Was my decision to take a Y DNA test a shot in the dark? An act of desperation? Or part of a carefully considered strategy? The truth is probably somewhere between the first and the third options. It would be lovely to claim that there was a detailed plan driving my research. I am not sure that it is possible to be too prescriptive. The name of this website is a big clue about the overall objective. I am primarily interested in finding more about my grandfather’s side of the family. And Patrick was born in Roscommon.
Any journey of discovery takes us into the unknown. We do not know what we will find. This was the experience of Burton and Speke as they sought to identify the source of the River Nile in the late 1850s. I expect that they followed many apparently promising tributaries only to be disappointed. Furthermore, they failed to agree on their findings! This is hardly surprising. If the river flows out of a lake, isn’t it necessary to trace the source of the lake? 
(Picture: Ripon Falls, where the Nile exits Lake Victoria. Or it used to before the creation of a hydroelectric station in 1954.) In the very early days of my research, I thought that I had found a connection to an Olympic athlete. (see ‘Stanley – sporting superstar’) It turned out to be a false trail. One step forward and two steps backwards.
Ideally, I would like to be able to connect all the various Stanley families that lived to the west of Roscommon Town in the 19th century. Patrick’s family is centred in Clooneenbaun. There are the ‘Ballyglass Stanleys’ (Owen/Oliver and James) who lived a few hundred yards away. There is the ‘Stanley Kenney’ family. Many of them emigrated to America. The rest stayed in Island Lower, about a mile away. One of them was baptised in the same church as Patrick (St. Patrick, Cloverhill) There is the ‘Stanley Kenney’ family. They can be traced back to St. Marys, Kilbegnet. This is about five miles from Clooneenbaun. (See ‘Definitely not related – update’)
The population of County Roscommon at the time of the 1881 census (two years before Patrick’s birth) was 132,000. And it is a relatively big county, at least by European standards (984 square miles). The population density was low – about 130 per square mile. (It is even lower today: just over 70,000 were living there in 2022.) There would have been only a few hundred people in the area west of Roscommon Town up to, and just across the border with Galway. Autosomal DNA has failed to reveal any meaningful links between the four Stanley families. There are faint traces, but they could be false positives. If the families are linked, the common ancestor could well be six or seven generations back. Y DNA should provide some solid evidence. I await the results of the analysis with interest.