West Cork Update

This blog post comes to you from the city of Cork, Republic of Ireland. I had initially planned this trip to be tagged on to the end of the International Congress of Entomology (that is, of the study of insects and their relatives) that was scheduled to take place in Helsinki in the summer of 2020. Of course, all such plans went by the wayside, and it’s only now that I’ve made it to Ireland. The plan is to spend a few days in Cork City, and then to move on, first, to Skibbereen, and then on to Baltimore. So, the topic today is an update on some of my research on the Driscolls of West Cork and then to introduce a man that I’ve found to be very interesting.

Jeremiah Driscoll family of Ballymacrown

In my earlier post, The (lost) family of Tim Driscoll, I described how DNA connections and a particularly informative description of a funeral led me to uncover the numerous brothers and sisters, and parents(!), of my 2nd great grandfather, Timothy Driscoll. He lived and farmed in the townland of Ballymacrown, near the port village of Baltimore in West Cork. One of the things that I originally found confusing was that in the 1901 Census of Ireland there was a Timothy Driscoll living in that townland. However, he was not my direct ancestor. He was born, roughly, about the right time, but he was the husband of Ellen Sullivan, and the son of the couple of Jeremiah Driscoll and Johanna Brian.

I’m already plucking at a couple of the strands of the spider web. First, Johanna Brian is a link to the O’Briens of Bawngare that I earlier described. (As usual, don’t worry about spelling variants!) Second, we have numerous DNA links to the descendants of Jeremiah and Johanna. I don’t have documents to “prove” it, but the amounts of DNA that we’re talking about are consistent with the hypothesis that the two Driscoll families living in Ballymacrown were closely related. The simplest explanation would be that John Driscoll Bawn and Jeremiah Driscoll were brothers.

I came to this idea through a combination of DNA, parish registers, and civil registrations of births, marriages and deaths. Recently, though, I’ve had a brief correspondence with a descendant of Jeremiah. He tells me that, indeed, Jeremiah and John were brothers. He also had another surprising thing to say, and that is that the Driscoll Bawns now live in the townland of Lackaghane! With this lead I’ve been digging into those families as well. The story is not complete yet, and there seem to be some twists in the road to complicate things. So, stay tuned on that score.

John, son of John Driscoll Bawn

In my post describing the family of John Driscoll Bawn I included a table showing all the children for whom I had found baptismal records. For some of them, I’ve been able to find and document numerous descendants. For example, I’ve had the opportunity to correspond with current family members related to Jeremiah, Mary, Hanora, and Margaret Driscoll. On the other hand, there were several children of John Driscoll Bawn and Mary Hourihane for whom I had only the record of their baptism. Recall that that these children were born shortly before the Great Famine, An Gorta Mór. This part of West Cork is notorious as one of the areas that was hardest hit by the potato blight. It seemed likely, therefore, that one or more of the children could have died young and left no descendants.

One of these was the son named John. In fact, it seemed likely that John had died as a baby. In the baptismal record in the parish register his name is accompanied by a small cross. This, in my experience with Swedish records, was commonly used to indicate that the person had died. But no: following up on DNA matches, I discovered that he survived and, in fact, is recorded in the 1901 census living in Ballymacrown. John married Mary Anne Shehy and had (at least) seven children. Four of them emigrated to the U.S. and lived in the Bay Area in California. Again, I’ve had the good fortune to communicate with the wife of one of his descendants.

Mary Hourihane, wife of John Driscoll Bawn

The family of Mary Hourihane is really the spark that stimulated this blog post. I can’t be absolutely sure, but I believe that Mary’s death is recorded in the civil registration in 1870. The given name Mary and surname Driscoll are both exceedingly common in West Cork, and so I must be a little cautious here. Given her age attested on that death registration, she would have been born roughly in 1791-1792. This predates any parish registers in West Cork, and the civil registrations of births did not begin until 1864. Therefore, there doesn’t seem to be any direct way to identify her parents or any other members of her immediate family. Here again, though, DNA evidence enables us to “peek under the covers” and get a suspicion of interrelationships. After sorting through the DNA matches for the Driscoll children, I had been left with a number of matches that I couldn’t account for. In truth, there are still quite a few of those. Often, these DNA matches either have no family tree available to study, or they have branded their tree as private. As a result, the only option is to try to build trees for them myself and hope that, somewhere down the line, their trees and mine will intersect.

For one set of DNA matches, I was able to push the family tree back to the limit of available Irish records. These led to a man named John Hourihane. I have no idea when he was born or died, but his wife Mary (surname perhaps also Hourihane or Harrington) died in 1884 and probably was born sometime around 1794-1795. Just as with the case of Jeremiah Driscoll that I earlier described, it seems to me that the most straightforward hypothesis that is consistent with the data is that this John (or his wife Mary) Hourihane was the sibling of my 3rd great grandmother, Mary Hourihane.

Peadar Ó hAnnracháin

Peadar Ó hAnnracháin, police photo taken after his arrest during the time of the War of Independence. From the "Private Papers of General Sir Peter Strickland KCB KBE CMG DSO." https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1030002664

In exploring John Hourihane’s family, I came across an individual whom I simply must introduce to you: Peadar Ó hAnnracháin (1873-1965). I’ve used the full-blown Irish version of his name, and you’ll understand why shortly. Believe it or not, though, his surname has also been rendered as Hanrahan, O’Hanrahan, Hourihan, and Hourihane. Peadar, of course, is one version of the name Peter. The O’Hanrahan version of the name probably comes closest in an English rendering (Béarla) of Ó hAnnracháin.

Peadar was the son of John Hourihane (1833-1912) and the grandson of the same John Hourihane in the preceding section. He was born in the townland of Inchinagotagh and baptized in Skibbereen on 30 Oct 1873. According to a later biography, he was one of 13 children born to John and Mary Donovan.

Peadar first achieved prominence in Munster as a teacher. He was an ardent advocate of the Irish language and culture. He worked for the Gaelic League as a young man. The League, the Conradh na Gaeilge, was founded in 1893 and is still active (cnag.ie). Its “…main aim is to promote the use of Irish as the standard language in Ireland.” Peadar was one of the League’s original organizers and was appointed to work for it in 1901. He was a travelling teacher until 1916, commuting from place to place on his bicycle, offering instruction in the Irish language, singing, and dance. As I understand it, Peadar’s parents spoke Irish, but he grew up with English as his first language. Later in life, then, he taught himself Irish; his command of the language was such that a reviewer of his book, Fé Bhrath an Chonnartha (Under the Flag of the Gaelic League), commented that “…the Irish is impeccable.”

Portrait of a younger Peadar. Image originally posted on Ancestry.com by user langthomas_1. Used with permission.

In 1914 Peadar was arrested on the charge that he refused to give his name to two British constables. They had come to investigate why the door of the pub was open on a Sunday night and found Peadar there along with the landlady. The constables asked his name and address to which he replied in Irish. They didn’t understand, asked again, and got the same response. After a bit of to-and-fro, Peadar was arrested and put on trial for being on licensed premises and refusing to give his name. This case caught a bit of local attention, and at the end of the trial the charges were dismissed. That story might give a bit of a glimpse into popular sentiments in the years leading up to the Easter Uprising in 1916 and the War of Independence. Peadar was reportedly part of the preparations in Cork that were to accompany the Easter Uprising in Dublin. Those activities in Cork, though, failed to be put into effect. Over the next few years Peadar was arrested on several occasions and served time in prisons both in Ireland and England.

