into the details in search of inferences. As we work with the question of Margaret Flannery's family constellation, we'll use the baptismal records from her home church in Ballina, County Tipperary, to see if we can infer relationships through the choice of godparents for her children.

I've used this process before, when working on my father-in-law's Kelly and Falvey ancestors in County Kerry. In that case, the difficulty was that John Kelly's name was so common that I had no way to ensure I was looking at the right John Kelly. Adding to that difficulty, the family seemed to move around from townland to townland.

In this month's research project, however, we have a family which seemed to stay with the same church parish over the years, at least until they made the decision to leave home for good and migrate to a new world across the Atlantic. The same Denis Tully who was listed as father of Margaret Flannery's seven children was consistently noted to have resided in the same townland location—Tountinna—as had been listed in his entry in Griffith's Valuation.

Since we've learned that the godparents named at an Irish Catholic child's baptism—at least during the time period we are studying in the mid-1800s—were either a sibling of one of the child's parents or an in-law, I'm now in the process of determining how each of those godparents were related to either Margaret Flannery or her husband, Denis Tully. Our most logical starting place is to research the sponsor of the eldest Tully child, Johanna, born in March of 1832.

Johanna's baptismal entry suffered damage through the years, including a missing section of the first of two sponsors named, but the second name given is one we can easily place in Margaret's family constellation. Kitty Flannery, the indicated god-mother, would by definition need to be Margaret's sister.

Included in the baptismal records for the church at Ballina, County Tipperary, were some entries for Kitty Flannery's own children. As it turns out, her husband was named John Tully. While living in the Tountinna townland at the time their children were baptised, John and Kitty had a daughter Mary, whose sponsors were identified as Denis Tully and Margaret Tully. By identifying Margaret with the surname Tully in that record, we can't yet be sure whether this was Denis' wife Margaret (a Flannery by birth) or a Tully sister with the same given name, but it is clear there is a sibling relationship both on the Tully and on the Flannery side of the equation.

John and Kitty had two other children baptised in Tountinna: their daughter Judy in 1844, and their son Patrick in 1846. For godparents, the Tully side of the family was amply represented by Darby Tully and Mary Tully for Judy, in addition to the two Tully sponsors named for Mary. The one Flannery godparent chosen, for their son Patrick, was a name we've noted for Margaret's son Michael: William.

What is tantalizing about the discovery of this two-fer for the Tully and Flannery sponsors was in exploring the "FAN Club" for the area in which Denis Tully settled his emigrating family in Brant County, Canada West. Down the page from the entry for Denis and "Mrs." Tully in the 1851 census was one for a man named John Tully.

Of course it would be difficult to ascertain whether this was indeed our John Tully—especially considering his wife was also listed solely by the irritating "Mrs."—but it is encouraging to note that their daughter Mary's name was part of that Canadian household as well, with an age close enough to agree with her baptismal record.

Gone, however, were daughter Judy and son Patrick, if that 1851 census entry is one and the same as our John and Kitty's family. Within the historic context of that time period, though, the possibility of childhood deaths was very real—and may have served as the motivator pushing the family to the difficult choice of leaving their homeland.

Yet the birth of this John's daughter Margaret, two years prior to the enumeration, helps to indicate when that Tully family arrived in Canada from Ireland—and echoes the same dynamic in the Denis Tully family at the top of that same census page, whose family added son William at about the same time. With the appearance of yet another family—a Flannery household—on the same census page, I'm wondering whether there was a migration of several people from the same area in Ireland, settling in the same location at the end of their long journey.

One task to help evaluate the connection would be to trace the Canadian John Tully's family—a simple enough project, at least on face value. We'll explore the possibility of a connection on Monday and see if we can glean any further records on the Canadian side to allow us to accept or reject that idea.

Checking Old Records with New Eyes

 

If the supply of newly-digitized genealogical records doesn't spring up in our direction as quickly as we'd like, there is still a useful option for researchers struggling with those frustrating "brick wall" ancestors: look at old records with new eyes. While that is exactly what I will be doing for the remainder of this week (and likely well into next week), here's another timely example to consider, if you need further encouragement, from American Ancestors' Vita Brevis.

The research goal I'm tackling this month is to discover any further details on the mother of my father-in-law's maternal grandfather, John Tully. We've already learned, through the fact that John Tully needed to request a letter verifying the date of his baptism, that his mother's maiden name was Margaret Flannery, and that she and her husband attended the Catholic church in the small town of Ballina in County Tipperary, Ireland.

That, however, is the end of the line, as far as my father-in-law's Tully pedigree goes. I have not been able to advance farther than Margaret and her husband, Denis Tully.

Fortunately, Margaret and Denis had many children, all of whom were baptised by the priest at the church in Ballina. Their records have been preserved as well as can be hoped, and are now accessible through many websites, thanks to digitization.

