Working on the Railroad

My last two blog posts both dealt with the Driscoll and Collins families in Oswego, New York. I’m going to continue on that thread here and in the next post as well. This line of research has been very fruitful, although not without a few roadblocks along the way. However, there are so many paths to explore, that I’m far from running out of leads to follow.

To quickly recap: I’ve already written about three ancestors who emigrated from West Cork. These were my great great grandmother, Ellen (Collins) Driscoll, her daughter Hannah, and her brother, Peter Collins. It turns out, though, that they were only the tip of the iceberg. The story of the Driscolls and Collins in the U.S. has really expanded thanks to DNA tests. As I tried to understand and reconcile some mysterious close DNA matches, I found out just how little I knew.

This story begins with a DNA match with my mother, a match that Ancestry.com estimated was a 4th to 6th cousin (a total of 41 centimorgans of shared DNA over three segments). That was enough to get my attention, and my interest was further piqued by the family tree this user had: the father and paternal grandfather of the person whose DNA this was were named Collins. So I explored a little further.

The grandfather’s name was Thomas J. Collins, and his son, also named Thomas, was born and died in Norwich, New York. (A warning: we're going to encounter a number of people named Thomas Collins. To help keep them straight, I'll give them nicknames. For reasons that will be clear soon, I'll refer to the first one, Thomas J. Collins, as Engineer Tom.) The fact that Engineer Tom lived in New York State led me to explore that combination of name and place in the website fultonhistory.com. I’m not sure if I’ve already described this website before, but this is an admirable one-man operation run by Tom Tryniski out of Fulton, New York, just south of Oswego. He’s been digitizing, databasing, and providing free on-line access to historical newspapers, originally mostly in New York State, but lately expanding ot other areas. According to the website, there are now over 49.5 million pages available on-line. Being from Fulton, it’s not surprising that there are extensive records for the papers from central New York.

As I rummaged through the fultonhistory.com resource I was surprised to find that an obituary for Engineer Tom was published in The Oswego Daily Palladium on 17 May 1916. Like his son, Engineer Tom also died in Norwich, but the obituary reported that he was a former resident of Oswego. Now the combination of Collins, Oswego, and the DNA match really had my attention, and I ended up researching this line for months. One other thing in the obituary was notable. In addition to the typical regrets were these sentences:

He was a patriotic citizen, a useful member of society, a loving husband and devoted father, and a delightful companion who faithfully discharged every duty and obligation. Seldom has the death of any one brought keener sorrow to so many hearts. There was no one along the O. & W. lines or among those with whom he came in contact that was not his friend.

Another death notice published in the Middletown Times-Press noted that Engineer Tom was “a well known locomotive engineer on the O. & W.” The O&W began its life as the New York and Oswego Midland Rail Road, the brainchild of Dewitt C. Littlejohn (1818-1892). Construction began in 1868 for a line that would run from Cornwall, New York (on the Hudson River) northwest to Fulton, with a branch to Utica. I was fascinated to learn that the funds to build the railroad came largely from the towns along its route, a kind of pay-to-play scheme. As a result, the road was long and winding and included some steep grades and deep cuts. The scale of these construction costs forced the company into bankruptcy within a month of the actual completion of construction. The company was then reorganized in 1880 under the name of the New York, Ontario & Western Railway, or the O&W.

Dewitt Clinton Littlejohn, founder of the New York and Oswego Midland Rail Road. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Frederick Hill Meserve Collection.

The relationship of the O&W with other railroad companies was complicated: the owners were also involved in other companies, rail lines were shared between rivals, and the many original small companies were being gobbled up by the big conglomerates. This was the heyday of Corrnelius Vanderbilt and the New York Central Railroad. Vanderbilt started out owning companies in the New York City area, expanded northward through the Hudson Valley, and then his acquisitions turned toward the west to Buffalo and beyond. The O&W also expanded its own lines, sharing track with the New York Central from Fulton to the port in Oswego and also opening a terminal in Weehawken, New Jersey, just where the Lincoln Tunnel is today.

The main businesses of the O&W were carrying passengers, mainly tourists going from the City to the resorts in the lower Catskills; hauling milk and other dairy; and eventually getting deep into the transport of coal out of the fields in northeastern Pennsylvania. One of my sources said that by the early 1930s coal accounted for 50% of the O&W business. By that time the company also owned three collieries, an early 20th century example of vertical integration. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a fraught financial decision. Two of the coal companies defaulted on their loans from the O&W, forcing the railroad in turn to default on its own mortgages. The O&W eventually declared bankruptcy (again) and the last train ran in 1957.