Peadar was also very active with the Skibbereen newspaper, The Southern Star. He served on its board of directors for many years and, off and on, was its editor. For more than 20 years he had a weekly column in the paper called “Our Dublin Letter,” written under the pseudonym of Cois Laoi. The title of the letter points to his primary job in his later years in a post in Dublin on the Pigs and Bacon Commission. (It’s good to remember that, until quite recently, the Republic of Ireland was very much a rural society.)

Peadar and his wife Máire had six children: Fachtna (1920-2010), Neasa (1922-2014), Ciarán (1924-2007), Colm (1928-1979), Bláithnín (1928-2008), and Fiachcra (1930-1993). They were very prominent themselves. Fiachra was a lawyer who practiced in South Africa, and Neasa was an actress with Raidio Éirinn. Colm, Bláithnín, and Fiachra were all musicians: Blaithnín was a harpist with the National Symphony Orchestra and Fachtna was the music director of Raidio Éirinn. Ciarán, under the stage name of Kieron Moore, was a film actor in Britain and Hollywood. He co-starred with Vivien Leigh in the movie Anna Karenina in 1948. Unfortunately, many of the reviews concluded that he was miscast in the role of Count Vronsky.

Three of the children of Peadar Ó hAnnracháin. From left: Neasa Ní Annracháin, photo from biography published at https://www.ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=5005; Kieron Moore and wife Barbara White, image from https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/kieron_moore; marriage of Fiachara and Anne O'Byrne, 28 May 1953, photo originally posted on Ancestry.com by user alexwhite1.

Poster advertising the movie Anna Karenina, starring Vivian Leigh and Kieron Moore.

Peadar Ó hAnnracháin died on 29 March, 1965 in Dublin, and he is buried in St. Fintan’s Cemetery in Sutton, Co. Dublin. His honored stature in Irish society was evidenced by the attendance of Eamon de Valera, President of the Republic of Ireland, at the removal of his remains to the church for his funeral.

Headstone of Peadar Ó hAnnracháin, wife Máire, son-in-law Seán Ó Briain (husband of Neasa), and daughter Bláithín. Image from findagrave.com

You Can't Always Get What You Want

The Search for Lottie’s Father

For several months, now, my research time has been consumed with several cases of unknown parents. I started with one case from Ireland, on my maternal grandmother’s Driscoll/Collins side of the family, and this has now grown into four intertwined cases of adoption. There’s also an interesting question for me from Sweden, and this is to try to discover the father of my great grandmother, Lottie Barthelsson. Lottie – Johanna Charlotta – was born on 27 Dec 1861 in the small town of Hallstahammar, in Västmanland. Her birth and baptism can be found in the parish book, and while the name of her mother was recorded, there was nothing identifying her father. Figuring out who he might have been, now over 160 years later, is clearly impossible to do if we have to rely only on the documentary record. With the coming of DNA testing, though, we have a whole new line of evidence of relationships available. So, with the bravado that comes with ignorance, I thought that I would see how much I could learn about the identity of this mysterious great great grandfather – let’s call him Oskar.

Lottie Barthelsson (right) and her daughter Wilma. Photo courtesy of Hans Malmkvist.

As a bit of background, each of us inherits a more-or-less random half of our DNA from each parent. Each of my grandparents contributed about one-fourth of my DNA, and each great grandparent about one-eighth. That means that the mystery man passed on to me roughly one-sixteenth of my DNA. If I could find other people who also shared pieces of that DNA, then I might be able to home in on the answer to my question.

Although this sounds reasonable in theory, let’s look at how much DNA I’m talking about. If I convert the amount of shared DNA from fractions to a measure of size called centimorgans (cM), then I should share 3485 cM with each of my parents; This quantity, approximately, drops by half with each generation. So, the amount of DNA I would expect to share with Oskar would be about 443 cM. That’s not a whole lot of DNA to work with. I could increase the amount of DNA, though, by including DNA from other descendants of Oskar.

Where could this DNA come from? Let’s review what we know about Oskar’s descendants. Lottie’s mother had only the single child. Lottie herself had only two children that survived to adulthood, and only one of them, Fred Johnson (aka Arthur Westerlund) had descendants. We “know” that Fred had five children: Alfred (born 1920), Eddie (born 1924), Joe (born 1928), Phyllis (born 1931), and my dad, Norman (born 1933). Phyllis was the last surviving child of the family, and, fortunately, she took a DNA test before she passed. Therefore, she is the closest descendant of Oskar (4 generations away) for whom we have this genetic information. We would expect that she had 887 cM that she inherited from Oskar. That’s the average amount; in the real world the known range in the amount of DNA shared with a great grandparent runs from 485–1486 cM (data from the Shared Centimorgan Tool at the DNA Painter website).

My grandmother, Nellie Shipman, surrounded by her children. Standing in the back, left to right: daughter-in-law Betty, Joe, Alfred. Middle: stepson Bruce Shipman, Nellie, Eddie. Bottom: Norman, Phyllis.

Phyllis’s brother Alfred had no children of his own, as far as I know. But Eddie, Joe, and Norman did, and those children would have inherited different pieces of DNA from Oskar. There’s almost certainly some overlap in Oskar’s DNA among the children, but likely each will have inherited some unique chunks of their own. Taken all together, then, we can increase the amount of Oskar’s DNA available, and therefore increase our chances of finding matches out there in the rest of the world that are also somehow related to him.

I’ve taken a couple of different DNA tests, and I recruited my brother and sister to do so as well. Therefore, we had DNA from the lines of two of Fred Johnson’s children, Phyllis and Norman. To get representation from his other two children, I asked my cousins RWJ (son of Eddie) and MBJ (daughter of Joe) if they would be willing to take the DNA test from Ancestry.com. I’m very grateful that they consented: thanks again for that! When the results would come in, we’d have DNA from all of Fred’s children (except Alfred, of course). The search for Lottie’s father could then continue with a better, larger sample of Oskar’s DNA.

Be Careful What You Ask For

The companies offering DNA tests for genealogical use – Ancestry, MyHeritage, 23andMe, Family Tree DNA, etc. – always caution you that the results they report may not be what you expect. Please take that into consideration before you read any further. What was my expectation? These two new tests were for first cousins, so let’s look at the overall picture of RWJ’s results. According to the Shared Centimorgan Tool, first cousins will share, on average, 866 cM of DNA, and the actual range that’s been observed goes from 396 to 1397 cM. RWJ shares 845 cM with me, 713 cM with my brother, and 1041 cM with my sister. All these values fall in the expected range. He also shares 1732 cM with his Aunt Phyllis, very nearly the average (1741 cM) for an aunt-nephew relationship (range 1201–2282 cM). No surprises there at all.

Graph showing the frequency of amounts of DNA shared between documented first cousins. The average amount that first cousins share is 866 cM; higher and lower amounts have been observed, but the greater the difference from the average, the less often that is observed. Total number of first cousins: 3,337. Chart from DNA Painter.

This is the point where everything went sideways. RWJ’s results came in first, and then MBJ’s came in a few weeks later. She was the one that first noticed something odd about the results: where were all the Swedish relatives? In her list of Ancestry.com matches, the first one with a possible Swedish name (Johnson) was 81st on the list (ranked by amount of shared DNA) at 43 cM. On MyHeritage, a database more widely used by Europeans, I found a Carlson match in position number 22 (54 cM). To compare with my own test, the first Swedish match was number 40 (67 cM) on Ancestry and number 13 on MyHeritage (74 cM). Further, I couldn’t find any of the Swedish matches that I know are my relatives in her list of matches.