Our purpose today, in taking these old baptismal records and looking at them with fresh eyes, is to document the names of each of the Tully children's godparents. This is for good reason—at least, if advice from one Irish genealogy resource holds steady. According to an article posted at Ireland Reaching Out, "The poorer class of Catholics...followed a specific godparent convention to the letter: every sponsor/godparent was either a sibling or a sibling-in-law of one of the child's parents."

In outlining the names of godparents for each of the Tully children, my hope is to draw names which can then be tentatively inserted in a proposed family tree for each of the parents. While that still doesn't provide me with John's grandparents' names, it is a starting point in building the family constellation.

With that, here is what I found. Keep in mind that I am drawing from documents preserved from nearly two hundred years ago, then microfilmed, then converted to a digitized format. Some pages which inadvertently included folds along the edges unfortunately were preserved exactly as they were laid out for the camera. Beyond that, in the often poverty-stricken conditions in which the priests kept the records, edges of pages crumbled or—as one person told me in Ireland—were torn off to provide a means to light votive candles when no other supplies were available. Some of those sacrifices took with them the details of our own ancestors.

For Denis Tully and his wife Margaret Flannery in the Catholic parish of Ballina, County Tipperary, these are the children I could find in the baptismal records.

Oldest child Johanna, baptised in March of 1832, was missing her first name—lost in the torn margin—as well as the day of the baptism. For this one in particular, I am grateful for the corroboration of one of her direct descendants, whose father also had had the foresight to preserve the letter confirming her date of baptism. However, only the parish records themselves could provide us the names of Johanna's godparents, and even that suffered partial obliteration: - - ke Tully and Kitty Flannery. (Luke?)

Next child was son Michael, baptised June 5, 1834. This is the record which first provides us with the location of the Tully residence, a place far outside the town of Ballina called Tountinna, which I have had the privilege of visiting. Michael's sponsors were named as William Flanery and Bridget Flanery. While church tradition would have it that the women were identified by their maiden name, I can't be sure that convention was always strictly followed—but William's name is certainly a keeper.

About two years later, younger son Patrick followed on August 30, 1836. His sponsors don't help us with the Flannery side of the equation, but will come in handy as I repeat this same process for Denis Tully's side of the family. Named were Thomas Tully and Mary Tully.

The next child was a discovery I would otherwise have never realized, for the child must have died before the family reached Canada—or at least prior to the first enumeration in which they appeared in "Canada West." Named William, he was baptised May 8, 1839, in the presence of godparents John Tully and Judy McNamara. Again, one sponsor's name associated with the Tully side of the family. You'll see later that the name William must have been an important one to the family, for it is repeated at the birth of the Tullys' youngest child, the only one born in Canada.

At this point in the family constellation, we insert my father-in-law's direct ancestor, John Tully. His sponsors for his February 24, 1842, baptism were John Brien (likely O'Brien) and Mary McNamara—giving us little clue how these two fit into the picture. Tully side or Flannery side? This will take yet another round of examination of records.

John's younger sister Margaret was the next baptism, in September of 1844, with the day of the event obliterated in a crumbling margin of the record. The godparents named were Mick Tully—no question about relationships there—and Mary Gleeson. That Gleeson, however, is a guess on my part, simply owing to the abysmal handwriting overlaid upon the now-crumpled record. But I find it a likely possibility, simply because we already have DNA matches connected to that surname from County Tipperary. Perhaps this is the nexus.

The last of the Tully family's Irish-born children was a daughter they named Honora. Baptised February 25, 1847, she, like her brother William, did not live to be counted in the first census after the family's arrival in their new homeland. At her baptism, her godparents were listed as John Tully and Biddy Tully.

Some time after that point, Denis and Margaret and their surviving children left famine-ravaged Ireland for a new life in Canada. By the time they next appeared in any preserved records, it was to document their existence in the County of Brant in what was then called Canada West—now Ontario. Gone from the 1851 record was any sign of what became of son William or youngest daughter Honora, but a child born to the couple in Canada received the name lost with the passing of William.

With that, we find only a few names to possibly add to Margaret Flannery's collateral lines: Kitty, William, and Bridget Flannery. On the Tully side, we now have the names Luke (?), Thomas, Mary, John, Mick, and Biddy. John Tully is actually mentioned twice, which may signify two separate individuals, or a very popular uncle. The remaining named individuals are a mystery for the moment but will hopefully lead to further family clues from Judy McNamara, John O'Brien, Mary McNamara, and Mary Gleeson.

In just these few baptismal records, we've now gleaned our first step towards determining who peopled the collateral lines in Denis Tully's and Margaret Flannery's family trees. Since the Tully side produced the majority of the names, tomorrow we'll begin the search through any other documents which can give us a clue as to who these Tully godparents might have been.