A Different Kind of Distant Cousin

When it comes to disappointment over ineffective “cousin bait,” for someone who has been the constant sniveler, I certainly didn’t anticipate the kind of email contact I received this week. I’m always hoping a distant cousin will sit down at his or her computer, type in the magic words—one of my family’s many surnames, of course—and presto! Be led to my blog post about that very ancestor.

Granted, I have been having a few of such responses lately, so for today’s post, I will only own up to “snivel lite.” But you know I’ve always wanted to connect to that dream distant cousin who will have all the answers to my family history questions.

So what should show up in my inbox earlier this week, but a letter informing me that I am definitely someone else’s cousin. Not even a question. It was a fact, apparently demonstrated scientifically. The only thing left for us to do is figure out how to make the connection that bears out that verdict.

With paper trail of ancestors in hand, I could have easily determined relationships back to the early 1800s, at least. The only problem is: the person addressing me is an adoptee.

How do we know we are related? Only by virtue of a DNA test. This particular test is called the mitochondrial DNA test, or mtDNA for short. It traces the maternal line, from child (either male or female) to mother to mother’s mother, and so on, along the maternal line for each generation. ISOGG, the International Society of Genetic Genealogy, explains it this way: the mtDNA molecule—or its specific (but rare) mutation—is passed in a direct female line of descent.

In the case of this new distant cousin, our mtDNA results are an exact match. This, incidentally, only means that whatever mutations I may have received from my mother’s line compare to the exact sequence also received by this new distant cousin. The catch is, as FamilyTreeDNA explains in their Learning Center page on Maternal Lineages:

Your mtDNA exact matches may be recent, but they may also be hundreds or thousands of years in the past.

Suddenly, my bravado over having a genealogical paper trail stretching back, on this specific line, to the early 1800s is retracted. How can anyone’s genealogical prowess stand up to the test of a possible time frame like that?

And so, the genealogy dance begins: poking and prodding, trying to figure out which female ancestor specifically related to someone in my direct maternal line might have been in the right time and place to become this mystery cousin’s birth mother. Or mother of this birth mother. Or maternal grandmother of this birth mother…

You get the picture. We’ve immersed ourselves in this search all week long. In a way, it’s nice to have a partner in the quest to push back the generations, to struggle against the silencing forces that made prior generations’ women nearly invisible.

Yet, there’s another side to a question like this. Though not to as extreme a degree as one story featured recently in Vox, explaining how genetic testing actually became the catalyst that tore one family apart, there is the aura of a witch hunt in the who-done-it aspect. Only this search isn’t for a murder suspect. The winner of this woman-hunt, in past ages, might at best end up wearing a scarlet letter.

And so we progress, my new-found cousin and I, email by email, piecing together facts from documents as we find them, with each discovery moving us one step closer to the revelation. In one way, it’s a joyful process, anticipating the reuniting of two people separated by an entire lifetime. In another way, it’s a process with a conclusion rife with risks.

Whatever the adventure entails, it is a steep learning curve we’re mounting, not only in uncovering documentation as we press backward through as-yet-undiscovered generations, but in familiarizing ourselves with every nuance of what the DNA tests are telling us. There’ll be more testing. And more genealogical research. But depending on how far removed in time we are from our ancestral nexus, we may soon—or may never—learn the answer to this mystery of our common ancestor.

A Disappearing Act

The deaf have an expression in sign language that pretty much represents how I feel after another day of fruitless genealogical research. It is basically composed of two images. One, stationary, is represented by two fingers, outstretched, parallel to the floor. The other is a quick motion in which the thumb and two fingers are closed together in simultaneous movement with the arm drawing the hand away from the communicator. What the sign represents, literally, is a train moving away from the station and rapidly fading into the distance. All that, figuratively, is meant to signify: “Ya missed it.”

Searching for this mystery branch of our Tully family—once living in County Tipperary in Ireland, then settled in Paris, Ontario, then seemingly vanished from all subsequent census documents—feels quite the same way. Somehow, I’ve missed it—the next place where the family must have moved.