The discrepancies in the match lists seemed unusual, and then I looked at the amounts of DNA involved. MBJ shares 313 cM of DNA with me, 402 cM with my brother, and 296 cM with my sister. Recall from above, that the minimum amount of DNA that has been recorded between first cousins in the Shared Centimorgan Tool is 396, and so the values for both my sister and me are too low. MBJ shares 723 cM with her Aunt Phyllis, 478 cM less than the empirically observed minimum! What’s going on?

With a closer look at MBJ’s shared match list, that is, people with whom she shares DNA, there were several names that I recognized. All of these are related to our grandmother, Ellen (Nellie) White, Fred Johnson’s wife. But none of them are related to both Fred and Nellie. The only possible conclusion is that while Nellie was MBJ’s grandmother, Fred was not her grandfather. In other words, Joe had a different father than his siblings Eddie, Phyllis and Norman. We can probably throw Alfred into that group as well, since there’s something of a physical resemblance between him and Fred.

From a Mystery Great Great Grandfather to a Mystery Father

If Joe’s father wasn’t Fred, then who could it have been? My research question had shifted from trying to discover who Oskar might have been to trying to suss out who this father was. The strategy for answering the questions, though, remained the same. The idea is to look at the people in the list of shared DNA matches, then look at their family trees, and find where their family trees overlap. Ideally, there would be a single lineage that all the shared matches have in common, and it’s in that lineage that I would then be looking to find one or more men who were in the right place at the right time and of the right age to have been Joe’s father. This was made a bit more difficult in practice because I haven’t worked out the family tree of MBJ’s mother, Elizabeth Smith, to any depth. Therefore, a lot of the unfamiliar name are related to this Smith line, and not to Joe’s mysterious father.

When MBJ pointed out to me the lack of Swedish names in her shared match list, there was one thing that did jump out to me: there seemed to be a surprising number of French names. In particular, these names were of French Canadian origin. In fact, number 6 of MBJ’s shared matches on MyHeritage is a young lady with French Canadian ancestry and quite a large amount of shared DNA, 118.5 cM. This match also had a fairly decent family tree worked out, with 108 people in it. This seemed like a good place to begin my research. I’m also a bit skeptical, so where shared matches had family trees available, I did my best to find the evidence myself, rather than just trust that their work was correct. I did find some significant errors in this process, and so I think my jaundiced eye was worthwhile. In many cases, though, the shared match did not have a family tree available, and so I had to work that out for myself from scratch.

To cut a long story short, I found 16 people that shared DNA with MBJ. I was able to work out their family trees and did discover a single point where all these trees tied together. This is the couple of Antoine Plante (born 1793) and Marie Marguerite Ouellet (born 1794). They were both born in Saint-Cuthbert in the province of Québec, roughly 55 miles (88 km) northeast of Montréal and 137 miles (220 km) southwest of Québec City, on the north side of the Saint Lawrence River. They had a total of 16 children! I didn’t trace the descendants of all of them, though, just those that linked up to the DNA matches.

The next problem, now that I had a “master tree” of the descendants of Antoine and Marguerite, was to figure out where MBJ best fitted into that tree. To do this I used another tool available at the DNA Painter website, one called WATO. The acronym WATO stands for What Are The Odds. We start with the question of who was MBJ’s paternal grandfather, and we have a tree built with her shared DNA matches. Importantly, we not only know that they match, but we know how much DNA each of those matches shares with her. The tool then uses information from the Shared Centimorgan Tool to calculate the probability that, say, a person that shares 244 cM of DNA is MBJ’s first cousin, first cousin once removed, second cousin, and so on through all the list of possible relationships. It does that simultaneously for all the DNA matches in the tree, and then shows where in the tree our subject – MBJ in this case – could possibly fit. The cool part is that it compares the chances of different scenarios and ranks them. Some of these hypotheses can then be eliminated with other evidence.

Results from the WATO tool. The names of living persons have been removed. The green boxes are people who lived in or near Ilion. The brown boxes are the living persons. Possible positions that MBJ could fit in this tree are labeled as Hypothesis. The value of the score for each hypothesis reflects the chance that the hypothesis could be true given the amount of shared DNA. The individual values themselves are meaningless, but the comparison between two scores is a measure of how much on hypothesis is more likely than the other. The strongest is Hypothesis 9 (score 50,918).

The most likely scenario found by the WATO tool is that MBJ is the grandchild of a man named William Peltier. This hypothesis is about twice as likely as the next set of four hypotheses, all of which are that she is the grandchild of one of Peltier’s siblings. Two of those we can eliminate, since they were William’s sisters, and we know that the missing grandparent was a man. That leaves us with three possibilities for Joe’s father: William, Daniel, and Fred Peltier. Actually, there is another brother, Joseph (for some reason called Tim!), but we have DNA for two of his great grandchildren and one great great grandchild, and the amount is too small for this to be as likely a scenario.

So, who might have been in the right place at the right time and of the right age? William was born in 1899, Daniel in 1898, and Fred in 1903, and so they would have been from 25–30 years old when Joe was born in Ilion, New York. Therefore, they were all of the “right age”: Nellie was 28 when Joe was born. Daniel Agustus Peltier was a transfer baggage man at the Richland, New York station of the New York Central Railroad. He died in 1932 in Richland and had never married or had any known children. He was born in Little Falls (11 miles east of Ilion), but had been living in Richland (72 miles northwest from Ilion) for 15 years.

Frederick Philip Peltier (1903–1957) was born in West Albany, New York. Early in life his parents moved west to Frankfort, the village abutting Ilion on the west. We find records of him there in the 1905, 1910, and 1915 censuses. He was a “chef;” I use the term with some caution, since the establishments he worked in would seem to call more for a short-order cook than a chef of haute cuisine. For a while in and around 1932 he was the manager of Central Square Lunch in Ilion. He married Mary Whalen in 1924, and together they had a son also named Frederick who was born in 1925. The couple must have divorced fairly shortly afterward, because Mary married Frank DeMola in 1935. (To make the story more complicated – and who doesn’t love a good complication – Frank was the widower of Fred’s sister Delia.) Fred served time in Sing Sing Prison for grand larceny. He was convicted of stealing a car valued at $200 in a parking lot at night in Ilion while intoxicated. Interestingly, his accomplice was a Jerry Whalen. I hadn’t noticed that Jerry had the same surname as Fred’s wife. Interesting. To wrap this up, Fred died in Miami in 1957, and he was unmarried at the time. Conclusion: the evidence is all consistent with the possibility of Fred being the unknown father.

Advertisement for Central Square Lunch during the period in which it was managed by Fred Peltier. Published in the Utica Daily Press, 14 May 1932.

Finally, we turn to William Joseph Peltier (1898–1967). Remember, he is the most likely parent of Joe according to the WATO tool. William was born in Colonie, near Albany, but then lived from at least 1905 to 1915 in Frankfort. In 1919 he married Blanche Irene Cavanaugh, who was from Pulaski in Oswego County. They had three children, Ethel May (born 1924), Alice Louise (born 1929), and William John (born 1931). In 1930 the family is recorded in the census from Lyons, New York in Wayne County, 118 miles west of Ilion. He was a machinist at the Rome Manufacturing Company and the General Cable Corporation. He died in 1967 in Rome, New York.