Very little of the physical footprint of the O&W remains: a few abandoned railroad tunnels, very little track, and some depots. The Oswego County Recreational Trail follows the old route of the railroad, and the Harbor Rail Trail in the city of Oswego makes use of the old railroad bridge across the river. There is still a good deal of interest in the railroad: the Ontario & Western Railway Historical Society is “dedicated to preserving the heritage of the New York Ontario & Western and other area railways.” They are involved in numerous restoration projects, maintain the company archives (600 cubic feet of records – five tons!), publish a newsletter, calendar, sponsor talks, etc.

Postcard of the city of Oswego, around 1900, looking south (upriver), with the railroad bridge in the background.

The railroad bridge in 1885.

The railroad bridge today, the Harbor Rail Trail, looking north toward Lake Ontario.

Thomas J. Collins (1867-1916), my Engineer Tom, pictured at left, was promoted to engineer on 20 Feb 1892. Together with George W. Obenauer he founded the Lyon Brook Lodge #216 of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen. Engineer Tom’s son, Tom, married Betty Ann Fagan in 1943. Both her father, John Edward Fagan (1887-1972), and his father before him, John Fagan (1854-1919), were also engineers working for the O&W. The picture at the beginning of this post shows John Fagan, on the left, with his conductor. The long family history of engineers – in total there were seven of them – was the subject of a photo-story by John Taibi, “Fagan, Batie, Colllins, & King – A family that spanned a railroad’s life.” It has quite a few historical photographs of the engineers and their engines.

Let’s retrace our steps here. I have a DNA match with a grandson of Engineer Tom, and the latter died in Norwich, but was born in Oswego. Engineer Tom was the son of John Collins and Julia (Johanna) Burns. I’m not sure about the details of her name: both are found in the records I’ve uncovered. John was born in 1846, as was Julia. John arrived in the U.S. somewhere around 1863-1864 at the age of 18, and he initially worked on the lumber docks in Oswego. Eventually, he became a coal dealer. It was this profession that made it possible for me to recognize this particular John Collins among the other men by the same name living in Oswego around the turn of the 20th century.

John Collins died sometime late in the night of New Year’s Eve or in the early morning of New Year's Day in 1917. If you check back, you’ll see that his son, Engineer Tom, died earlier in 1916, on 14 May 1916. But as John’s obituary noted, there was a third death in the family that year. Julia, John’s wife and Engineer Tom’s mother, passed on 26 April 1916. A short notice in the Oswego Daily Palladium on the 24th of January of that year reported that she was critically ill at her home on 120 East Tenth Street. It was later recorded that she had been in ill health for some time and was “very much depressed.” Sometime around 3 a.m. on April 26 members of the family reported hearing her moving about the house, going from one room to another. When they got up to check on her, she had apparently gone back to sleep. But shortly before 6 a.m. they discovered that she was missing, and her son Peter and daughter Mary began a search. The newspaper reported that they eventually found her in the shallow waters of Lake Ontario, near St. Paul’s Cemetery, roughly a mile away from home (as the crow flies). The house itself is only about 4-5 blocks away from the lake, and perhaps the current moved her northeast toward the cemetery. It doesn't record whether she was in her nightclothes or properly dressed. The most that I could find about the weather at the time was that it was predicted to be cloudy and cool in Oswego; in Buffalo the temperature range for that day was 46°-52° F. I imagine that it was pretty nippy at dawn on the lake shore in Oswego in late April.

View of Lake Ontario from St. Paul's Cemetery, looking toward the city of Oswego.

The exact relationship of John Collins was confirmed in his obituary, which closed with the words “He is survived by … one sister, Mrs. Ellen Driscoll [my 2nd great grandmother], and one brother, Peter Collins of this city.” To further support the relationship of John to my 2GG Ellen and her brother, my 3rd great uncle Peter, I obtained a copy of John’s death certificate from the office of the Oswego city clerk. On this it was recorded that his parents were Thomas Collins [3GG Tom] and Mary Gainey, the same names found for the parents of Ellen (on her baptismal record) and Peter (on both his baptismal and death records).

As I was uncovering these records and looking for newspaper articles to fill in details of the lives of John and Julia Collins, I came across this short notice published in the Oswego Daily Times on 23 Sep 1902:

Returns from Ireland

John Collins, the East Side coal dealer, and his nephew, Peter Collins, have returned from a ten weeks’ visit to Ireland. They visited its principal cities including Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Belfast and report having a most enjoyable time.

