Rescue at Sea

The Storm

Saturday, the 14th of December, 1839 was a mild day with clear skies. In New England many ships took advantage of the weather to sail to Boston, New York, and ports farther south. That all changed during the night. Around midnight snow began falling and mists and winds from the northeast blew in fog off the ocean. Ships quickly made for shore up and down the coast, looking to find safe harbor from the storm that was brewing.

Gloucester, Massachusetts was one such harbor. The town is located on Cape Ann, the spit of land that marks the northern boundary of Massachusetts Bay. Ships anchored in the harbor, most of them north of Ten Pound Island. This did not prove to be safe enough, though, as the wind shifted to the southeast greatly increased in force, reaching hurricane levels..

"The scene in Gloucester harbor during this storm has never been equalled in any other New England port. Many vessels sought this haven of refuge from the tempest, and in all as many as sixty were there during the gale.Between three and four o'clock on the afternoon of Sunday, they began to drift, dragging their anchors or breaking the cables that bound them. Upon the beach were many willing fishermen to assist the mariners if it were possible. ... On Monday morning only a single mast was left standing in the harbor. Twenty-one vessels were driven ashore, three schooners sank, and seventeen were so thoroughly dashed to pieces that in some cases no fragment larger than a plank was left. Twenty vessels still rode in the harbor, all but one without masts, they having been cut away. From each vessel a slender pole stood to bear aloft a signal of distress. They were tossing like egg-shells upon the still raging sea, liable at any moment to part their cables and be driven to sea with all on board. The pieces of twenty-two wrecks were scattered along the shore, scarcely any one of which being larger than a horse could draw. The crowd had staid on the beach all night to give assistance if it were possible. On the following afternoon as soon as it was considered safe to do so, a brave volunteer crew under the direction of Capt. William Carter procured the custom-house boat, and pulled out to the vessels that still floated, taking the weary and suffering seamen to the shore. The shipwrecked men were obliged to jump from their decks into the boat, as the sea was still too violent to enable the gallant little craft to approach nearer. One of the vessels, just after her crew were taken off, drifted out of the harbor and was never again heard from.

The exact loss of life was never ascertained. About forty lives were believed to have been lost, including the persons who perished by the wreck of a schooner near Pigeon cove, and twenty were known to have died, though only twelve bodies were recovered. One of the bodies was taken away by friends, and the funeral of the other deceased mariners was held at the Unitarian church on the following Sunday afternoon. ... The people of the town were so deeply in sympathy with the occasion that between two and three thousand persons listened to the exercises. ... The vast congregation formed in a procession, which was nearly a mile in length, and followed the remains of the mariners to the public tomb.^[1]

The Schooner Glide

The picture at the head of this post is a schooner. Since I've never lived anywhere near the sea, researching this story has prompted me to find out the exact meaning of familiar terms. A schooner is a vessel with two or more masts, and the lower sails on the masts are "gaff-rigged" The gaff is the pole, attached to the mast at one end and to which the head of the sail, its top margin, is attached. During the storm in Gloucester, one such schooner, the Glide, was tied up at the wharf, already loaded with cargo and ready to sail for New Orleans. Newspapers at the time reported that the Glide suffered damage due to "chafing" as it rode out the storm. This ship, though, is not the Glide that is the focus of this story. There was another schooner Glide that had already put to sea before the storm. It had been cleared from Boston harbor on November 30, and finally set sail on December 11, leaving Boston under Capt. James Colburn and headed for Havana. On board were six men and one woman, and part of the cargo was stored on deck.