I’ve left out one important detail. In the 1925 Census for the state of New York, William, Blanche, and their first child Ethel were living in Ilion. Helpfully, the census also gives their street address: 131 West Clark Street. I didn’t notice this at first, but once I did the alarm bells started going off in my head. Recall that we’re searching for the father of the child born to Nellie (White) Johnson. In 1925, Nellie was living with her father (Luke White), mother (Elizabeth White née Farnham), husband (Fred Johnson) and two boys (Alfred and Edward) directly across the street from William at 132 West Clark!

The house at 132 West Clark Street, Ilion. In 1925 it was occupied by Luke and Elizabeth White, Fred and Nellie Johnson, and their sons Alfred and Edward. William Peltier lived in the house on the opposite side of the street. Image taken in 2021 by Google.

Unfortunately, there’s a gap of two full years between the official date of the census (01 June 1925) and conception of Joe, sometime around June of 1927. William’s obituary, published on 26 December 1967 in The Palladium-Times in Oswego states that he had arrived “here” 28 years earlier, so roughly in 1939. The 1940 Federal census records that William was living in Ilion on 01 April 1935. I’ve not been able to find any city directories for the critical period of 1925–1927 to establish where William might have been living at the time. Conclusion: as with Fred, the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that William was Joe’s father, and there is the additional factor of physical proximity with Nellie.

I will admit that it is very, very tempting to decisively conclude that William was the father of my Uncle Joe. That is my tentative conclusion, but I would urge a bit of caution. William did live right across the street at about the right time. But he had another brother, Fred, also living in Ilion at the time, and it’s reasonable to suspect that Fred might have been at the home on West Clark Street on occasion. William’s middle name was Joseph. However, Nellie’s mother had a brother also named Joseph, who had died as a young child. One way to possibly resolve the question is to see how much DNA the living descendants of Fred share with MBJ. I’ve tried to initiate contact with them, but so far I’ve not gotten any response. Of course, there’s the other brother, Daniel, but since he has no known descendants, we’ll probably never be able to eliminate him as a possibility.

It’s a Small, Small World

As a young boy my dad lived with Joe and Betty in town to go to school while his mother and stepfather lived on a farm in the country. My Uncle Joe was a prominent figure in my life after my family moved back to Ilion in 1967. We went fishing (I was no end of frustration for tangling the fishing line on the reel); he gave me a couple of pairs of work gloves and a polka-dot hat when I worked summers at the Cranberry Lake Biological Station in the Adirondacks; and when I left to go to college in Syracuse he put a Syracuse University sticker on his backhoe. He died in 2008 and Aunt Betty passed in 2011. There was a ceremony in Union Cemetery when the urns containing their ashes were placed there, and afterwards everyone went to Donna’s Diner on Route 5 in East Herkimer to eat, talk, share…. The Donna of Donna’s Diner was Donna Marie Krouse (1946–2016), wife of Thomas James Graham (1942–2021). Joe and Tom were good friends. Tom had lost an arm in a hunting accident, and the story my mother told me is that Joe would help out at the restaurant, for example, in unloading deliveries. The funny thing I stumbled across is that, if we assume that Joe was the son of William Peltier, then Tom was his first cousin once removed. Was this coincidental, a case of similar personalities gravitating to one another? Or did they know something that none of us were in on. I wonder.

Notes

1. Those of us of a certain age will recall the rest of that chorus: You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need.
2. I used the name Oskar to refer to the unknown father of Lottie because that was the name she gave for her marriage certificate in 1886.
3. I did consult with Joe's daughters to be sure that they had no objections to sharing the story with you. I have not used my cousins' names here, but I doubt that is fooling many readers!
4. The picture of Joe Johnson comes from the wedding photo of my parents.

Swinford

It was some time ago (in 2015!) that I last explored the subject of my dad’s maternal grandfather, Luke White, and relations. Since then, I’ve accumulated a number of interesting tidbits, and it’s well past time to share them.

In that post (Share and Share Alike) I mentioned my correspondence with a mysterious "Mr. D". His grandmother was the sister of Luke. He told me that the family came from the village of Swinford in County Mayo. If you’re not familiar with the geography of Ireland, Mayo (Contae Mhaigh Eo) is in the west of the country, in the province of Connacht. Today, in addition to Mayo, Connacht is made up of the counties of Galway, Leitrim, Roscommon, and Sligo. It’s also home to one of the three surviving dialects of the Irish language. Here are found the most populous Gaeltacht areas, regions in which the first language of the inhabitants is Irish.

In writing that the family “came from … Swinford,” I may be giving the impression that this was the ancient home of the Whites. Not so: Swinford was only established in the late 1700s, and it was a planned town. It was founded by the Brabazons, an Anglo-Irish family that came out on the short end of armed conflicts in the mid 1600s and the subsequent settlements imposed on them by Oliver Cromwell. The Brabazon family lost its castle and land in Galway and were resettled in lands in farther north in Mayo.

The origin of the name Swinford, sometimes spelled Swineford in the past, is the subject of some small dispute. According to one account it is exactly as its name implies: the site of a ford across the river where swine would be taken to a local pig market. The Irish name for the town, Béal Átha na Muice, is an exact reflection of this. Béal átha is an “approach to a ford,” and na muice means “of the pig.” The other story is that the town was named for and modeled after a town by the same English name in Leicestershire, England. Support for this idea comes from the fact that the Brabazons were originally from Leicester. The two accounts are not mutually exclusive, and both may have a bit of the truth.

View of central Swinford, Co. Mayo, from Bridge Street.

Luke White reported on his World War I draft registration form that he had been born on May 14, 1873. I have reason to doubt this. At this time in Ireland it was mandatory to register all births with the civil authorities. Failure to do so would result in a fine. However, I have not been able to find any such registration in 1873. What I did find was a baptismal record for a boy named Luke, son of Luke White and Ellen Brennan. The date on that record is August 17, 1869: quite a difference, but not at all unusual. It’s possible that this child died young, and their next boy was also given the name Luke, but I’ve found no evidence at all for this. Actually, the credit for finding that baptismal record should go to Jill Dale and her website County Mayo Beginnings. Her focus was on the Brennan family, that of Luke’s mother. She has one page where she focused in on the records for the Brennan and White families in the townland of Cloonaghboy, and this is where I found the baptismal record.

Luke Sr. and Ellen Brennan were married on February 9, 1857 in Swinford. I have not been able to discover the names of Luke’s parents; Ellen’s father was named Martin Brennan. Unfortunately, the parish records for the time period in which they were probably born are not available. I have come across a few DNA links that suggest an identity for a sister of Ellen, but so far no documentation.

Record of the marriage of Luke White and Ellen Brennan from the Swinford parish register. The given names of the bride, groom, and witnesses are in Latin.

Griffith’s Valuation, published in 1856, identifies the properties on which Luke Sr. was living at the time. The farm was just to the southeast of the town of Swinford. The “roads” in the area are still recognizable on Google Maps. You can see from the condition of the road that even today it doesn’t look like it’s a heavily travelled area!

View of the townland of Derryronan, just to the southeast of Swinford. This is where Luke White and Ellen Brennan farmed and raised their family.

