Thoughts Leading up to Independence

 

When we celebrate Fourth of July tomorrow, what Americans are really celebrating—well, besides parades, barbecues and fireworks—is the holiday we also call Independence Day. Pinpointing the whole of the independence saga on one day, though, boggles my mind. I've had some thoughts on that, lately. And yes, even this will have something to do with genealogy.

July 4, 1776, bears the brunt of the entire unit of history Americans celebrate as the fulcrum of our independence, but the story unwinds much slower than one discreet twenty-four-hour episode. As my pastor shared in his sermon on Sunday, our founding fathers didn't simply wake up one morning and decide it was a good idea to revolt against one of the world's superpowers. This was the culmination of a multi-year process filled with letter-writing, petitions, negotiations and appeals—all to little avail.

Even pinpointing the date—July 4—as a representation of this culmination of diplomatic efforts is not entirely accurate. Though the founding document representing that declaration of independence was adopted on July 4, the motion to take that stand of independence was taken to a vote two days earlier with the Lee Resolution. And the calligrapher's handwritten copy of the document, drawn up after Congress ordered it done on July 19, was not officially signed until August 2. Even a declaration can be a matter of process, and processes take time.

Perhaps, for those of us who study the immigration of our colonial ancestors in the 1600s and 1700s, we have adopted the mental image that trans-Atlantic travel was so primitive and hazardous as to seal our ancestors' fate to never return to their homeland again. That, as I discovered a few months ago while working on my mother-in-law's colonial Maryland Howard family, was not actually the case. If business needs arose which required travel to, say, courts in London, return trips eastward were taken just the same as the previous voyages westward to the colonies. Likewise, those tasked with the necessities of dealing with political difficulties in the colonies also found themselves traveling across the ocean in both directions, such as Benjamin Franklin and his missions in London on behalf of the colonies. 

Thus, perhaps family history researchers burdened with our modern outlook concerning the hazards of colonial travel need to free ourselves of that mental image of the tearful departure of immigrants never to be seen by their loved ones again. That may have been the story of my father-in-law's ancestors from Ireland, perhaps fitting that image shared in the 1868 book, Illustrated History of Ireland, but it is not the sole story of all immigrants to America.

Thoughts like these awaken in my mind the possibility that, if such were true for those key individuals during the many years that went into the founding of the United States of America, perhaps we can take such details as cues to rework our mental image of our own ancestors' travel stories.

Trans-Atlantic sailing trips, which might seem perilous to our modern fail-safe mindset, might not have represented the final goodbye for our ancestors. Adding to that thought the safety of travel in groups—recall the researcher's moniker, the FAN Club—we may be able to discover more about our ancestors when we realize that many traveled with their friends and family members, not to mention their close associates and neighbors from back in their homeland village.

But the main lesson to me, as I ponder the elongated time line of just how long a sequence of events combined to bring us Independence Day on the Fourth of July, is that events take time to formulate and put into practice. It may seem romantic and oh-so-twenty-first-century to up and travel halfway around the world at the spur of the moment now, but it took time and much consideration before our eighteenth century ancestors actually made the move to the New World. Likely, for each step of their journey, they left a paper trail of hints for us to follow. To find those hints, though, we need to re-think all the steps that might have gone into that process of saying goodbye. It never took only one short day.

Image above, depicting the tearful departure of emigrants from Ireland, from an engraving by Henry Doyle for the preface of the first edition of Mary Frances Cusack's 1868 book, An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800; courtesy of Wikipedia; in the public domain. 

Orland Park and Fourth Cousins

What is it with Orland Park and my husband's fourth cousins? I've heard of the "FAN Club"—those Friends, Associates, and Neighbors we need to keep our eyes on whenever our ancestors slipped from view—but that was for those time periods we are researching which were far earlier than our current era. How did my father-in-law's Irish ancestors who immigrated to Chicago all manage to have descendants who decided to move to Orland Park?

Orland Park, a village at the far reaches of Chicago's suburbs, was originally settled by log-cabin-building pioneers in the 1830s, but that is not what constituted this FAN Club activity I'm talking about. I've been documenting all the descendants of Johanna Flanagan Lee, my research project for this month, and I've traced where many of them ended up, several generations removed from when that original couple—Johanna and her husband, John Lee—settled in Chicago.