Captain James Colburn was descended from an early settler in New England, an Edward Colburn who purchased land north of the Merrimack River in 1668 and occupied it a year later. James was his 3rd great grandson, five generations separated. James was born in Leominster 30 May, 1787; in 1821 he married Mary Shelton (1800-1825) with whom he had one daughter, Mary. After his young wife's death, James married Mary Herrick of Hopkinton, New Hampshire in 1836. The captain had one incident that was widely reported in newspapers of the time before our story begins. On 08 Mar 1836 he was captain of the brig Barafine (a brig is a square-rigged vessel), at the time anchored in Boston harbor. At four in the morning the ship was discovered to be on fire. Capt. Colburn was sleeping in his cabin and was the only person on board. He managed to save himself by knocking out a dead light (the cover over a porthole) and getting out of the cabin window. The fire apparently began from the stove in the captain's cabin.^[2]

The Pehr Ennes

The second "actor" in this adventure is the Swedish ship, the Pehr Ennes, captained by Sven Norberg. The ship was sailing from Gävle to New York, carrying a cargo of iron for the company Boorman, Johnston & Co. with offices in Manhattan. All the records I've seen refer to the Pehr Ennes as a "ship." I believe that this means that this was a larger, square-rigged vessel. One site on the web says that the Pehr Ennes was one of Sweden's finest ships.^[3] The ship was based in the port of Gävle, roughly 110 miles (175 km) north of Stockholm on the Gulf of Bothnia. The name of the city is, roughly, pronounced like "Yef-la," and in English-language newspapers in the 19th Century often spelled Geffle. Today the city is famous for the Gävle goat (Gävleboken). This is a holiday tradition, begun in 1966: a huge goat made of straw and set up in the city center. Its height varies from year to year, generally it's about 40 feet tall (12 m). The ship was named after Pehr Ennes (1756-1829), a Gävle wholesaler and shipowner. Sven Norberg (1792-1850) captained the Pehr Ennes from 1839-1846. He was based in Gävle, where he was married to Greta Stina Nordberg (1798-1832) in 1818, but he was born in the south of the country, in Allerun parish in Skåne. In the church records, the captain's name is spelled Nordberg.

Top: The Gävle goat, fenced and with security cameras in an attempt to avoid its natural enemy, holiday arsonists. Bottom: Pehr Ennes, namesake of the ship. The text below his name translates simply as oil painting.

Now, to bring these two ships, Glide and Pehr Ennes together. The Glide had left Boston before the storm hit. It was next heard of when Capt. Norberg spotted it. Here is an early account as published first in the Commercial Advertiser in New York on January 22. As you'll see, there are several errors in the initial version:

DISASTERS

Captain Norburg, of the Swedish ship Frobenis, from Gefle, fell in with on the 19th inst. Lat 34½ long 66, the schr Glide, Colburn, 8 days from Boston for Havana, in a sinking condition. The G. on the 15th, 16th and 17th inst. encountered severe gales, lost sails, deck load, and set the vessel aleaking so badly that the pumps could not keep her free, and thought advisable to abandon her.

To translate some of the abbreviations in that passage:

• inst., for instant, refers to the current month
• lat, for latitude, and long. for longitude, are the coordinates where the Glide was spotted. This location is roughly 134 nautical miles (248 km) NNW of Bermuda, or 534 nautical miles (989 km) SE of New York City.
• schr: schooner. Note that the record refers to the Pehr Ennes as a ship. After citing the name of the vessel, custom seems to be to name the captain.
• G.: the Glide

The obvious error is that Norberg's ship was not the Frobenis, but the Pehr Ennes. Later reports give more details, but then introduce another error, citing the latitude as 81°N. That would place the ship north of Greenland, a very unlikely place to be if your destination was Cuba! Two days later, the Evening Post (New York) published this note:

Extract from the Log Book of the Swedish ship Pehr Ennis from Geffle, S. Norberg, master.

The 18th December, at 4 o’clock P. M. fell in sight of a schooner (Glide, Captain Colburn) without sails, and drove right before the wind, and as his flag was hoisted at the foretop as in distress, we made several tacks to come up with him, in which we succeeded at 8 o’clock. We hailed him, but could not hear the answer, for it blew rather hard. Consequently I sent the jolly boat, with three men on board to inquire if they were in distress; the answer was that the schooner was sinking, and the crew asked to be taken off. I now despatched the large boat with five men, which with great danger took six men and a woman from the wreck.