Moving forward in time, knowing the names of Luke and Ellen made it possible for me to find records of the births of several children, a few of which I knew from Mr. D’s correspondence. They were Mary (b. 1857), Martin (b. 1861), Edward (b. 1867), James (b. 1869), Ann (b. 1871), and Ellen (b. 1874). The names Edward and Martin jumped out at me: Edward Martin White was the name of my great uncle. The three girls all ended up emigrating to the U.S., specifically to Brooklyn. The records there are few, and they’re a bit confusing. My best understanding is that both Ann and Mary married men named Flannery, Joseph and Bernard respectively. Ellen married John F. O’Neill, from County Tyrone. I’ll come back to the Flannery connection shortly.

The son Edward White remained in Ireland, and as far as I can tell he lived in Swinford for the rest of his life. In 1912 he married Mary Groarke (1893-1964), a woman 26 years younger than him. (That is, if I have my dates right.) I know of four children, but the Irish birth records are only accessible online up to the year 1921, and I suspect I’m missing some. Edward died in 1944. Of the other two brothers, James and Martin, I know nothing.

One interesting note that I stumbled on was that Luke Jr. “enlisted” in the British Army in 1890. To be specific, he enlisted in the 3rd Battalion of the Connaught Rangers. He claimed to be 18 years old, 5 foot 3 inches in height, weighing 124 pounds; dark brown eyes, blackish brown hair, and with a scar on his abdomen. I haven’t been able to discover what his unit was doing in 1890. The Rangers were organized in the 1700s and fought in the Napoleonic wars. In later times they fought in the Boer War in southern Africa as well as in the First World War. By that time, though, Luke had emigrated to America. Although his enlistment record that he signed says that he agreed to a six-year term, I have a record of a Luke White, 20 years old, coming into New York in 1892. Is this the same man, and if so, what does that imply?

First page of the enlistment record of Luke White into the Connaught Rangers.

Painting entitled Listing for the Connaught Rangers, painted in 1878 by Lady Elizabeth Butler (1846-1933). It shows two men who have enlisted in the Rangers, accompanied by their sergeant, against a backdrop of west Ireland landscape. Original in the Bury Art Museum.

I promised to come back to the Flannerys. The records, as I said, are sparse and confusing. But I’m fairly certain about one thread. Ann White seems to have married two different Flannerys: whether they’re related or not, I can’t say for sure. I mentioned Joseph, and the other husband was named Peter J. Flannery (1876-1943). They may have had two children: I’m pretty sure about a girl named Dorothy Margaret Flannery (1912-1956), but I’m less sure about Martin Douglas Flannery. I know that Martin was a family member. However, he may have been the adopted son of Ann’s sister Mary, who died in 1922.

Dorothy seems to have been an interesting person. I found a couple of letters that she had written to the local newspapers in Brooklyn. One was published in a syndicated column called Listen, World, written by Elsie Robinson. Listen, World ran from 1924 to 1956 and was distributed by King Features Syndicate. Here is Dorothy’s letter:

Dear Elsie Robinson,

I’m sending my puzzle to you and I hope you can help. You see there’s something wrong with me and I have often wondered if I am a little mad.

I’m seventeen and I like parties, dancing, necking and most all the things people do but my pleasure is always being spoiled for me because in the midst of it the thought will come crashing down – what’s the use? How futile it all is! Then instantly all my enthusiasm is gone and I feel helpless.

I see people rushing back and forth, and call them fools for bothering, when all the time, perhaps, I myself may be the fool. It’s hard, Elsie, to be so young and to know that people never mean what they say – to know that they hide their real selves from you under a veneer. I have only two that I can really call my friends – a girl and a boy – but though I have known them both for many years I dare not study them for fear that if I probe too far they will turn out to be like the others.

That’s one big trouble – the shallowness of people. Another is that I can find no career or work to interest me. I’m too restless. I have been to six schools since I graduated from grammar three years ago leaving each as soon as I became accustomed to it. I can’t keep on doing the same thing day after day – the monotony is unbearable. What does one do in a case like this?

DOROTHY FLANNERY
No. 192 Garfield place, Brooklyn

I found this copy of the letter published in the Albany Times Union, 01 June 1929. I won’t go into Elsie’s response, other than to say that – in my opinion – she was a bit of an ass.

For quite some time Dorothy was a mystery to me. After her father’s death in 1943, I could not find any record of her anywhere. Then, in the past year, I’ve been in contact with one of her daughters and her grandson, made possible by DNA matches. It turns out that in 1949 Dorothy married a man named Frederick Dehnert (1900-1985). As I started searching using the name Dehnert, I got a big surprise.

Dehnert was the son of the German immigrants Henry (Heinrich) Dehnert and Gertrude Biel. He had two sisters, Katherine and Irene, and one brother, Henry. If you’re a big sports fan, perhaps you already know where this is leading. Henry G. Dehnert (1898-1979) is much better known by the name of Dutch Dehnert.

Dutch was a forward for the original Celtics basketball team: not the Boston Celtics, but their precursor. The original team was based in New York, and they played their games in Madison Square Garden. It was basically a barnstorming team and was a force in the 1920s. In one year, they played a 205 game schedule, and their record of 193-11-1 speaks to their dominance. I had even heard of one of those players before, the center Joe Lapchick.

The original Celtics. The two men in standing in the center in the back are Joe Lapchick on the left, and Dutch Dehnert on the right.

The original Celtics basketball team in uniform. Joe Lapchick standing, center; Dutch Dehnert (I believe) to his left.

Dehnert was a 6’1” forward, weighing 210 pounds. He started his career as a professional with teams like Danbury/Jersey City-Norwalk, Wilkes Barre-Nanticoke, Bridgeport, Philadelphia, Scranton, and even Utica. That last team was the Utica Utes; they played in the old Utica Armory, a venue with a seating capacity of 1,300. Over Dutch’s entire playing career of 433 regular season games from 1917¬-1939 he averaged a whopping 4.6 points per game. When the playoffs rolled around though, he came through with an average of 3.6 points per game over 31 games. It was a different game in those days!

The Utica Armory in Utica, New York. Home of the Utica Utes.

One of the differences was that after every made basket, there was a jump ball to determine possession. No three-point shots, of course. But there was another contrast with the modern game, one for which Dutch Dehnert was given credit. Basketball lore says that he created and perfected the so-called “pivot play.” In this, Dutch would position himself somewhere around the foul line with his back to the basket. He’d get the ball, and then his teammates would cut past him, either right or left. Dutch would deftly pass to the teammate and then would immediately cut toward the basket in the opposite direction from which he passed. With the pivot play the focus of their offense, the Celtics won the American Basketball League championship in both 1927 and 1928. It turned out that this scheme was so devastatingly effective that the basketball powers-that-be changed the rules of the game so that it was illegal for an offensive player to remain close to the basket for more than three seconds. This was the birth of “the lane” and the modern offensive 3-second rule. The original Celtics team was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1959, and Dutch Dehnert himself was inducted as a player in 1969.

Old film footage of members of the original Celtics team. As the video opens, Joe Lapchick is on the far left, and Dutch Dehnert is on the far right.

Dutch Dehnert, 6'1" forward for the original Celtics; inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1969.

