Pursuing the Patriline

After visiting with genealogy friends who are pursuing their American Revolution Patriots—or, even more impressive, their Mayflower roots—spending a month to discover more about my father's own grandfather seems rather uninspiring. After all, many people have even met their own great-grandfather in person, but I'm still wandering through a paper maze, trying to learn who this person is.

For this month's goal from my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025, I'll make the switch from a summer season of exploring my father-in-law's roots to discovering more about my own father's ancestry during this fall. This, however, is not an easy task; remember, this was the man who was tight-lipped about his background. Like father, like son, it's been said, and in this case it applies well: my father had his own father as an example of how to keep a family secret.

In past years, I've worked on this patrilineal puzzle. Five years ago, Thomas Puchała claimed the featured spot for my goal in November, and the following year, I explored records showing his father to be either Johann Puchała—according to church records in Latin—or, more likely, Jan Puchała in the vernacular.

Though I have discovered Thomas' father's name, thus pushing the patriline back another generation, there is still so much to learn about this branch of my family. I have found that Thomas once lived in Lubichowo, a small village in Pomerania, where he was likely born in 1844. I also have found mention of his marriage to Anastasia Zegarska in 1868 in the nearby village of Czarnylas, also in what was at that time the country known as Prussia. The difficulty is that those details only came to me, thanks to transcriptions of documents posted on websites in Poland. I have yet to locate and download copies of the actual documents, a task to include in this month's research goals.

In pursuit of this patriline, thankfully I've had some DNA help, mostly through my brother's willingness to take a Y-DNA test, but also through the few matches we've found through autosomal testing. This month will call for closer examination of the updated cousin matches as well as ethnicity updates due out this month at Ancestry.com. And I'll still keep a close eye on those Y-DNA test results, in case an exact match pops up in a timely manner for this month's exploration.

From Ireland to Poland

 

No, this is not about a text received from one of my traveling friends, laying out the itinerary while abroad for holiday in Europe. Having exhausted the resources for Irish research on my father-in-law's great-grandmother Margaret Flannery, I am giving up and moving on to my plans for October's research project.

That move is made with misgivings, however. It's not that finding my own father's ancestors in Poland will be any easier than pushing against the research brick wall in Ireland. But at least it is a new—or at least newer—project. Perhaps that will infuse some energy into the search.

For this month, my plan is to delve into what records can be found in the small village of Lubichowo, part of the Pomeranian Voivodeship—or province—in the northern coastal region of Poland. Not that we haven't wandered in that direction before; I've struggled over my father's roots for nearly my whole life. It's only been in recent years that breaking through that closely-held secret of my paternal ancestry—that we were not Irish, after all, but Polish—has enabled me to explore the truth of the matter.

For the remainder of this month, we'll review what we've already learned about my father's paternal grandfather, Thomas Puchała, and begin exploring what else can be found about his life in Poland during the mid-1800s.

Approaching Flannery Fatigue

 

It was bound to happen. After delaying my good intentions to find the roots for my father-in-law's great-grandmother Margaret Flannery due to a sickly September, I thought I'd try my best to make up for that lack. There is, however, no sense in trying to squeeze thirty days of research into a mere extra week. This goal, I decided, needed a decent full month of concentration sometime again in the future—sometime, that is, after I've recuperated from Flannery fatigue.

And then, wouldn't you know it, those DNA matches came back to haunt me. A Flannery cousin popped up in my husband's results—from Ontario in Canada, no less, home of the migrating Margaret and her husband Denis Tully and their children.

It was a small match, but big enough to tempt me into following the trail. From that Flannery cousin, I followed a Find A Grave clue for her father, (which conveniently included a copy of his obituary naming that same DNA cousin as well as all his siblings). That led to his father, and then that Flannery man's father—all while still remaining in Canada, in and around some of the same communities where our Margaret Flannery and her husband Denis Tully had settled in Ontario.

Tempting, that is, until I ran into yet another brick wall. This Flannery trail goes cold, still in Canada. I have no way to connect this ancestral Flannery from the DNA match's line to Margaret Flannery from my father-in-law's line. It seems I have a collection of stubs—dead ends on the Flannery branches.

It will take a lot more than a few days' work to unscramble this puzzle. Though I still regret not being able to work through the past month on this September goal, it's time to put it aside for another year's Twelve Most Wanted. It's time now to catch up with October, before another month disappears.

What we Find When We're Looking for Something Else

 

Rabbit trails—those tempting deviations from our intended research goal—can be dangerous, but I can't say I'd advocate ignoring them completely. Sometimes, it's what we find when we're looking for something else that turns out to be the answer to another question that has stumped us.