The wind had now increased, and it continued to blow very hard. I laid by with the ship until 12 o’clock, when I had the great pleasure to see our men and the strangers all well on board, because I am persuaded that without our assistance no one on board the unfortunate schooner would have lived. We were then in lat N. 81 6, and long W 67 81, and arrived safe in New York, after severe weather, the 21st of January, the captain and passenger of the schooner having been on board 5 weeks.

The Commercial Advertiser echoed this report, but added an additional note. This, I hope, will finally explain to you why I'm telling this story:

Captain Colborn, of the Glide, in behalf of himself, passengers and crew, has published a card of thanks to Captain Norberg for his gentlemanly and kind attention to him while on board his vessel, and to Mr. Charles Westerlund, the first officer of the Peter Ennes. They say – “We consider ourselves under infinite obligations for the kindness and intrepidity he displayed in managing the boat which came to our relief. Undaunted by the tempest or the heavy sea running at the time, rendering it impossible to board the schooner, he, happily for us, succeeded in saving a part of our clothing, and our whole company, as we threw first our trunks and then ourselves overboard from the stern, and finally after much perseverance got us safely to the ship, then at 6 or 7 miles distance, during a … driving rain and dangerous sea, at midnight – thus distinguishing himself as a man of courage and a philanthropist.”

Over the next few months I found accounts of the rescue published in newspapers up and down the eastern seaboard, in Portland, Maine; Keene, New Hampshire; Woodstock, Vermont; Philadephia, Pennsylvania; and Charleston, South Carolina. One noteworthy point, I think, is that the newspapers reported that the Pehr Ennes arrived in New York 90 days out of Gävle. Also you probably noticed that it took the Swedish vessel 5 weeks to travel ~500 nautical miles to New York. The weather was not great, to be sure, but that would equate to an average speed of less than one knot. Perhaps that's a good pace for a sailing ship laden with iron.

The real reason that this article caught my attention, of course, was the heroics of a certain Carl (= Charles) Westerlund. That's my paternal grandfather's surname, so that explains my interest. I'm not sure if Carl was aboard the small jolly boat that initially set out to communicate with the Glide, but he was certainly in command of the larger boat that rescued the passengers and crew. It's almost unimaginable: a boat powered only by oars (certainly if it had the capacity to raise sail, the intensity of the storm would have prevented it), 6-7 miles distant from the mother ship, in the middle of a raging storm in the middle of the night. I think that I'd agree with Captain Norberg: those passengers were lucky to make it out alive. Upon arrival in New York, Captain Colburn and the passengers attempted to raise funds to repay the crew of the Pehr Ennes for their heroism. I don't know if that ever came to fruition. But the real question is, is there a sailor named Carl Westerlund in the family? The answer is yes.

Carl Axel Anshelm Westerlund

Carl Axel Anshelm Westerlund was born 08 Dec., 1816 in Stockholm, in the old city (Gamla Stan), son of Axel Jansson Westerlund (1784-1840) and Catharina Ulrika Hempel (1789-1831). He had 3 siblings: Mathilda Eleonora (born 1815, date of death uncertain, but sometime after 1840), Frans Daniel (1818-1881), and Helena Sophia Ulrica (1819-1820). His father, Axel, was a grandson of Lars Ericsson (1698-1757) and Margreta Ersdotter (1710-1784), which is as far back as I've been able to trace the Westerlund lineage. Axel was a policeman in Stockholm, and, in an earlier post, I included a picture from my visit to Stockholm standing in front of two of the buildings Axel and family lived in (see Retracing Steps: Stockholm). At the age of 14 Carl was apprenticed to the tailor C. Dahlin. The household examination records from Stockholm for this time are pretty minimalistic, and I lose track of Carl until, in 1841, he is recorded in the moving-out book. This is a record of members of the parish (Sankt Nikolai, or the Storkyrkoförsamling) leaving for another parish. Here Carl's profession is recorded as a sailor (sjöman), and he is headed for the sailor's home in Gothenburg (Göteborg).