It seemed logical, as we discussed yesterday, to presume the family of John and Catherine Flannery Tully moved in the same direction as many of their relatives once living in Paris, Ontario. We’ve seen others move to Detroit—it is, after all, along the main highway leading past Paris to the west. And we know another John and Catherine Tully—my husband’s great-grandparents—ended up in Chicago, along with some of his siblings.

So it wasn’t a surprise to find a potential John and Catherine Tully of just the right ages as our Tully-Flannery couple in Detroit for both the 1870 and 1880 census. Because they were aging, themselves, finding the addition of a son, Michael, seemed just the ticket to trace this line into the future—well, at least as far into the future as to get to the decade in which government records tended to include parents’ names in death certificates.

Because John and Catherine’s entry in the 1880 census—well, let’s presume this was theirs—did not include any sign of their son Michael, I looked elsewhere for a possible twenty-seven year old Canadian-born candidate. I did find one, of approximately the same age, still in Detroit. However, what I found in the census record wasn’t going to help much with tracing the line forward. This Michael Tully was still a single man, living in a boarding home with several other men who, like himself, worked for the railroad.

The railroad? This was not going to be easy. While Michael might still have been in Detroit in 1880, he was likely to end up anywhere, next time we’d find him in any government documents. It’s great that he had a good job, but that job meant he needed to be willing to travel to where the work was when the local project was completed. I was beginning to feel like that sign: about to see myself miss the train as it moved down the tracks.

Having no 1890 census to consult became a sorely missed link in tracing this family, for by the time I checked for Michael in the 1900 census, there was no sign of him anywhere—well, not anywhere the search engine for the digitized version of the census at Ancestry.com was able to see. Perhaps another search engine at another collection might be able to serve up a different set of results, and I’ll need to check that. But for 1900 and 1910, I hadn't found any results.

Did that mean Michael passed away early from occupational hazards? Working for the railroad industry did include some risks. I looked at the Seeking Michigan website to see if I could find any death certificates in that name—or even the names of Michael’s parents—from that approximate time frame, but I found no pertinent results.

If Michael, or John and Catherine, made their move once again—perhaps to Chicago as did other family members—I must have missed it. Another train slipped down the tracks before I realized it. My only recourse in continuing any research on this potential branch of the family would be to locate any marriage records for John and Catherine’s daughter, Margaret—who did make it to Michigan—or their older daughter, Mary, who disappeared from governmental view sometime before that 1870 United States census revealed the family had left their home in Canada.

Refocusing

The moral of the story for the last few days’ detour: the genealogical path to finding Darby Tully is rife with rabbit trails. Stay out!

Lest I lose more time in researching the Tully and Flannery immigrants from County Tipperary to Canada West, I decided to return to my notes from our recent foray into the land of our Irish roots.

The first thing that exercise did was remind me how researchers in archives have absolutely got to remember to be well-supplied with sharpened pencils. The notes I took with worn out nibs are abysmal. Talk about re-focusing: I’ll have to transcribe my time-pressured chicken scratch in ink before I can even try to enter them into any usable format in computer records. My eyes are watering and crossing, just at the thought of reading that penciled hand. I'll never complain about an 1850s priest's handwriting again.

However, if we are making no progress pursuing Darby Tully, what about the other Tully man found in the NLI baptismal microfilm for County Tipperary?

That would be the mention of the marriage of John Tully and “Kitty Flanery.” The date for the event was recorded as 23 February, 1841—and an extra note mentioned John was from “Tauntinna,” the same place showing in property records in the next decade under the names of both Darby and Denis Tully.

It didn’t escape my attention that, in that subsequent decade when our Denis Tully had surfaced in Brant County, Ontario, there was a John Tully just down the road from him. Could that be the John Tully who had married Kitty? Here are some clues to pump up a possible “yes” vote on this one:

• A wedding in 1841 would likely indicate a groom born before 1821; the John Tully in the Canadian census gave as his age thirty six, being born about 1816.
• That 1841 wedding might indicate a bride born before 1825; the wife in the 1852 Canadian census would have been born about 1820.
• The oldest child listed in the Canadian census was nine years of age; an age much older than that would have ruled out the couple in Ireland.
• The age of the youngest child, born in Canada, seems to coincide with the ages of the other Tully families’ children born after immigration.
• On the same census page, there is also a household under the name “Edman Flannery,” indicating the possible presence of another family member who had immigrated along with Kitty Flanery Tully.