The ABCs: Abandonment, Bigamy, and Concealment

In one of my earliest posts on this blog, “From Johnson to Westerlund (and back)”, I recounted the discovery that the name Johnson is not at all an old family name, but one that was adopted in the late 1910s by my grandfather Fredrick Arthur Johnson (1888-1937). To recap very briefly, my grandfather was born on Long Island, and he and his family lived in Brooklyn. But in 1917 he turned up living in central New York, in the village of Ilion. Along the way he had changed his name from Arthur Johan Alfred Westerlund to Fred Johnson. (I will be bouncing back and forth with his names: just remember that Arthur and Fred are the same person). I ended that blog post with several unanswered questions: Why did he change his name? Why did he choose the name Fred Johnson? Why, on his marriage license in 1919, did he list his father’s name as Alfred Johnson and his mother as Charlotte Rumstrom? I still can’t completely answer these questions, but some new evidence has come to my attention that, I think, go some way in shedding some light on the issue. Before I explain what I’ve found, the old warning comes to mind: “Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.”

Fred Johnson aka Arthur Westerlund. Photo courtesy of Marcia Robbins.

In that old post I described my pet theory: he changed his name in order to avoid the anti-German sentiments that were common in the U.S. during the years of the First World War. Those sentiments were real enough, but I no longer believe that that was his reason.

Where is this coming from? For several months now, I’ve been following the trail of the families of the mother of my maternal grandmother, the Driscolls and the Collins from West Cork in Ireland. One of the intriguing – and frustrating – parts of this has been trying to figure out how some DNA matches fit into the family. These matches involve three adopted children, two of which are connected (the same mother), but the third somehow is a separate story. Last week I was looking at some folks from Bayonne, New Jersey (yes, Jersey!). Anyway, one of them was born on Long Island. That led me to remember my grandfather. His draft record said that he had been born in East Hempstead, but I had been unable to obtain a birth certificate. But that was before I knew his original name, and maybe in my earlier searches I hadn’t used the name Arthur Westerlund. So I ran another search.

What I found was a marriage record. We know that Fred Johnson married Nellie White in 1919, but this wasn’t Nellie. This was a 1914 marriage between Arthur Westerlund and a person named Helen Agnes Tucker! Coincidence? No: the father of the groom was named Alfred and the mother was named Hannah Bottleson. My Fred/Arthur’s parents were Gustaf Alfred Westerlund and Johanna Charlotta Barthelsson. There was also a small notice published in a Brooklyn paper called “The Chat” listing marriage licenses issued in which the address of Arthur Westerlund, age 25, was given as 494 Elton Street. I have several records that confirm that this was where my Westerlunds were living.

Transcript of the marriage license for Arthur Westerlund and Helen Agnes Tucker, 1914, in Brooklyn>

Listing of marriage licenses issued, published in The Chat in Brooklyn, 25 Apr 1914.

It is at this point that alarm bells started going off in my head. What do we know about Helen Tucker? In the transcription of the marriage license (I haven’t gotten a copy of the original yet), her parents are cited as Elom Leroy Tucker and Mary Delany. Further investigation showed that her father’s name was actually Alvin Leroy Tucker. This marriage record gives Helen’s age as 18. This is not true: Helen Tucker was born on 27 Feb 1898, in the Bronx. Therefore, she was only 16 years old when she married Arthur.

That prompted me to try to do a little research on the question of the minimum legal age at which a woman (a girl?) could marry. What I found was, frankly, disturbing. Leave aside for the moment the question of what the laws were in 1914. Today, in the year 2021, the minimum age at which a girl can marry in the state of Massachusetts is 12, yes, twelve, years old. Prior to 2017, the minimum age in New York was 14. Looking back to the 19th century, the age of consent in the state of Delaware in 1880 was … wait for it … seven. I have tried to avoid applying 21st century morals to people living centuries earlier, but I must admit that this pushes me close to my limits.

Let's continue following the timeline. In the 1915 New York state census, we find Helen listed as Helen Westerlund, but living with her parents at 373 Cleveland Street in Brooklyn, about 3 ½ blocks from the Westerlund home on Elton Street. But there’s no Arthur living there. In fact, the Westerlunds seem to be entirely missing from that census. I worked through the records, page by page, following the census taker as he walked the blocks: he goes straight from 492 Elton to 496 Elton. I guess that either no one answered the door when he knocked, or he didn't even recognize it as a separate dwelling.

The Westerlund and Tucker homes in Brooklyn. The Westerlunds lived in the small brick house at 494 Elton (on the left, the home with the air conditioner in the upstairs wind), and the Tuckers lived at 373 Cleveland (on the right). In the center is a map of the routes between the two, only a short 8 minute walk today.

The next record of Arthur Westerlund/Fred Johnson is in the 1917 WWI draft registration. He was then living on Railroad Street (now Central Ave) in Ilion under his new name. A year later he is in the army, in the Syracuse Recruit Camp, in 1918, Fred then married Nellie on 01 Nov 1919 in Ilion. As I mentioned earlier, Fred listed his parents as Alfred Johnson and Charlotte Rumstrom. Alfred was, indeed, his father’s name; Swedes often go by either their first, second, or even third given names in everyday life. Charlotte Rumstrom is a mangled form of his mother’s name. Although her real maiden name was Barthelsson, her mother in 1888 had married a private detective in New York named Herman Maleus Eugene Olausson Rundström. I suppose that if we squint a bit, Fred didn’t really falsify the names of his parents.

If the names of his parents were reasonably close, though, what about his own name change? There is, and was at the time, a legal process for changing one’s name. All this involves is filing a form with a court and paying a fee. That filing then becomes a public record. I haven’t actually done the research, but I doubt that Fred bothered to go through with this. I’ll explain why in the next paragraph. But if you think about the times, Fred had never traveled abroad (to my knowledge), and I’m not even sure how widely passports were in use at the time. In the 1910 Federal census Arthur’s occupation is said to be a driver for a private family. Whether he drove a motorcar or some sort of horse-drawn conveyance is not clear. But driver’s licenses were not mandated in New York City until 1919. So, I’m left wondering what kind of personal identification people would generally be using at the time. I suspect that there was none at all. I can easily imagine that if you moved from one place to another, your name was what you said it was, no questions asked.

On Jan 26, 1920 in Portsmouth, Virginia, Helen Westerlund divorced Arthur on grounds of desertion. I’m sure you’ve done the arithmetic in your head already: that leaves a period of nearly three months in which Arthur Westerlund aka Fred Johnson is legally married to two different women. To me, then, a likely scenario is that Arthur married Helen and almost immediately abandoned her. He then scuttled north to central New York under a new name, presumably to avoid being discovered. When his father died in 1923 (his mother had died the year earlier) Fred returned to Brooklyn to sign away any claim to the estate. Thus, it seems likely that at least his sister Wilma (the only other heir) knew where he was living so that he could return to Brooklyn to take care of the paperwork.

Record of the divorce of Arthur Westerlund and Helen Tucker, 20 Jan 1920.

To wrap up some loose ends, Arthur Westerlund and Helen Tucker – to the best of my knowledge – had no children together. After divorcing Arthur in January of 1920, Helen married Charles Aloysius Angley on 18 Jun 1920. Angley’s father had died when he was only 8 years old. This is another ugly story, with charges of his father regularly beating his mother showing up in the local papers. His mother subsequently remarried to a man named John James Campbell. As a result, Charles appears in the records under both the name Angley and Campbell. By 1930 Helen and Charles Angley/Campbell were divorced, and she then married Jacob Stelling sometime before 1940. They stay together until he passed in 1969 and she died in 1986. Helen apparently never had any children of her own. I have found her nephew on Ancestry.com, and, in a biography of his grandfather, he wrote that Helen and Jacob raised a grand-niece from the time she was a baby. I have reached out with a message to this nephew, but he is now in his mid 80s, and I haven’t heard back from him yet.