Moving-out record for Axel Westerlund in 1841 (the sixth record down from the top). It records his occupation (sjöman or sailor), date of birth (1816 8/12), place of birth (Storkyrkoförsamling, the main cathedral parish is the old city), destination (Götheborg), where he'll live there (the sailor's home or sjömans huset), and then details on his religious capacity and participation. Source: Storkyrkoförsamlingen BIIa:7 (1835-1843) Image 228 / page 221 (AID: v90642.b228.s221, NAD: SE/SSA/0016)

After this, I've been able to find very few records of Carl Axel's whereabouts and fate. But if he was the first mate on that tiny boat in the Atlantic on that stormy night, then that's enough in my book to look up to him as a real hero.

Epilogue

After his rescue at sea, Captain Colburn was not out of the woods. This item was published in the Boston Traveler on January 31, 1840:

Capt. Colborne, of the schooner Glide, who arrived at New York last week, escaped from the wreck of his vessel, was a passenger in the stage from New Haven, returning to his family in Boston. The stage overset twice on the journey, and once it was thought Capt. Colburne was killed, as he had the whole weight of the stage and a large number of passengers upon him. When extricated he was found to be much bruised, but not seriously injured.

Colburn continued in the maritime trade in the West Indies. He died in Trinidad de Cuba on Sept. 2, 1843, aged 56.

After the death of his first wife in 1832 Captain Norberg was remarried to Brita Cathrina Sundberg (1793-1863). According to a post in the Gefle Dagblad his last voyage, in command of the Oden, brought emigrants to New York from Sweden. Among those passengers were Eric Norelius (1833-1916). Norelius studied here in Columbus, Ohio at Capital University, and then continued west to Minnesota. As the Latin form of his name might suggest, he was a Lutheran minister. Norelius, initially at least, seems to have been part of a group led by Joris Per Andersson from Hassela parish in Gävleborg (the county, or län, of Gävle). Andersson, his family, and followers were early settlers in Chisago, Minnesota, and the diaries of Norelius were part of the research materials upon which Wilhelm Moberg based his historic novels, the Emigrants. These books were also discussed in an earlier post (see Unto a Good Land). Captain Norberg died on 25 November, 1850 in New York and is buried there. As for the Pehr Ennes, it was abandoned in the North Atlantic on 14 July, 1853 on a voyage from London to Québec City, and its crew rescued by the British ship Parthenia.^[4]

That, at last, brings me to the central question: was the heroic Carl Westerlund actually the Carl I've found in the family? If the goal was to write an interesting story, I should have stopped at this point. My Carl was a sailor, he was about the right age, and the heroic acts are abundantly documented. But curiosity and skepticism pushed me to look a little further. The answer that a lawyer might give to the question is that I have no definitive evidence, one way or another, that Carl Axel Anshelm Westerlund born 8 December, 1816 was the first mate on the Pehr Ennes during the events of December, 1839. But, honestly, I don't think it was the same person (sigh). You may have noticed in the document pictured above, that when he left Stockholm in 1841 he used the name Axel, not Carl. This isn't definitive, to be sure: it seems that Swedes often switched from their first to their second names, or both(!), pretty liberally. But it isn't supportive of my argument. Second, my Carl was in Stockholm, not Gävle where the ship was based. In fact, looking through the Gävle records there were two, two! other Carl Westerlunds who were sailors based in Gävle. One was born in 1815, the other in 1816. I haven't (yet) found the crew list for the Pehr Ennes at the time, so this isn't definitive. However, in browsing for the death record of Captain Norberg, I did come across one of those Carls: he also died in 1850, and he was listed as Styrsman, the same rank of the Charles Westerlund in the newspaper reports. So while I can't say for sure, my own hunch is that it was the Carl Westerlund, born 1816, died 1850, who was the real hero of this story.