Of course, the one main handicap in our conjecture is the irritating tendency of the census enumerator charged with canvassing this Canadian village to list women merely as “Mrs.” Who knows if this was the household of our John and Kitty.

So I had to try to look beyond this one census record for 1852. Don’t think that would be a simple task of rolling through the decades on Ancestry.com. Apparently, John and Catherine Flannery Tully didn’t intend to be found any more than their relatives did. I made that discovery as soon as I tried finding them in the very next census. No record.

I thought I’d outsmart them. Instead of taking the direct approach and looking for the household of John, I looked for his wife, instead. No matter whether I tried “Kitty” or “Catherine,” there was no clue to be found anywhere in Canada.

Reasoning that the rest of the Tully family had found a way to immigrate once again—this time, ultimately, to the United States—I expanded my search for Catherine. On the very faded pages of the 1880 census for Detroit, Michigan, I did find a Catherine “Tulley.” Thankfully, she was born in Ireland, and her age roughly matched the birth year I had assumed. To top things off, she was still married. Her husband? John.

But what are the chances? Do you know how many John Tullys there are out there? And narrowing things down with a wife’s name of Catherine doesn’t help much. I tried to work backwards again, this time in the United States, to see if I could find an earlier census record.

Not much came of it, though. I switched my tack again, this time searching for their younger daughter, Margaret. I had two thoughts for this approach. First, I simply could not bear to bring myself to search for yet another Irish immigrant named Mary. Second, Margaret was born in Canada; I thought entering in the added variable of a Canadian child born to Irish parents might flush out a more specific response.

Of course, I had to endure the maddening show of such results as the Margaret Tully in a Canadian household in the Darby Tully neighborhood of Blenheim Township—this time, daughter of a Michael and Margaret Tully. Eventually, though, I isolated a result for 1870—again, in Detroit—that included both a (sort of) right-aged Margaret, born in Canada, and parents John and Catherine from Ireland.

There was only one wrinkle. There was another child. And this one wasn’t named Mary.

Whatever happened to John and Catherine’s daughter Mary—who now would have been at least twenty seven—I don’t know. In her place, however, was a seventeen year old son named Michael. Younger than Margaret, and also born in Canada rather than in Ireland, he could very easily have fit into the picture since we last saw our John and Catherine Tully in the 1852 census record in Canada.

If, that is, this Detroit Tully family is one and the same as our Canadian Tully family. You know what that means, of course: more research.  

Detour

So, I’m sitting at my computer, minding my own business—well, at least the business of finding any connection between my Denis Tully and a Darby Tully who pops up nearby in Ontario, Canada—and what should I find but this off-the-wall document.

It's a death certificate—not an unusual find for someone immersed in genealogical pursuits. Frustrated at not locating any more about this Darby Tully of Blenheim Township in Oxford County, Ontario, I thought, at the least, I could glean his parents’ names from a death certificate—if, that is, he survived until the newly-minted government of Canada saw fit to record such information in their vital statistics.

That was going to be a long shot. Best I could tell, this Darby Tully was born sometime before the turn of the century—that other century. Like 1800. His chance of living through an entire century to reach governmental enlightenment—at least of the documentary kind—was extremely small.

I was game to take a look. I checked out Find A Grave. I wandered through local cemetery websites, thanks to leads from Google. And I put Ancestry.com through its paces, looking for death records.

At first, I looked for Darby. Finding no results there, I reverted to the more formal Jeremiah. Still nothing positive. Frustrated, I just entered the surname, and left the given name field blank. Seasoning that search recipe lightly with a restriction to the “location” field, I did find some possibilities. None, however, with the name I was seeking.

So I wandered. I’m good for that. And this is what I found:

I know the given name James is not among my possibilities for Tully ancestors—or, given the more recent date of 1911, possible Tully descendants—but just in case this James turned out to be a son of one of my Tully clan, I rationalized I could trace this further.