With only a few exceptions—mainly those who either moved to California or entered an academically demanding profession—descendants of the Lee family moved to the Chicago suburbs. That's not surprising, considering the quality of life amenities which can be gained in the suburbs. But why did so many Lee descendants end up specifically in Orland Park? Those are distant cousins who probably aren't even aware of their relationship to each other.

Since Orland Park is a village of less than sixty thousand people, I wouldn't have heard of the place, myself, except for one detail. Keep in mind that my father-in-law, a Chicago native, had several brothers who remained in the area and raised their own families there. Having gone to visit those uncles in Chicago, over the years I've picked up a familiarity with some of the suburban areas there. And eventually, one of the uncles did indeed move to Orland Park, which is probably the only reason why I ever had heard of the place.

With Johanna's descendants, though, the story is quite different. There is no way I'd ever have known Johanna. She was born about 1849 and from her youth, lived in Chicago until her death in 1909. It is only when we get into Johanna's great-grandchildren's generation that we enter the realm of possibly having met them. And that's where I get that eerie feeling that, visiting family in Orland Park, I may have crossed the path of my husband's many fourth cousins in that same town and never realized it.

Granted, the impetus behind this discovery can be attributed to DNA testing. If my husband hadn't tested, I wouldn't have been on such a search to discover all the descendants of those Irish ancestors. Thus, in building out my father-in-law's tree as far as those fourth cousins, I'd never have found those Ancestry hints showing me that, yes, yet another distant cousin has settled in Orland Park.

There is probably some sort of cognitive bias which makes my brain perk up and take note when a familiar town name shows up for a distant cousin's residence. On the other hand, it does seem odd that the same place name shows up with such frequency. The choice of a place to live couldn't be chalked up to something in our genes, could it?

  

O Canada

 

While I am hunkered down behind bolstered windows in defense against our current hundred-plus degree heat wave, I can still hear the continual popping of fireworks in anticipation of our celebration of Independence Day. That, of course, won't occur officially until Fourth of July, but there are those who can't contain their exuberance.

While our American fireworks displays may be premature for next week's holiday, there is one similar event which does occur today for those who live north of the U.S. border: July first is when our northern neighbors celebrate Canada Day. This is a day celebrated by parades, festivals, air shows, concerts with renditions of "O, Canada," the national anthem—perhaps, not unlike the upcoming celebration of their neighbors to the south, even with fireworks displays.

Working on my father-in-law's Irish immigrant Flanagan ancestors reminds me that this was the family which eventually married into another Irish immigrant line, the Tully family. The Tullys, however, did not follow the "usual" route in fleeing the disastrous famine conditions in Ireland; they traveled first to Canada, settling in Ontario before heading south across the border to Detroit and, later, Chicago.

Thus, a tiny part of my father-in-law's ancestry can claim Canada in their roots as well as the United States. And I will always remember joining in renditions of "O, Canada" on July 1, despite owing allegiance to the Stars and Stripes forever. Not only are the two countries neighbors but deep within our roots, many of us are family, too.

The Difficulty With DNA

 

At the beginning of a research project, I first let my brain take in all the possibilities. There can be a lot to consider when the slate is blank and there are plenty of options to explore. With this upcoming month's project to explore what can be discovered about Johanna Flanagan Lee, cousin to my father-in-law's grandmother, I've started laying out the branches on her direct line, filling in all the descendants. And I can't help but wonder if any of them has thought about taking a DNA test.

Even if one of these descendants of Johanna did decide to take a DNA test, checking the ThruLines tool at Ancestry.com is simply not an option in this case. The readout for this tree only goes as far back as Anna Flanagan, my father-in-law's great-grandmother and aunt to Johanna. Even though I've entered a place holder in the tree, labeled simply "Flanagan," for Anna's father—and thus, Johanna's paternal grandfather—there are no other DNA testers in the Ancestry pool to show up as a ThruLines match.

There may be an explanation for this dearth of matches on the Flanagan side. For one thing, the very situation Anna found herself in, directly after the birth of her daughter Catherine, meant Catherine would have no full siblings. Anna's husband, for whatever reason, abruptly needed to leave the country and sail to America, leaving Anna and baby Catherine behind in Ireland. Though Anna herself sailed to Boston in search of him, she never found her husband, and never married again, eventually settling in Chicago with the rest of her immigrating Irish family. Perhaps for that reason, family obituaries included niece Johanna among the survivors of the departed: this simply was such a small family as to leave very few names to mention as bereaved relatives.