There is one further record for cousin Carl that I've found. It is from the Karlsborg Garrison. Karlsborg is a fortress on a bay off the western shore of lake Vättern, one of the huge lakes in central Sweden (I'm not quite sure how to refer to it in English, is it Lake Vättern, Vättern Lake, Vätter Lake...?). This was supposed to be a central defensive position: if Sweden were attacked, then the monarchy, administration, and all the gold could retreat to this central, fortified position. The garrison there seems to have been a mix of regular soldiers and men who had been sentenced to service in the garrison. I say this because Carl Westerlund's record documents that he was convicted of counterfeiting and attacking a police officer in 1855. He was sentenced to 28 days on bread and water. I don't know if this was a euphemism, or the real punishment. He seems to have been released in December, 1855, but then returned the next year, sentenced to two years. I'm not sure what the second sentence was for; perhaps the counterfeiting and assault were two separate incidents. Interestingly, the record shows that after he served this sentence he returned voluntarily (!!!) in 1861. And that's the last record I've found of Carl so far. As a final note, Carl doesn't seem to have been the black sheep of the family, at least not the only one. His brother, Frans Daniel, and his uncle, Lars Gustaf, also served sentences at Karlsborg.

Carl Axel Anselm Westerlund's record from the Karlsborg Garrison. https://sodabreadcrumbs.blogspot.com/b/post-preview?token=APq4FmBfacqcS9uCjH63aVggHvzK2UtFZ5WtmYjrKxDGJEkRWdGUGx8f546SwwpsN0cWBK6oaSBR6aGegpjEYgo8HOklpnTSvf97nYzG0T41qZyXoWV-EnfUcPKyYjZXO5Q0q1ZuwKIO&postId=1376938000395805820&type=POST

I'd like to close with the thought that it doesn't really matter too much if I'm related to the daring Carl Westerlund of the Pehr Ennes or not. It's a helluva story, and I admire the man and his courage on its own. I hope you do too.

Sources

1. Perley, S. 1891. Historic storms of New England. The Salem Press Publishing and Printing Co., Salem, MA. 341 pp. Link to Google Books.
2. Newburyport Herald, March 08, 1836, page 1.
3. Kaptensgården i Furuvik - snart ett minne blott? https://www.gd.se/artikel/kaptensgarden-i-furuvik-snart-ett-minne-blott
4. Fate of the Pehr Ennes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shipwrecks_in_July_1853

Four-leaf clover

In the past few weeks I haven't ventured yet into the relatives of my maternal grandfather, Patrick Harrigan. This is partly because that's the side of the family about which we knew the most as I began. My mother's cousin, Ann Morgan, had been one of the major folks filling the role of family historian, and this has since been taken over by her daughter, Florence Gillman of San Diego. I've included Ann's picture here, as a nod to her efforts to keep track of our heritage. So a lot of the low-hanging fruit had been plucked, and what remained to be discovered was going to be more difficult. Also, although I was working with a Harrigan family tree that Florence gave to my mom when she was getting ready for a trip to Ireland, I'm sure there's much more in her files that I haven't yet learned. But, accepting the risk that I'm merely re-plowing well-known ground, let me describe what I've been up to over the past couple of weeks in exploring the Harrigan clan.

When Hanora O'Connell passed away in 1918, unmarried and with no children, she had little in the way of assets. She had only about $200 in cash and a piece of property in Little Falls, NY. She died without a will, and therefore her executors – her sister Abigail (O'Connell) Harding and Abby's daughter Mary – publicly advertised to all known relatives that her estate was being settled. These ads, published in newspapers in Little Falls and Utica, are a veritable who's who of the O'Connells. The Harrigan connection comes in with another of Nora's sisters, Julia, who married Denis Harrigan. Some of the family branches listed in the ads we know pretty well, while others are little more than a name.