Oh, who am I fooling: it was what followed that first half of the form that grabbed me, robbed me of all common sense and dragged me off, kicking and screaming, to find out more about this guy.

On the “Medical Certificate of Death” section, where the county official is supposed to “hereby certify” that he “attended the deceased,” the only line that follows expected format was the first line. His name: “Tully, James.”

Under that was a statement, “This is a case of being found dead from natural causes, probably heart failure sudden.”

Ya think?

The rest of the form was left blank. There was no helpful information on the lines meant to designate date or place of birth. No clue of what his father’s or mother’s name might have been, or where they came from. No listing of even a spouse. What the reporting party saw was what the document got: his name—how that was obtained without gleaning anything else from whoever discovered the death is a puzzle to me—his gender and race, that he was a laborer, and the supposed date of death. Coroners are good at figuring that out.

Oh, and that he died in a place called Ingersoll, in Oxford County, not far from our (possible) Darby Tully in Blenheim Township there.

When I saw that, all I could think of was our Patrick Flannery, the poor unfortunate distant relative who was found dead in a frozen mill race. Until I ran across Patrick’s death mentioned in a news article, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a mill race. The whole episode had struck me as such an anonymous way to go.

Maybe the anonymity of it all was what made me determined to learn something else about this James Tully, the guy who died alone (well, hopefully he didn’t have any assistance) on the eleventh of August, 1911.

So, off to the census records it was. For speed of search, I stuck with Ancestry.com for this one—some links won’t work for you if you’re not a subscriber—because they have readouts on each of the decades I’d need.

Not knowing how old our unfortunate James might have been, I started with the 1861 census. There, the only possibility in Oxford County was right there in Ingersoll—same place as where it all ended for Mr. Tully.

In 1861, James was situated in the household of one Henry Crotty, who gave as his occupation, “Gentleman.” A single man, James was listed as laborer, and declared himself to be twenty years of age, having arrived in Canada West from England—thus, in a piquant role reversal, becoming an English laborer serving an Irish gentleman. He was an Episcopalian, as was his employer, which automatically nixed him from possibilities of connection to our Tully family.

James likely remained in the Crotty household for the 1871 census, as he did for the 1881 census. After that, he seems to have done a disappearing act. Perhaps that’s when he went into a loner phase—a prelude to his lonely passing twenty years later, I thought.

You know I couldn’t let it go at that. He had been such a regular at the Crotty household. So I tried a different approach: I looked for his employer in the 1891 census. And struck out again.

Realizing that the good gentleman was likely born in 1812, and this was the 1891 census we were contemplating, I thought it might be prudent to try a different tack: look for his wife.

Sure enough, Mrs. Crotty was listed as a widow, but was still on the family property, along with her remaining children. In addition, Ancestry.com had noted a laborer in the household by the name of James “Nelly.”

I took a peek. Yes, I’d take that for James Tully. At least the birth year was consistent. What do you think?

By 1901, however, Mrs. Crotty had joined her husband, and the land was left to her children—at least, those who had chosen to remain. As for James Tully—or even James Nelly—there was no sign. Nor was there any indication of such a man with a birth year of 1841 in the Ontario records at any other location. He seemed to have simply vanished. Perhaps he was perfecting his Invisible Man routine.

Likewise, there was no sign of James Tully in the 1911 census. But we know he had to be there, for if nothing else, the official record indicates he was found somewhere in Ingersoll in Oxford County—the same place where he had lived and worked since at least 1861—by August 11, 1911. Always a fixture around the farm, he slipped away into lone anonymity when his services were no longer needed by the Gentleman.

Can Be Easily Distracted

Seeking confirmation for the possibility that our Denis Tully was accompanied to the New World by his relative, Darby Tully, has had one unfortunate result: too many rabbit trails. Just little ones. But they are still tempting.

And you know me and bunny trails.