By the time that I discovered the Westerlund to Johnson name conversion, only one of the children of Fred and Nellie Johnson was still living, my aunt Phyllis Dickenson. I had a chance to chat with her about the name change, and she somewhat wryly said that she suspected that her family was being suspiciously secretive and that there might have been something untoward or illegal going on (gasp!). Maybe her intuition was right all along. I’m also reminded that Nellie’s sister, Kathryn (Kaddie) Squire, was extraordinarily reluctant to talk about family history. I wonder if this story of abandonment and bigamy was involved. I also shudder to think that that is only the tip of this particular iceberg. Obviously, I haven’t answered all the questions with which I began this post, but I think we’ve taken a few steps toward in that direction. I wonder where the path will lead us.

Strawberry Fields Forever

If you’ll indulge me, I have one more post that follows in the same vein as my most recent ones. These follow the trail of my relations with the Collins and Driscoll families. To briefly recap, my great great grandparents (the maternal grandparents of my maternal grandmother) were Timothy Driscoll (1835-1883) and Ellen Collins (1843-1919). Tim was a farmer in Ireland, and he died fairly young, aged 48, in the townland of Ballymacrown in West Cork. About a decade after his death, his widow sold her goods and property rights and moved to join her daughter (Johanna, my great grandmother), son (Jeremiah), and brothers John and Peter Collins in the port city of Oswego, New York. Along with her came the rest of her children, Timothy, Katie, Ellen, and Michael.

My goal in this post is to pick up with another of the sibs of Timothy Driscoll, his brother Jeremiah (1829-1884). In my last post I described the colorful history of one of Jeremiah’s daughters, Julia, who was the wife of the notorious mayor of San Francisco, Handsome Gene Schmitz. Jeremiah was Tim’s older brother, baptized in early 1829, so either born that same year or possibly late in 1828. I’m not sure when he emigrated from Ireland to the U.S., but he was naturalized in 1856 in Shasta County, California (so, he was about 28 years old at the time). He later moved south and settled in the Pajaro Valley near the coast in central California, and I’m fairly certain that it was in California that he married another emigré from County Cork, Johanna Hickey (1833-1920). Together they had nine children: Mary Ann (1860-1946), John Joseph (1861-1955), Timothy F. (1863-1882), our friend Julia (1864-1933), Jeremiah C. (1866-1951), Richard Francis (1869-1934), Daniel Ambrose (1872-1953), Bartholomew Leo (1873-1944) and Margaret L. (1877-1853).

Jeremiah seems to have been a fairly successful and prominent man in the valley. His death was noted in the Santa Cruz Sentinel: “By his own energy and industry Mr. Driscoll acquired one of the best farms in this county [Santa Cruz County]. … Father Francis Cordina performed the funeral rites. In the obituary he spoke of the many virtues of the deceased, whose piety and unostentatious charity were well known to the clergymen of Pajaro Valey. … Mr. Driscoll’s family have the sincere sympathy of this community, and he shall be missed here and is much regretted by all….” There are more details and even a poem accompanying the article. This is a fairly elaborate obituary for 1884, and I think it probably attests to the status of Jeremiah in the community, the wherewithal of his family for such an extensive elegy, or a combination of the two.

Actually, I know fairly little about Jeremiah. My focus here will be on one of his children, a person that I’m certain is already familiar to many of you. This is his son Richard. In fact, I’d heard of him – or at least his legacy – for years without realizing it. Every time I walked into the grocery store and went through the produce section, there was his name: Driscoll’s Berries. I never made the connection until researching this branch of the family tree. The Driscolls of berry fame are the descendants of Jeremiah.

The story of Driscoll’s Berries is well documented, both in print publications and on the web. Richard Driscoll married Margaret Olive Reiter (1875-1965) on November 27, 1889 in Castroville, California. She was the daughter of Joseph Nei Reiter (1833-1920) and Philomena Catherine Meyer (1845-1913). Her mother, surprising to me, was born in Cleveland, and her father came from Alsace Lorraine in France (now Alsace-Moselle, but at that time this was disputed territory between France and Prussia). In their book A History of the Strawberry from ancient gardens to modern markets, Stephen Wilhelm and James E. Sagen have an extensive appendix (69 pages long) recounting the history of the California strawberry industry. My summary will build upon theirs.

I mentioned Dick Driscoll’s wife, Ollie, because her family plays a central role in the story. Somewhere between 1900 and 1902, her sister Louise visited friends who lived on the Sweet Briar ranch in Shasta County, near Redding (mentioned in my last post, Shake, Rattlee and Roll). There she was served strawberries for breakfast that immediately caught her attention as being better than any of the varieties that were being grown in and around Watsonville. When she returned, she reported this to her brother, Joseph Edwin (Ed) Reiter and her brother-in-law, Dick Driscoll. Reiter and Driscoll had been growing berries since at least 1896. They quickly established a relationship with ranchers in Shasta County to grow this new variety (new to them, at least) that was called Sweet Briar, after the original ranch. Strawberry production turns out to be a fascinating subject. The plants were grown in the mountains, and then dug up and shipped down to the coast to be replanted. After a year of growing in their new home and sending out runners, the plants would then be allowed to produce fruit. Following that, though, the plants would regress and fail to produce new runners. Therefore, they had to be removed and replaced with new plants from Shasta County. This is still largely the method used, although newer varieties don’t require that intervening year where no strawberries would be produced. The nursery operations take place at higher elevations and cooler temperatures, while fruit production takes place along the coastal plain.

Richard F. (Dick) Driscoll. Photo courtesy of Lynn Willing-Bond.

Joseph Edwin (Ed) Reiter. Photo courtesy of Lynn Willing-Bond.

Louise Reiter, sister of Ed who brought the Sweet Briar strawberry to the attention of Dick Driscoll and Ed Reiter. Photo courtesy of Lynn Willing-Bond.

It is one thing to have a good product, but quite another to translate that into sales. The primary market for strawberries produced in the Pajaro Valley was the San Francisco area. Reiter and Driscoll would ship their berries north in crates, and around each crate they would tie a blue paper ribbon with a picture of a red strawberry. For buyers, this ribbon identified the superior Sweet Briar fruit. Because of this association of the berries with the ribbon, the name of the variety changed, becoming known as the Banner variety. The first newspaper ad that I was able to find in the Bay Area newspapers using the name “Banner” was printed in mid-May of 1911. This variety was so popular that it displaced all the others that had earlier dominated the market.

Historical photo, taken about 1917, of Banner strawberries (the Sweet Briar strawberries).

Ad for Banner strawberries that appeared in the Alameda Daily Argus, 18 May, 1911.

Ed Reiter and Dick Driscoll basically had a monopoly on Banner strawberries up until about 1912. After that, other ranchers could see their success and quickly moved to obtain their own plants. Driscoll shifted his operation to new ranches, particularly trying to avoid fields that had previously been used to grow strawberries. Although the details were poorly understood at the time, strawberry plants are susceptible to a number of fungal and virus diseases. Some of these can persist in the soil for several years. This was not unique to Banner, and it continues to be a pressing concern today. Therefore, even now before strawberries are planted, the soil is fumigated to reduce or eliminate these problems.

As a quick aside, strawberry farming is a labor-intensive operation. In these early years when Dick Driscoll and Ed Reiter were achieving prominence, much of the labor was performed by Japanese sharecroppers. The “bosses” would provide the land and plants, and the sharecroppers would grow, care for, and harvest the fruit. At the end of the day, the profits were generally evenly split. Of course, much of this mutually beneficial relationship was upended with the Japanese internments during World War II.