While we were visiting central New York in May, one of the things that I wanted to do was to go to the surrogate's court in Herkimer and try to find out what information existed in the probate records for Nora. A little bit ago, I was skimming through the copies we'd made, and one item jumped out at me. One of the named relatives of Nora was her niece, Margaret Sullivan (daughter of Denis and Julia Harrigan), and what caught my attention was that the documents said they she lived in Boston. I didn't know that, so I thought I'd look a little closer. And that is how you go down a rabbit hole!

First, what background information did we already have for Margaret? To start with, you can't be too picky about spelling: Harrigan, Horrigan, and Horgan were all used by the family, sometimes more than one by the same person. Second, the family tree from Florence had Margaret Horgan (born 1863), husband Daniel Sullivan, and six children: Mame, Gene, Alice, Nellie, Joe and Peggy. I knew that it would be foolhardy to go looking in Boston with only Margaret's name, but I thought that I had a reasonable chance of success with all of these other people associated with her.

Boston is a pretty big town and, I'm not sure if you've heard this before, but there's quite a number of Irishmen living in it. So my audacious goal was to find one particular Irish family in the city, and this was going to be a family with very typical Irish names. (Hence, the mixed metaphor title of this post, since I felt like I was trying to find a needle in a haystack or a four-leaf clover.) The easy place to begin was with the U.S. Censuses.

A search for Daniel Sullivan in Boston, born plus or minus 5 years of 1863 (his wife's year of birth), and with wife name Margaret results in a mere 11 hits on ancestry.com. You have to take this with a grain of salt, though, since it's quite possible that the Margaret actually didn't use that name, but used her middle name instead. Folks in the past seem to do this much more freely than today.

The number one hit had Daniel J. and Margaret E. Sullivan and children Mary (maybe that's Mame?), Ellen (Nellie!), Catherine, and John (both new names). So half of the kids in this family, if I'm generous, were included in our original tree. Number two hit from the census? Daniel and Margaret, Mary (again, maybe that's Mame?), Julia (new), Ellen (Nellie!), Cornelius (new), Dennis J. (new), Eugene (Gene!), and Margaret (Peggy!). That's four hits, but three new names. I don't know how you want to score that, but it's not an exact match. We could go through the other nine Sullivan families, but I think you can see my problem. And maybe an exact match is too much to hope for: it wouldn't be surprising if some of the children in the family tree I had were born after 1900.

I was about to despair at this point, because I felt that I'd need some other tidbit of information to help me to distinguish the right family. I never have found the smoking gun, but evidence and suggestions did build up gradually. Remember hit #2 in the earlier paragraph? I noticed that the three oldest children in that family – Mary, Julia and Ellen – weren't born in Massachusetts like the others, but were born in New York state. One of the things that I've learned is that immigrants, when they first arrived in the U.S., often would first go to live with or near relatives who were already in the country, and then later on they or their children would spread out to other parts. Little Falls seems to have been just such a center for the Harrigans and O'Connells. Most of my relatives worked either for the railroad (men) or for the spinning factories (women) in Little Falls. Abby Harding and Nora O'Connell did so, as did a number of others. Textiles seems to have been an industry that offered employment and wages to women, probably something relatively unusual in the late 19th Century.

Again, the little tidbits of gossip published in local papers came in handy:

• 7 Sep 1903, Utica Herald-Dispatch: Miss Julia Sullivan of Boston is the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Owen Sullivan in Burrell [sic] street.
• 13 Sep 1914, Utica Daily Press: Miss Margaret Sullivan has returned to Boston after spending the summer at Owen Sullivan's on Burwell street.
• 24 Aug 1915, Journal and Courier (Little Falls, NY): Mrs. Daniel Sullivan and daughter of Boston are guests at Owen Sullivan's on Burwell street.

