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. 

 

Why it's Good to Revisit old Research Tasks

 

Researching Margaret Flannery, the Irish woman who became wife of Denis Tully and mother of his children in both County Tipperary and Canada West before 1860, is a challenge I have tackled before. Last time, the results weren't too stellar—until you consider that my few discoveries did bring me far ahead of what I knew before that round of research.

With that track record, I'm eager to try my hand at finding her roots once again. Why? Because with every year, more documents become digitized and placed online. What I once would only have been able to accomplish on her family history by traveling across a continent and an ocean to do in person—or pay for someone at a heritage center in Ireland to access on my behalf—I can now do for the price of some well-designed search tactics through online resources.

That is specifically the case when, years ago now, Irish Catholic baptismal records became available at the National Library of Ireland, then spread to various other subscription services. Suddenly, rather than squinting my way through rolls and rolls of microfilm, I could enter a search term and immediately receive possible results.

Finding helpful articles on the details of the baptismal records also shined a light on possible ways to use this information for my research benefit. Much like working an algebra equation, we can determine the value of an unknown by rearranging the known quantities to our benefit.

Thus, if the Irish tradition was to appoint sponsors for the baptised infant—their godparents—based on specific close family relationships, it would seem all we need do is compile a listing of the godparents for each of Margaret Flannery Tully's several children. Then, we can scour the resultant list for any patterns or repeated names. With that, the unknown "x" could turn into the answer to the question, "Who were Margaret's siblings?"

Likewise, we could repeat the process for all the Flannery family members—not to mention, expand to all the Tully relatives—who might have baptised their children in the same parish in County Tipperary. As the numbers multiplied, it could become a research mess, true, but who said a "reasonably exhaustive search" was ever simple or streamlined?

Because we now know, thanks to a letter regarding two of Margaret's children, the specific parish where they were baptised, we can limit our search for all records containing those surnames—Flannery and Tully—to that specific geographic area. If need be, we can expand to the neighboring townlands. From that, we can compile our list of godparents—and watch to see whether any patterns emerge within that expanded family constellation.

Since an effort like that borders on genealogical sausage-making, I'll spare you the tedious details. Tomorrow, we'll check progress and see whether any useful clues emerge.

Meet Margaret

 

Margaret Flannery is an ancestor whose very name—let alone the details of her life story—I am fortunate to know. She took her position on the not-very-long maternal line of my father-in-law only after I discovered two of her children conveniently needed to request verification of their baptism. (Or maybe they were just one of us who find it hard to dispose of any records of our past.)

Margaret was wife of Denis Tully, an Irish emigrant from County Tipperary who brought his family to "Canada West" before the 1851 census. Only you wouldn't know it: that year's enumerator for the village of Paris insisted on cataloguing each of the married women as "Mrs."

Gone were my chances to discover Margaret's given name in the subsequent Canadian census, for she had apparently died by that point; her husband Denis Tully reported himself to be a widower, though I have yet to find any trace of her buried remains. It was only by diligently tracking each of her descendants that I eventually encountered a death certificate reporting parents' place of birth to be Paris, Ontario. That was how I learned the Tully family's stopping place, before the next generation arrived in the south Chicago neighborhood I always knew they called home, was in Canada.

Now, thanks to this clue delivered with her son John Tully's baptismal record, I've not only learned her given name—hint: it wasn't "Mrs."—but I was gifted with her maiden name, as well. Take that information that Margaret was a Flannery and combine it with discoveries in County Tipperary, and we have just been handed the keys to permit our first steps in her homeland.

Better than that, we learned that the specific parish in which her children were baptised was called Ballina—a village small enough to make stab-in-the-dark searches a little less impossible. From the Canadian census in 1851, we learned that "Mrs." would have been forty three years of age at her next birthday. Knowing the Irish propensity to report their age in their own favor, we'll give that number a wide berth, but hang on to any date close to 1808 on the chance that her estimate was close to reality.

I originally guessed Margaret's year of marriage based on her daughter Johanna's 1832 birth, though nothing yet has appeared to substantiate that estimate. I subsequently discovered Denis and Margaret had a son, Michael—partially confirmed, thanks to DNA testing of a descendant—whom I found in the 1861 census not far from his father's home in Paris. But even such calculated guess work is no longer necessary, since so many Irish records have since come online. Now, not only can I trace her children Patrick, John, Margaret, and William based on their records later in life in Chicago, but I can also locate their Irish baptismal records online for all but the family's youngest—William, who was born in Canada.

That online asset affords me the opportunity to once again put collateral lines to work in my favor. Given the Irish tradition of naming specific relatives as the baptised child's godparents, it will be my next task to inspect each of those baptismal entries to see if we can glean enough names to build an extended family network for both the Tully family and Margaret's own Flannery folks.   