Take this Flannery puzzle that has kept me at bay for the entire past month of September. Granted, that month I had a rough go of it, thanks to unexpected illness and other troubles. Yet into this new month, I've still decided to persevere for at least a few more days to seek information on Margaret Flannery's roots in County Tipperary, Ireland.

Having made a listing of all the known children of Margaret and her husband, Denis Tully, my next step was to list each child's godparents, based on their baptismal record.

From that point, the tedium began: searching baptismal records from that same Catholic parish where I had found the children of Margaret and Denis—the church at Ballina—to look for the families of each of those named godparents. After all, if Margaret and Denis had selected these named godparents because they were siblings or in-laws, that would help me identify collateral relatives for both the Tully and Flannery lines. Besides, perhaps I would uncover a reciprocal baptismal relationship where Margaret or Denis were named as godparents for these siblings' own children.

Yes, I did mention tedium. I can't say I made much progress looking for the few Flannery names among the godparents. Basically, that included Kitty, William, and Bridget Flannery. Most of the rest of the godparents were from the Tully side of the family, so I continued my search on that branch of the family next.

My next search candidate, then, was Thomas Tully. Surely with that surname, the relationship would be clear: Thomas should have been a brother to Margaret's husband, Denis, right? But I couldn't really be sure because, for example, Thomas could have been selected as a godparent because he was an in-law to the new parents; he could have coincidentally acquired the same surname because he was, say, a cousin who just happened to marry a sister of one of the parents.

It was worth the detour to discover what could be found about this Thomas. In an 1834 baptismal record in the same parish for a son named Denis Tully, parents Thomas Tully and Margaret "Wilkisson" named as the child's godparents none other than John Tully and Margaret Flannery.

It just can't get any better than that. While we already know who Margaret Flannery was, we can now add John's name as another possible Tully sibling.

This, of course, brings up another possible theory, which in turn requires me to search for all the baptismal records for Thomas' children. If this Denis, born in 1834, was Thomas' eldest son, another Irish tradition would mean that Thomas' father's name would also be Denis. Thus, my Denis would, by necessity, have been the eldest son of his father—and, as far as I can tell, my Denis had also named his eldest son by that same name, in honor of his father. Perhaps looking further for this newly-discovered brother John Tully might reveal a firstborn son whose name resonates with this evolving pattern.

Unfortunately, the chance of finding baptismal records before the 1830s is near impossible for this area of County Tipperary, so discovering the exact dates and details for brothers Denis, Thomas, and John—and their parents—just wouldn't happen. But we can extrapolate from known traditions and piece together possible collateral lines, if nothing else.

Though it doesn't help me move forward yet with any Flannery discoveries, for now, I can at least add two collateral lines to my father-in-law's Tully ancestors, all thanks to the wanderings in pursuit of the answer to a different research question. You can bet I stopped to write that answer down so I wouldn't forget what I found.

Baby Steps

 

It may be the start of a new month, but after a month like the one I just finished, I'm not ready to relinquish the research goal I wasn't able to conquer last month. For the next few days—only a few, I promise—I'd like to spend a bit more time puzzling over Margaret Flannery and her home back in pre-famine-era County Tipperary, Ireland.

Today, I went back over the baptismal records for each of Margaret's babies—at least, the ones who were born in Ireland. The goal was to list the godparents listed in each child's church record. There is a reason for this: at that time in Ireland, the tradition was to name a sibling or sibling-in-law of one of the parents as the child's sponsors. If this custom held true for Margaret's time period and location, then we would see the formation of possible relatives to add to her family tree. Then, too, if the priest were consistent in record keeping, each godmother would also have been listed by her maiden name.

With the exception of a baptismal record for son Denis, born in 1830 as (possibly) the oldest child of Margaret Flannery and Denis Tully that I could find, here are the results of my search:

• Johanna, born in 1832: Kitty Flannery and - - ke [Luke? Mike?] Tully
• Michael, born in 1834: William Flannery and Bridget Flannery
• Patrick, born in 1836: Thomas Tully and Mary Tully
• William, born in 1839: John Tully and Judy McNamara
• John, born in 1842: John Brun and Mary McNamara
• Margaret, born in 1844: Mick Tully and Mary Gleeson
• Honora, born in 1847: John Tully and Biddy Tully

Of those children, I do know that William and Honora died before the family emigrated around 1851. (The name William must have been important to the family, for they named their youngest son, born after the family's arrival in Canada, by that same first name.)

Of those godparents, I have already discovered DNA matches linking back to the Gleeson surname from County Tipperary, an encouraging sign. And the name McNamara appears in the Griffith's valuation for the townland of Tountinna, where Margaret settled when she married Denis Tully. The only surname that puzzles me among the godparents listed is for John Brun; I have no idea of that connection.