Take this unhelpful discovery that there was, indeed, a Dennis Tully resident in the same township in Oxford County, Ontario, as my target Darby Tully. The Dennis in Blenheim township in the 1852 Canada West census, however, is a single laborer aged twenty one, not the fifty year old married guy I was expecting. Could he be a nephew? That would contribute yet another mystery Tully to the count, adding to the mess rather than shrinking it.

Poking around, trying to find anything on this new Dennis Tully I had just discovered, I ran into another puzzle: a Bridget Tully, daughter of Dennis and Margaret, who despite living in Warwick, said she was born in Paris. Like Paris, Ontario, the Brant County village where our Denis and Margaret settled.

Where did she come from?

And does that mean there is yet another Dennis Tully to pursue?

This Bridget, I discovered, was set to marry a man by the name of John Kane, according to her marriage license. But wait! Does that document say her mother’s name was Margaret? Or Mary? It’s too hard to read whether that last letter signifies an abbreviation for Margaret or not. You know I’ll have to go check that one out, too.

Conveniently, that blurry marriage document named her witness as Margaret Tully of Warwick—if we’re fortunate, that would be her sister, giving us at least one other hint to help construct their family constellation.

But who am I kidding here? The name Margaret seems to be a regular installation on census readouts for Tully families in this neck of the woods. I trawled through all the other marriage listings for Ontario on Ancestry.com to rule out any other such Bridget Tullys. And then headed to the census records.

Since Bridget’s 1881 marriage license stated she was then twenty four years of age, I checked the 1861 census to see if I could find any baby Bridgets at home with dad Dennis and mom Margaret—or, granting a concession to the possibility, a mom Mary. Fortunately, there were only four Bridget Tullys that could be gleaned from the 1861 census in Canada West—and of those, only two were within the range of possible birthdates extrapolated from the marriage license. One—though temptingly next door neighbor to one William Flannery from Ireland—turned out to have parents named John and Biddy Tully. The other was actually a “Bridgeit Tuley,” daughter of John and Catherine. And both families, oddly enough, were in Perth—not Blenheim township, not Paris, not even Warwick.

Perhaps our Bridget was a little over-zealous about stating her age for her marriage license. I took another look, just to make sure. This time, an 1861 record that had been mis-transcribed on Ancestry.com as “Dennis Sully”—and thankfully corrected by an astute subscriber—showed up. Along with Dennis and his wife Margaret, there was five year old Bridget and—undoubtedly the one serving as bridesmaid twenty years later— her younger sister Margaret. And they lived in the township of Warwick, part of Lambton County, Ontario.

This Dennis, by the way, was thirty one years of age, putting his year of birth around 1830—making me wonder if he, too, immigrated from County Tipperary along with some other Tully cousins. Or happened to put an earlier stop in at the township of Blenheim on his way to Warwick.

Still, I wasn’t finding anything further on my target Darby Tully in Blenheim township. How was I supposed to figure out whether he had any relationship to my Denis Tully? I tried searching for other resources to help me find answers, like Joe Beine’s listings on Ontario websites, and the Ontario Cemetery Finding Aid. I discovered two online sites providing information on Oxford County cemeteries—even the tourism agency there is friendly to genealogists!—but no Tully results that I could find.

Nor were there any leads back in our Denis’ new home, Paris in Brant County. The online records for the Sacred Heart Cemetery in Paris showed no Tully burials whatsoever—though, granted, the listing is incomplete.

In the meantime, don’t presume that I nobly stayed on task throughout this whole exercise. I did make some interesting detours. Small ones, admittedly: they do have to do with Tullys. But I’ll have to save them for tomorrow. Wouldn’t want to make today’s post too long.

Remembering

There are some people whose paths we cross, though strangers, whom we cannot subsequently forget. Whether for something done, some memento of significance or other token, there is an exchange that calls the person to remembrance.

While our own family has spent the greater part of the last month in Ireland, seeking details on my husband’s roots, there was one part of our trip in which I encountered someone I want to remember. Not a family member, not someone I met face to face, she was someone who, nevertheless, reached out and grabbed me and, in a way, pleaded for me to remember her. I’ve kept the only photograph I have of her, saving it specifically for a day like today.