These link Mrs. Daniel Sullivan and the young misses Margaret and Julia, all of Boston, to another Sullivan, Owen, living in Little Falls. Further digging reveals that Owen was born around 1854, nine years before the Daniel I was searching for. I presume, therefore, that he was a brother or a cousin. At the end of the day, though, all I've done is found suggestive evidence, the three women being linked to an area that the Harrigans came from.

So let's follow this Boston family forward in time and see if anything becomes clearer (spoiler alert: I think it does). In the 1910 census they're living at 27 Litchfield Street in Allston (a part of the greater Boston area), and the clan has grown. The census lists parents Daniel and Margaret, and children Mary, Julia, Nellie, Cornelius, Dennis J., Eugene, Margaret, Alice and Gertrude. So of my original list of children, I now have four of the five names accounted for (Mame, Gene, Alice, Nellie and Peggy), one missing (Joe), and four extras (Julia, Cornelius, Dennis and Gertrude). It's looking better at this point, but I think you'll agree, it's not really definitive.

Father Daniel Sullivan died in 1918, and here we get a first good piece of evidence linking this family in Boston to where we started, the Harrigans. The death notice published in the Boston Post on 28 Dec 1918: “Sullivan – In Brighton, Dec. 25, Daniel, beloved husband of Margaret Sullivan (nee Horrigan).” Brighton and Allston are adjoining regions, and now Allston appears to be subsumed within Brighton. To jump ahead a bit, one other obituary that I found early on was for Gertrude. When she died in 1982 her obit also confirmed that her mother's maiden name was Horrigan. Dan Sullivan was 56 years old when he died, and his profession was described as a laborer for the City of Boston.

At this point I just tried following every lead I could find on the kids of the family, hoping to find some reference back to their parents, or earlier, that would shore up my presumption that these were the people I was looking for. The resolution of the missing child, Joe, turned out to be a dope-slap. I first found him in the draft records for World War I: he's there, Joseph D. Sullivan, home address 27 Litchfield Street, Brighton. At this point he was 22 years old (in 1917). So if he were born in 1895 then he probably had to enroll in the old-man's draft in World War II and, sure enough, I found him, at a different address, but still in Brighton, and living with his sister Julia. The head slap comes because he gives his name as Dennis Joseph Sullivan! I'd had him all along, and just didn't notice.

In conclusion here, I was able to match up everything in my original family tree with this family in Boston. There are a few extra people, Julia, Cornelius and Gertrude, but that doesn't concern me too much. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Mother Margaret appears to have passed away on 25 Jul, 1925, but I haven't yet been able to find any notice published in one of the local papers. Mary (Mame) married a man named Noyes, and lived in Natick, Massachusetts, finally passing away in June of 1971. I haven't been able yet to find any further details, so I don't know if she ever had any children or who the mysterious Mr. Noyes was. In the 1940 census six of the remaining Sullivan kids are living together, all unmarried. As far as I've been able to tell, none of them ever did get married.

So, a dead end for the Sullivans? Well, we haven't accounted for Cornelius. He did get married, to Julia Hooley. He worked for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority as a conductor and operator, of streetcars, I presume. When he died in 1967 and Julia in 1972 they had 9 children (one adopted) and were survived by 37 grandchildren! The adopted daughter, Dorothy, was actually Julia's niece. That resulted in a lot of confusion in my records, before I was rescued by a new acquaintance through the Internet, Pat Callahan, who explained that relationship to me. Pat lives just a short ways from here in southwestern Ohio, near Cincinnati, and, of course, neither of us had any idea that the other existed. Of the other children, Joseph Sullivan (1916-2003) worked for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office for a while. The rest seem to have stayed in Massachusetts. Both Daniel (1920-2005) and Robert (1928-2014) worked for the Boston Fire Department (see portrait).

I've been able to track down basic information for all but one of the nine children, that one being John P. Sullivan of Cambridge and Brighton, Mass. I'll keep digging, but with a name like that, I'm going to have to get lucky again in order to figure out which John Sullivan is my four-leaf clover.