As for the Flannery connections, I now have Kitty, Bridget, and William Flannery as possible leads. These three, however, could be either Margaret's siblings, or they could be spouses of either Margaret's or Denis' siblings. No matter which way this turns, a possible next step would be to look for those names as parents in the baptismal records for the same church parish in Ballina, Margaret's home church where her own children were baptized. 

Two Places at the Same Time

 

If Margaret Flannery Tully and her family migrated to that tiny town known as Paris in what is now Ontario, Canada, where did she come from? That question about the two places she once called home is not as hard to answer as it might seem, thanks to finding a handwritten letter confirming the baptism of their son, John Tully, kept over the decades in personal family papers. Not only was that document the key to discovering Margaret's maiden name, but it was how I learned the location the family called their home church back in Ireland.

That church location was in Ballina, part of what was once known geopolitically as the "North Riding" of County Tipperary. But as you probably have learned by now, the most important location for tracing an Irish ancestor is actually the land subdivision known as a townland. Finding that townland can be challenging. After all, County Tipperary has a mere 3,245 townlands—or 3,144 townlands, as one Irish website puts it, "that we know about."

Besides finding the handwritten note verifying Margaret's son John Tully's baptism, I've since been able to locate digitized copies of baptismal entries for the remainder of the Tully children born in Ireland. For instance, in finding that their oldest known son, Michael, was baptized on June 5, 1834, I could spot the priest's entry at the top of the register stating that the family came from Tountinna, the townland named for the highest point in the Arra Mountains.

I've been there myself, viewing the rugged terrain which once housed the Tully family before their departure for Canada. By all accounts, the Tullys arrived in Canada in time to be listed there in the "1851 census"—an anomaly in itself, as that census, due to other difficulties, was actually not enumerated until January 12, 1852. Still, the very document which led me to find the Tully residence in Tountinna, Griffith's Valuation, was said to not have been completed until June 29, 1853.

Yet, looking closely at the Valuation entries in Tountinna—transcribed, unfortunately, as "Fountinna" in currently-available typewritten records—it is quite clear that, despite the family's entry in the Canadian census in the previous year, there was an entry for Denis Tully, Margaret's husband, back in that Irish townland. It is only in looking closely at the details from the Tully entry in Griffith's that we see the evaluator's note, "Added to [entry] No. 1. House struck out of valuation."

It is sometimes only in the relentless pursuit of the tiny details that we learn more about our ancestors. In Margaret's case, it appears we will only—if at all—be able to learn more about her roots if we continue to follow suit.

The Gift of DNA Cousins

 

With a little help from our friends on the technology side of the world, it's not that hard to figure out who our distant cousins might be. And it's the gift of effective tools for being able to discover DNA cousins that has enabled me to paint a picture of the far-reaching connections that can flow from one ancestor's family.

In researching my father-in-law's great-grandmother Margaret Flannery in the past month, I've been able to reach down the generations to document all the way to her fifth great-grandchildren. Many of them still reside in Canada, the place where Margaret and her husband, Denis Tully, had settled after leaving their native home in what used to be called the "North Riding" of County Tipperary, Ireland.

Researching those more current generations in Canada had been, in the past, a challenge. Perhaps it might have been the cultural influence of a more reserved, British composure that left obituaries with an air of understatement. Finding an obituary for an ancestor we're researching might, in general, be cause for the genealogy happy dance, but when that hard-won victory leaves us with news stating the deceased "left a wife and four children," it's, well, rather deflating. I found many instances of that reticence about divulging information, even well into the twentieth century.

Granted, some countries embed a far more generous zone of silence, for privacy purposes, in divulging, for instance, contents of some governmental records. While for my American ancestors, I need only wait a mere seventy two years before being able to view their names in U.S. Census records, countries like Canada set a ninety-two year wait, and Ireland and Great Britain espouse an even more conservative hundred year rule.

With limited access to the types of documents genealogists normally rely upon to build a family tree, the advent of DNA testing has indeed become a gift. The tools that have since been developed to help sort that avalanche of new data speed the research process even further. In Margaret Flannery's case, I still am working my way through the many DNA cousins said to be connected to her line. Having recently acquired the ProTools available at Ancestry.com has accelerated my ability to connect the dots between these DNA matches, thankfully, though I realize I still have a long way to go before I can check that finished task off my to-do list. 

Connecting DNA matches to my father-in-law's tree, while helpful—hey, I've found some willing collaborators among these DNA matches!—does not always guarantee that the results will automatically point us in the direction of the answer to my main question. I still want to know exactly where Margaret Flannery came from before she met her husband Denis Tully and settled with him high up in the mountain townland of Tountinna.

That, of course, was my main research goal for this past month. Or, to amend that statement, my erstwhile goal. Still, I have one more day to lay out the details of what I know, so far, about Margaret Flannery's roots back in Ireland. We'll talk about that tomorrow, and figure out then what to do next.