A New Month, a New Ancestor

 

This year marks the second year I have organized my family history research goals around the monthly pursuit of what I call my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors. Well into 2021 now, I've completed three months focused on my mother's family, followed by three months devoted to my mother-in-law's family. July brought the exploration to Ireland with the first of my goals related to my father-in-law's forebears, and this month continues that series.

While I have researched each of these ancestors in the past, there is one other detail they all hold in common: each of them has previously stumped me. Whether for lack of online records, or enigmatic details—try differentiating several Kelly ancestors from Ireland, for instance—each one has seen me set aside their challenge for a more opportune time. The hope has been that new record sets will be digitized and brought online, or that I'll be able to travel to the ancestor's home location to inspect documents which couldn't be found online.

This month, our focus will be on Margaret Flannery, one of my father-in-law's great-grandparents on his maternal side. While each of my father-in-law's eight great-grandparents were born in Ireland, when I first started researching that particular line on his mother's side, I didn't even know that Margaret and her husband, Dennis Tully, were the great-grandparents I needed to focus on in that line. Moreover, I had no clue that before their children appeared in Chicago around the time of the great fire there, they had lived in Canada. All I had was the presumption that of course they had originated in Ireland.

It took thorough research of all the collateral lines I could find to discover that Margaret Flannery's immigrant Tully children stopped first in a tiny village called Paris in the county of Brant in Ontario, Canada—using a research process similar to the job I'll need to complete this month before I can achieve my goal of discovering more about Margaret's origin. More than that, I didn't even know her maiden name until a fortuitous turn of events provided a handwritten copy of a baptismal record for her son John and corroborated those details with an almost identical such note provided to the family of her daughter Johanna.

The beauty of all those serendipitous discoveries was that they filled in the blanks concerning Margaret's maiden name and the location where her children were born in Ireland, a valuable discovery, indeed. That, however, doesn't mean the search is over.

My hope, of course, is to push back the line yet another generation on the Flannery side. With lack of documentation during that era for Catholics in Ireland—we're pushing back to the 1830s and beyond by then—the process will again require careful analysis of collateral lines and other village and parish information in the hopes of finding clues.

With that challenge facing us, let's take the relatively easy first step of an introduction to our Most Wanted Ancestor challenge for August. Tomorrow, we'll meet Margaret Flannery and review what little we do know about her life's story. 

 

Above: A handwritten verification of John Tully's 1842 baptism, providing his mother's maiden name of Flannery, drawn up by a priest at the Catholic parish at Ballina, County Tipperary (by then consolidated with the parish across the river in Killaloe, County Clare), dated March 7, 1887; original letter in the author's possession.

 

Postscript on the Irish

 

Some research projects are hard to let go. Count my failed search for my father-in-law's Kelly ancestors in Indiana among them. Yet let me add just one more word before we move on to August's research challenge.

There was so much to glean from William Giffin's book, The Irish, that I couldn't say it all in one post. Nor does this one tidbit I found necessarily connect to the immigrant Kelly family upon their arrival in the vicinity of Lafayette, Indiana. It does, however, provide a glimpse of circumstances which might have influenced the choices made by their future in-law, John Stevens.

I already had learned about John, who eventually married Catherine Kelly, that he had filed his Declaration of Intention in Tippecanoe County, which document serendipitously gave me the exact details of his immigration route.

The Declaration provided his stated age—twenty seven at the time, though who knows whether that was framed in the Irish tendency to minimize such numbers during those vital working years. The record also told me that he was born in County Mayo, and that his route to America was through Liverpool in England, eventually arriving in the city of New Orleans in Louisiana.

What I failed to pay attention to—and had to go back and check today—was the date in which the Declaration was completed in Lafayette. Here's why.

William Giffin's book on the Irish in Indiana went into detail on several aspects of immigrant life during various time periods throughout the state's history. Noting the evolution of acceptance of Irish common laborers in the state, Giffin noted that the Irish were active in state politics long before 1860. Almost unanimously, Irish immigrants supported the Democrat Party, and for good reason: the party's line was sympathetic to the cause of immigrants. In fact, because of that Democrat control of the 1850 state constitutional convention, delegates voted to "ease voting requirements for immigrants."

Giffin noted that the catch was that "aliens could vote providing that they declared their intentions to become citizens and met a minimal residence requirement."

Apparently, there was a rush among those Irish immigrants to file their first papers of the naturalization process. Giffin cited a study of one Indiana city in which many such Irish declared their intentions in the week leading up to the general election itself.

That made me curious. As it turns out, I have a copy of John Stevens' Declaration of Intention, so I took a look to see. Sure enough, apparently as soon as he could, the Irish immigrant from County Mayo fulfilled the requirement on August 4, 1851. 

I don't have any way to know whether taking that act indicates anything on John Stevens' part, but I like to think he was certainly attuned to current events in his new hometown of Lafayette, Indiana, and possibly even keen on the twists and turns of local politics.

Above: Copy of the Declaration of Intention of John Stevens of County Mayo, having arrived in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, via New Orleans in December, 1850; copy on file in author's records.