A nephew Peter Collins? John had a son named Peter, but neither the Ellen nor the Peter that I knew had a son by that name. Who was this person? This was the door opening into yet another part of the family. Recall from my last blog post that the earliest U.S. record I have of my great grandmother, Hannah Driscoll, came from the 1892 New York census. There she was listed immediately after the entries for a Thomas Collins – yes, another Tom Collins – followed by a Peter and a Nellie Collins. This Thomas was then the sexton of St. Paul’s Cemetery, so I'll refer to him as Sexton Tom. His wife, Ann Burns, had died in 1889, and they had had five children. Two daughters, Mary and Catherine, died young, and, of course, there was a son named Thomas. Tom the Sexton's son died in 1888 at the age of 22 in a railroad accident. Sexton Tom died of a heart attack in 1894. By that time his his brother (I think) Peter had already come to Oswego from Ireland, but his sister, Ellen, would not arrive for another year or so. I’m hedging a little bit here: so far I’ve not found any DNA match with Sexton Tom’s descendants. However, and you won’t be surprised at this, 3GG Thomas Collins and Mary Geaney in Drishanebeg did have a son that they named Thomas who was born at about the same time as the sexton. Whether that Tom and Sexton Tom are one and the same seems very likely to me, but I’m still missing definitive evidence. Similarly, I am just so tempted to infer some relationship between the wives of Sexton Tom and John the coal merchant, both of whom had the surname Burns. I haven’t tracked that one down yet, but it is very intriguing.

So far, then, I have (I think) four Collins siblings in Oswego: Sexton Thomas, Peter, Ellen, and John. I went back to the baptismal records in Skibbereen parish in Ireland looking for additional children born to 3GG Thomas Collins and Mary Geany. Indeed, there were more: a son named Jeremiah who was born in 1826, and another son, Barry born in 1829. That means that the four children who moved to Oswego were the youngest of the family. I’m still trying to run Jeremiah and Barry to ground. It appears that they both stayed in Ireland on the old homestead in the townland of Drishanebeg. And I have found at least one DNA match with a descendant of Jeremiah. For what it’s worth, I think that it’s noteworthy that Sexton Tom’s son, Peter, had the middle name Barry, just like his putative uncle. I take that as some confirmation that I’m on the right track. There are lots of trails to follow still, but it looks very promising. I know that the similarity in names is probably confusing. By my count, in this post alone there are five different people named Tom Collins. That’s confusing for me as well, especially when a document only has the name and nothing else. One example of this is the death certificate of Sexton Tom. The danger of confirmation bias is also something that I try to be aware of, but I’m only human. I hope that, with enough pieces of evidence that fit together, we can try to cobble together a coherent picture.

You knew this was coming, didn't you? I had to close this post with a sixth Tom Collins!

Sources

• Taibi, J. Fagan, Batie, Collins, & King - a family that spanned a railroad's life. The Northern Division Bridge & Building Dept., No. 113. http://ontarioexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/nd_FBCK.pdf
• Ontario & Western Railway Historical Society, Inc. http://nyow.org

The fading trail of the Whites

Today I'd like to focus a bit on my father's maternal grandparents, in other words the parents of my Grandma Nellie. This should have been, could have been a long discussion, for when Nellie's mother, Mary Elizabeth White, died in 1956, her obituary was full of the types of details needed to trace a family back in time.

Mary Elizabeth White – Grandma White, I've been told – was born July 23, 1878 in Albany, New York to Barney Farnham and Catherine McGuire. She married Luke White in Albany on September 19, 1899. Their first child, Grandma Nellie, whose full name was Ellen Theresa White, was born on June 25, 1900. The other children were Lillian (born September 4, 1902), Edward (born April 15, 1907), Mary (born March 8, 1911) and Kathryn (born April 17, 1913). I'm happy to say that I knew all of these kids, superficially of course. However, Grandma White died when I was about 2½ years old, so I have no recollection of her. Although it looks like the family started in the Albany area, by the time of her death Elizabeth had lived in Ilion for 45 years.

[A quick aside: the name Kathryn appears in the records with lots of different spellings. I really don't know how Aunt Kaddie spelled her name, either the name Kathryn or Kaddie. If anyone knows, please pass it on!]

Those kinds of details are real gold nuggets, providing solid evidence to build upon as we trace back through the historical records. In fact, though, the oldest record I've been able to find so far is from the 1900 national census. I've not been able to corroborate anything prior to that time, not her wedding date, birth date, or her parents. More on that a bit later.