Today is historically remembered as the anniversary of the end of World War I—Armistice Day—later designated in the United States as a day to honor all people who have served in the Armed Forces. While there are certainly many who deserve this recognition for their sacrificial service—even some in our own extended family for whom I again give thanks—today is a day in which we can express our appreciation even to those whom we do not know, never met, and likely will never see in the future.

One such person is Bridget Gilbourne. Daughter of Thomas and Ellen O’Donnell Gilbourne, she spent her childhood years living with her parents in the household of her paternal grandmother, Johanna Gilbourne. The family had once lived in Ballygulleen, one of the townlands in County Limerick, though she was said to have come from Kilmeedy—apparently, not far from Castletown-Conyers, where I first learned about Bridget.

At some point, Bridget made the decision to serve with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, part of the British Royal Air Force, during war years. In her duties there, she eventually rose to the rank of sergeant.

What those duties were, however, I may never know. All I know is that there was a headstone listing her name at the old cemetery at the Catholic church ruins in Castletown, where my husband and I went walking last month in search of remnants of our own family. Under the WAAF insignia, the inscription read

420869 Sergeant

BRIDGET GILBOURNE

Women’s Auxiliary Air Force

14^th June 1946 Age 36

There were apparently one hundred nineteen casualties from County Limerick during the second World War. Two of them were women—besides Bridget, a private, Mary Collopy. All were commemorated in a book issued in 2006 in Limerick by war historian Patrick McNamara, Their Name Liveth For Evermore, and further detailed in an unnamed newspaper article posted on the Limerick City Council website.

Perhaps it was on account of the military affiliation—after all, there was that Air Force connection—that my husband decided to include her headstone among the others he captured in random photographs the day we were at Castletown. When we returned home and started reviewing all we had gleaned from our research trip, there it was: Bridget Gilbourne’s headstone, alongside the walls of the church ruins. Someone had evidently been by to care for the space—a small plant had been recently left there. Perhaps there was still a family member nearby, maybe from her brother Patrick’s family—Patrick being only an infant on the one piece of documentation I was able to find about the family, the 1911 census.

Bridget’s passing was duly noted in Peter Singlehurst’s The War Dead of the Commonwealth Cemeteries and Churchyards in the Republic of Ireland, a listing from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Perhaps Patrick McNamara’s book devotes a page—or at least a paragraph—to the cause to which she devoted her energies, and ultimately her life.

There is just something about headstones like this that makes me stop and stand still. I wish I knew the stories behind such small monuments. But since I don’t—and likely won’t be able to—the least I can do is take a moment and in whatever public way I can, say “thank you.”

Photograph: The 1946 headstone of W.A.A.F. Sergeant, Bridget Gilbourne, at the old Catholic cemetery in Castletown, County Limerick, Ireland. Photograph courtesy Chris Stevens.

Laying the Ground Work

Sometimes, in puzzling out tangled family lines, it helps to think out loud. While I’m not going to go as far as to lay down an audio track for today’s post, I am going to go through the paces of retracing my steps on this question about whether the Darby Tully and the Denis Tully in Canada West’s 1852 census were related.

Let’s start with what we already know, and examine the findings in two parallel tracks: one for Darby and one for Denis.

As for Darby, we’ve already taken a look at his entry in the 1852 census. Almost immediately, in reviewing my steps, I saw my first mistake: the assumption that Blenheim today would be the same place as Blenheim township in 1852. If you live in the eastern regions of the United States and are familiar with those entities known as townships, you could easily have told me that. And, really, if I had remembered back far enough to my childhood days in New York, I would have realized that, myself.

It took reviewing a few decades of census records before I woke up to the fact that the documents I was viewing belonged to Blenheim Township in Oxford County, not Blenheim, the community located in Chatham-Kent. One glance at a map told me I was no longer considering a distance between the two Tully households in excess of one hundred miles, but a mere seventeen miles across the neighboring county line. Out of all the townships in rural Oxford County, Blenheim township is situated farthest to the east, as you can see on this diagram of the townships here. In current-day Oxford County, the area is now known as Blandford-Blenheim township. The historic township of Blenheim was “amalgamated” with neighboring Blandford township in 1975. Looking to the footer on the entry for the township in Wikipedia, you can see the neighboring areas include sections of Brant County—precisely the county in which our Denis Tully settled.