Despite this situational reason for lack of Flanagan DNA matches, I realize one thing. Among those in my father-in-law's extended family, I apparently have a line of female descendants which would qualify as the matriline leading back to Anna.

Of course, even if I could find a member of that matriline willing to spring for a mitochondrial DNA test, it wouldn't point me back to the originating Flanagan side of the family, but through Mr. Flanagan's unnamed wife onwards to the roots of her mother. And the matriline for Anna's daughters' daughters would not be the same as that of her niece Johanna, who was related to Anna through her father's line.

Likewise, finding any male Flanagan descendants willing to take a Y-DNA test would only work if I could find a descendant of a brother of Anna. If Johanna had a brother, that would help, but I don't even know that much about Johanna yet. Even if I did know who her brother might have been, a Y-DNA test would only help if that brother had sons, who had sons, who had sons....

As it is, the only DNA that might help in this case would be that plain ol' vanilla version: autosomal DNA, the test which reliably points out all those distant cousins in the family, sometimes even up to as remote a relationship as sixth cousins. For my current volunteer test taker, that would mean a match at the fourth cousin level.

That fourth cousin level is very do-able, except for one small detail: this family has what is sometimes called long generations. In other words, the number of years passing between each generation, in this family's case, stretches close to forty years. If Johanna's generations were shorter than this span in Anna's family, that would leave us looking for matches at the level of once-removed or more distant. Since we are approaching those distant stretches where DNA sometimes drops off the testing radar for viable matches, adding those generations "removed" can push us beyond the detectable thresholds necessary to identify genetic matches.

And so, in this quest to find more about Johanna's family, I'll keep looking for DNA matches. But I won't hold out much hope, considering these difficulties. For Johanna's descendants, it's better to keep a closer eye on the paper trail of genealogical matches than the DNA trail of genetic matches.

About Johanna

 

A daughter of Ireland who found herself in Chicago: that may be the very one who connects me with the missing links in my father-in-law's Flanagan—and, eventually, Tully—family line, and yet, she herself was not part of his direct line.

Johanna, a Flanagan back in Ireland, married someone with an agonizingly common name—John Lee—and raised her family in Chicago. If it weren't for mentions of her married name—Johanna Lee—in obituaries of her relatives, I wouldn't even have known of her connection to my father-in-law's family. However, when no other clues on that Flanagan family emerged, despite diligent searching, any relative could become the one to help find answers.

Somehow, Johanna was cousin to my father-in-law's maternal grandmother, Catherine Malloy. This relationship was likely through Johanna's father—an as-yet unnamed Flanagan—and Catherine's mother, Anna Flanagan. Where Johanna came from in Ireland I can't yet determine, but I do know that Anna received a letter from Catherine's father in 1848, on the date of his departure for the New World, an ill-fated trip to Boston. The address on the envelope revealed that, at that time, Anna and her infant daughter Catherine lived in Parish Ballyagran in County Limerick.

With Catherine having been born about 1848, Johanna would then be the younger of the two cousins—but not by much. Johanna, at least according to census records in her adopted second home in Chicago, was said to have been born in March of the next year. By the time Johanna's name began appearing in American documentation, she and her husband John were parents of several children. Depending on which source I found for the listing of names, there were up to eight children born to the Lees: William, George, John, Lillian, Edward, David, Deborah, and Mary Elizabeth. David had died as an infant—not uncommon in that time period—and William, mentioned in his mother's obituary as having predeceased her, apparently died in the same year as her passing, 1909.

While I can find small details on this particular collateral line of my father-in-law—such as the Lee family's address in Chicago at 3414 Parnell—the weightier, and thus more helpful, details evade my notice. Johanna's father's name, for instance, would help build a clearer picture of that generation of siblings of Anna Flanagan, Catherine's mother.

However, I don't want to merely focus on that Flanagan connection. For July's rendition of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, I'd like to learn as much as possible on the descendants of Johanna, herself. Who knows? With all the recent emphasis at Ancestry.com about connecting with fellow researchers, perhaps I will find someone willing to share records and remembrances—or even maybe spring for a DNA test from the Flanagan side of the equation.

Taking a Detour

Sometimes, the direct route to an answer isn't the best option, considering current conditions. Perhaps there's a traffic jam. Or construction in the way. For family historians on the road to a better understanding of their roots, that might involve running into the dreaded "brick wall" which brings all research to an abrupt stop.