Luke White was born on May 14, 1873 in Ireland, and he emigrated to the U.S. In 1892. In the 1900 census his occupation was recorded as a railroad track laborer, in 1910 he was a section head for the railroad, 1915 the section boss. Between those last two records the family had moved from Montgomery County to German Flatts. In 1920 he was working as a laborer in business equipment, which his obituary clarifies is that he worked for the Library Bureau. Both his daughter Nellie and her husband, Fred Johnson, also worked for the Library Bureau. This was not, as I had thought, a branch of Remington such as the typewriter company or the Rand. Rather, it was a separate company that built library and office equipment: files, desks, etc. Finally, Luke's death certificate (the information coming from his wife) says that he was a wood worker.

The death certificate raises another point of interesting inconsistency. Both it and the earliest census records say that Luke was born in Ireland, and one of the latter even specifies that he arrived in 1892. I have found a Luke White, aged 20, on the passenger list for the ship Germanica, which arrived in New York on 29 April, 1892 from Liverpool and Queenstown, Ireland. Queenstown was the old name for the port of Cobh (pronounced “cove”) in County Cork. The list says that this Luke White was from Dublin; I think we need to view that record with a bit of skepticism, as Dublin may only have been the last place he lived before emigrating and not the place where he was born. Actually, even more caution is probably needed: White is a very common surname, and the given name Luke isn't really that unusual either. That, plus the fact that the age is a little off (at that time Luke would have been just a month short of his 19th birthday, not 20) leads me to consider this record as a suggestive possibility, and not as anything solid.

Luke White died in 1928 at the age of 55. He had suffered for 14 months before finally succumbing to liver cancer. I have no picture of him, but in 1918 he registered for the draft in World War I (at the age of 44). On that document he is described as being of medium build, brown eyes, brown hair, height 5'4½” (under the tall category!). I'll bet that the signature at the bottom of the first page is his.

I don't know too much about Lillian (in picture with Grandma White outside their house at 132 West Clark Street in Ilion). She never married and suffered from ill health. I believe that I remember my dad telling me that because of her severe arthritis he would carry her from one room to another. I'm sure some of you have a better knowledge and memory of the facts; I'd love to learn what you know. The two things that stick out in my memory of Uncle Ed were that (1) he attended all of the Ilion home football games, and (2) he used to play semi-pro baseball. Mary ended up living in Watertown, where she was a clothing buyer for one of the local department stores. As I wrote those sentences, I was really hit by just how scanty my knowledge is. Please folks, help me fill in the gaps!

Luke and Elizabeth White are both buried in St. Agnes Cemetery, a small graveyard “nestled” between Route 5 and the New York Thruway just north across the Mohawk River from Ilion. As you drive up the hill to the cemetery, they're in the back in the eastern corner, where you can also find the grave of their daughter Lillian and son-in-law Fred Johnson (aka Arthur Westerlund). At the western end of the hill are the graves of their daughter Nellie, grandson Alfred, and Alfred's second wife Emma. During our visit to the Mohawk Valley in May I took a brush and water to the gravestones and was able to clear away most of the lichens that had grown on them. Emma's stone has sloughed over, I think because the cement slab on which it's set has cracked and broken, but otherwise everything looks in pretty good shape.

So for the White family, I feel like we have a fairly good handle on the basic facts from recent history, but I just haven't been able to break through from the 20th into the 19th century. Grandma White's parent's names are Barney Farnham (Farnum?) and Catherine McGuire. I can't find anyone in the greater Albany area by those names in the late 1870s. Is Barney a nickname for Bernard or something else, or just a nickname (like Butch)? I had hoped that Luke White's death certificate would provide clues on where to look for him in Ireland, but his wife didn't know where he was born, other than in Ireland, or what his parents' names were. I can find no record in the Albany newspapers for the marriage of Luke White and Mary Elizabeth Farnham in 1899. That's not too unusual for newspapers of that time, though. The Catholic Church has simply ignored my inquiry. My current hope is that their marriage license will provide some kind of breakthrough. The bride and groom are supposed to give the names of their parents, and this will have the advantage over, say, an obituary or a death certificate because Luke and Elizabeth would have provided the information themselves and not some grieving relative. I requested a copy of the license from Albany in July, and I'm checking the mail every day now in hopes that it arrives. But so far, no luck.

Thanks to Ron Johnson for copies of the photos of people in this post. I also understand that some of you are having problems adding comments to the blog. This I don't understand: the settings should allow anonymous commenters and the text should appear in-line. I'll continue to try to figure out what's wrong and hope to straightened it out. In the meantime, you can always email comments to me directly at baeus2-at-yahoo.com (substitute the @ symbol for -at-).