In 1852, Darby Tully was fifty two years of age, putting his date of birth at approximately 1800. In his household were fifteen year old Margaret, thirteen year old Patrick, ten year old Mary, six year old Bridget, and three year old John—the only one of the household actually born in Canada. The census does not provide any labels regarding relationship among those in the Tully household, but we can presume that Darby was a widower, and these were at least some of his children.

By the time of the 1861 census, I can find no entry for a Darby Tully in Canada West. However—and here Kat’s explanation is borne out—there is a listing for one solitary Jeremiah Tully. Fortunately, that entry is for a man living in Oxford County. Although his household consists of a smaller threesome—besides sixty three year old Jeremiah, there was twelve year old John and fourteen year old Bridget—the names and ages are appropriately similar to what we found in 1852.

Despite the fluidity of ages among reports by the Irish in census records, Jeremiah likely was about the age he reported—even though the age given in 1861 would place his year of birth closer to 1798. I wasn’t sure he would make a showing for the subsequent census enumeration, but there he was in 1871, giving his age as seventy four. Unfortunately, he appeared to be living alone, so we can’t glean any hints as to daughters’ married names from this record. However, the longer he lived, the closer he got to the era in which record-keeping would record the type of details we’d be after for family history purposes. By 1881, however, there was no census entry under either Jeremiah Tully or Darby Tully.

What about his possible brother, Denis Tully in neighboring Brant County, Ontario? It turns out he was just as steady in his residence location as was Darby. Denis appeared in the 1852 census at age fifty—two years younger than Darby. He was accompanied by a forty three year old woman, labeled frustratingly only as “Mrs.” Then followed seventeen year old “Johan”—an unlikely rendition of difficult handwriting, probably meant to signify Denis’ daughter Johanna. Then follow, though not quite in stair-step manner, Patrick, John, Margaret and William, ages fourteen, ten, eight and two, respectively. Just as Darby’s youngest was born after the family’s arrival in the new land, likewise William became Denis’ addition to a new home in a new world.

The 1861 census brought changes for Denis’ household as well. Gone was the “Mrs.” of the previous decade. Of the children, the only one to have left the household was Johanna, of whose marriage in the interim I have other documentation. With Denis now listed as age sixty, the children had grown to the ages of twenty five, twenty three, eighteen and twelve. Of them all, John seemed to age the fastest. Perhaps he was already entertaining illusions of running away to glory in the American Civil War.

While there were three people listed with variations on the name Dennis Tully in the 1871 census, none matched the year of birth or country of origin of our Denis Tully. By this time, his sons John and Patrick had immigrated to the United States. Perhaps he moved to Chicago along with his sons, though that is doubtful, considering his possible age by that point.

As for the other John Tullys we encountered the other day—the one for whom we have baptismal record from County Tipperary in 1834, and the one showing in the 1861 census in Jeremiah Tully’s household in Oxford County, Canada West—they seem to have disappeared without any trace.

In their place appears yet another John Tully—this one a neighbor of Denis Tully in Brant County. Aged thirty six, with a thirty two year old wife—“Mrs.” again—and young daughters Mary and Margaret, his name makes him a redundant addition to either of the other Tully households, both of which already had sons by that given name. His 1816 birth makes him a far stretch for brother to Darby and Denis. But possible.

He could, however, be the John Tully mentioned in Tipperary church records (of "Tauntinna") as having married a Kitty “Flanery” in 1841. With the Flannery family of Ed-blot (now confirmed to be Edmund) arriving in time for the 1852 census in close proximity to both the households of John and Denis Tully in the village of Paris in Brant County, we may be seeing the beginnings of a shadow family constellation taking form.

While the brick wall of destroyed government documents may have prevented us from moving backward in time to earlier generations in Ireland, we may still, by moving forward in time, be able to re-construct the details of this Tully family constellation, after all.