That's when I prefer taking a detour. The scenic route. The bypass which avoids unnecessary roadblocks. Sometimes, this may not work to help me arrive at the answer to my research question, but often—no matter the end result—it leads to some enlightening information.

That's the process I'll be using for this upcoming month's research project, when we explore the family of Johanna Flanagan Lee, immigrant from somewhere in the south of Ireland to the chill winter winds of Chicago, Illinois. Last January, in selecting my Twelve Most Wanted for 2023, Johanna gained the spot for this coming July's research efforts.

The month of July marks the first of three months in which I'll work on the ancestry of my father-in-law. Three out of his four grandparents were born in Ireland, and certainly all eight of his great-grandparents were from that same country.

For the month of July, however, my goal will not be to work on any of those direct line ancestors. Instead, stuck on a key question about one particular great-grandmother of his, I am going to take a detour rather than a direct route: I will be researching a collateral line.

While that line does have to do with my father-in-law's Flanagan line, it is actually a cousin of his maternal grandmother who will grab our attention this coming month. That cousin, Johanna Flanagan Lee, was mentioned in obituaries as a relative of two known Flanagan ancestors—it's just that I don't know exactly how she is related. Her father, a Flanagan, is a total unknown—so far.

While that may sound like a research dilemma for someone else's family tree, not ours, it comes with a tempting hook: if I can find Johanna's parents, perhaps I can tie that knowledge to what I already know about my father-in-law's direct line, and together, those facts might tease out some leads. If nothing else materializes, at least I can build out Johanna's own family tree and see if it leads to some fellow researchers. Tomorrow, we'll start with what is already known about Johanna, and then determine which direction will be the best to take first.  

About Those Millers

 

There are some genealogical questions for which DNA testing is simply not suited to answer. Filling in the blanks in all the lines of descent from my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather, Mathias Ambrose, is one such instance. Especially when it comes to Mathias' daughter Barbara, whom we can tell from his 1804 will was already married to a Miller, I'm afraid I will have to call off the chase for more information—at least for now.

Here's the problem: Barbara's husband is not named in her father's will. Searching for a woman in that time period—the early 1800s, following her father's death in Bedford County, Pennsylvania—is already a challenge, as women were next to invisible during that time period. Although Mathias did mention the name of one grandchild in his will, that child was not the son of Mr. Miller, whoever he might have been.

Even though Barbara's husband was not named, if he had gone by almost any other surname—Smith or Jones being the obvious exceptions—we might have had more of a chance to discover his given name. But Miller? 

Then, too, I have yet to discover where Barbara herself fit into the Ambrose family constellation. True, the tradition was to name one's children in birth order when listing them in a will, so in that case Barbara would appear to have been right in the middle of the birth order, or even among the youngest ones. She was named as the third daughter, but that was after mentioning three sons, so it is hard to tell whether they all were listed strictly in birth order. I tend to think not.

If she was among the younger Ambrose children, my next task would be to search for marriage records in Bedford County, rather than back in Maryland, from where the family had moved. With this month almost over, that will need to go on my to-do list for the next time I explore this Ambrose family. Searching for a Miller without a given name is simply too challenging for that time period. If Barbara and the rest of the Miller family had moved westward, as did her married sisters Elizabeth and Susannah, the chances of locating the right Miller family would decrease even more precipitously.

As for the other sisters, even they present research problems. The start of the problems in finding these descendants grows first from the very handwriting on Mathias' will, which is next to impossible to decipher. Adding guesses to surnames, combined with missing given names for those husbands, compounds the research problem. Perhaps that is the prime reason why there are no ThruLines results for the descendants of those other daughters.

My temptation, seeing how close we are to the close of this month, is to set aside this research project for another year. Among the tasks I'd like to pick up upon my eventual return to Mathias Ambrose's puzzle would be to locate and study the probate records for the administration of his estate. As disbursement of liquidated property would involve signed records of the named Ambrose children having received their portion of the inheritance, I already have seen that some such receipts would actually be signed not by the named daughter herself, but by her husband. If so, that might be a mystery instantly solved for the actual surnames of the husbands—some of whose names may have been mangled phonetically in the will—not to mention, a big reveal for the missing given names of those men. A search like that, however, may take quite a bit of time.

With that, we'll jump ahead to the research project planned for July, and start tomorrow with a brief introduction of the challenge we'll face as we move from my mother-in-law's family lines to those of her Irish-American husband.