Dick and Ollie Driscoll had six children: Richard Oliver (1900-1971), Edwin Francis (Ned, 1902-1981), Agnes Marie Louise (1905-1996), Donald Joseph (1908-1986), Kenneth Leo (1911-1936), and George Vincent (1914-1958). As noted earlier, Dick passed in 1934 and Ollie in 1965.

Of all the story lines to pick up here, one of the most important for the success of Driscoll’s as a company starts with Dick’s son, Ned. Banner strawberries had been a tremendous success for the partnership of Dick Driscoll and Ed Reiter, but after only a few years most if not all of the ranchers in the Pajaro Valley had begun growing the variety for themselves. After twenty years of large-scale production, though, Banners began to be hit by diseases. By 1950 it was entirely gone. To continue to take advantage of the climate and soils of California for strawberry production new varieties were needed, varieties bred to withstand the various wilts and viruses that inevitably spell doom for the plants. Development of such varieties, though, takes time, money, and the acumen of horticulturalists to recognize commercially valuable traits and try to combine them in a single plant through careful breeding. But if, after all of that effort, everyone and his brother could plant the same variety and compete on the market, it might be impossible to recoup all of that investment.

Ned Driscoll

Ned Driscoll was involved with early experimentation with varieties that had been produced by researchers at the University of California at Davis around 1937. These varieties, having been produced by an arm of the state were available for all growers to use. Ned pioneered the adoption of winter plantings; previously the stock brought down from the mountains was planted in March. This eliminated that year of establishment that earlier growers had needed. Further, in 1944 he, together with his brother Donald, their cousin Joe Reiter, and three others, established The Strawberry Institute of California. The organization was devoted to the development of new and better varieties, research on cultivation, and support for all grower members. They achieved a bit of a “coup” when the two leading researchers at UC Davis resigned to go to work for the Institute. In 1958 they patented their first variety, Z5A. According to Baum (2005), this made Driscoll’s “…the premier California grower-shipper, a position they still retain.”

Today, the company originally founded by Dick Driscoll and Ed Reiter in 1904 is still privately held, with an estimated global revenue of $3.6 billion in 2018. They have expanded their product line, producing not only strawberries, but also raspberries, blackberries and blueberries. They have also moved beyond – but not out of – California, with both growing and marketing efforts worldwide. The plastic clamshell box that berries are now sold in: that’s another Driscoll’s innovation. Today the company is the largest berry supplier in the U.S., and is led by J. Miles Reiter, the grandson of Ed.

Headquarters of Driscoll's Berries in Watsonville, California. By Coolcaesar - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In doing the research that led to this post, I’ve made contact with several of the descendants of Jeremiah Driscoll, both from California (at least originally) and in West Cork. Some have told me that they remember the time when the relatives from California would regularly come back to Ireland for a visit. Unfortunately, my immediate family was not part of that. My grandmother was an only child, and her mother – Johanna Driscoll – died just shortly after giving birth to her. But there were other Driscolls that came to live in Oswego. I wonder if they have retained links with their cousins.

Finally, let me close with a bit of a confession. Here in central Ohio (as in much of the rest of the country), if you drive through the rural areas you’ll see mile after mile of corn. Those fields will also have signs posted, telling you the variety of hybrid plant that’s being grown. For many years it has seemed somehow “wrong” to me that farmers could be sued if they retained some of the seed from the previous year’s crop to plant in the spring. (Not that hybrid seed would be much good!) But in learning of the costs and effort it takes to develop new strawberry varieties, I think that I’m a bit more sympathetic to the idea of patenting plant varieties.

I have another prejudice that this story is undercutting. I’ve long looked down my nose at commercial strawberries. I remember, or I think I remember, picking wild strawberries and how intense their flavor was. You just never get that in a store-bought fruit, do you? But perhaps this is just my own nostalgiac notion, and they were never really that good. I must admit that I’m developing a new taste for the produce in my local market.

My granddaughter gives her seal of approval on this Driscoll's strawberry!

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Sources

• Baum, H. 2005. Quest for the perfect strawberry. iUniverse, Inc., New York.
• Driscoll’s Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driscoll%27s
• Driscoll’s Berries website: https://www.driscolls.com
• Goodyear, D. 2017. How Driscoll’s reinvented the strawberry. The New Yorker, 14 Aug 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/how-driscolls-reinvented-the-strawberry/amp
• Wilhelm, S. and J.E. Sagen. 1974. A history of the strawberry from ancient gardens to modern markets. University of California Division of Agricultural Sciences.

Shake, Rattle and Roll

I’ve spent much of the past year following leads on the Collins and Driscoll families from West Cork. As I was digging through the records, I’ve come across some interesting – and, for me, surprising – stories. I’d like to share the first of those in this post. It starts with my great great uncle, Jeremiah Driscoll. He was my second great grandfather’s brother, born (or at least baptized) in 1829.

The Patriarch

In a short biography of one of Jeremiah’s sons (Bartholomew), I learned some details about his early history. Jeremiah came to California in 1855 at the age of 25 or 26, about six years after the famous Gold Rush. Initially, he worked as a miner in the northern part of the state. He became an American citizen on 24 Sep, 1856, with the naturalization taking place in Shasta County. (The county seat is the town of Redding, a town we will revisit a bit later). He moved to Santa Cruz County in 1857 and settled on land along the Pajaro River, approximately 3–4 miles east of the modern town of Watsonville.

Map of the Pajaro Valley. Watsonville is off the left side of the image, and Jeremiah Driscoll's property borders the river in the center of the screen. Map dated 1889.

A roadside view of the property once owned by Jeremiah Driscoll, looking toward the Pajaro River.

One of the first experiments in farming in the area around Watsonville – the first, that is, by the immigrants coming from the eastern part of the country – was to plant potatoes. This experiment turned out to be wildly successful, so much so that an oversupply of the crop caused the price to crash, and that led to the devastation of the farms. Recall, that this was in the time before the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and so the producers were limited to the local market. Following that crash, much of the land was planted in grain, including that owned by Jeremiah.

Jeremiah Driscoll married Johanna Hickey, another native of County Cork, and together they had nine children. He died on 11 Apr, 1884 at the age of 55 (reported in the newspapers as 53). In the account of his death, published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, it was noted that “[b]y his own energy and industry Mr. Driscoll acquired one of the best farms in the county.” His estate included land holdings of 350 acres, valued at the time as $30,000. I’ve translated 1884 dollars into 2021 dollars, the equivalent being somewhere over $800,000. I don’t think simple calculations based on the rate of inflation adequately capture the value of land in California in today’s market. All told, I think we can agree that Jeremiah left an estate worth somewhere north of a million dollars.

Jeremiah’s legacy included more than valuable farmland. His children achieved fame that extended beyond the Pajaro Valley, and for the rest of this post, I’d like to focus on one of them, his daughter, Julia.

Mrs. Mayor

The first hint of what was to come, the first foreshock, came at 5:12 a.m. on the 18th of April, 1906: nineteen minutes before sunrise. Less than a minute later, the San Francisco Earthquake hit. The magnitude 7.7–7.9 quake and its aftermath of fire resulted in more than three thousand deaths, 225 thousand injuries, and an estimated $400 million dollars in damage. In today’s dollars, that’s roughly $11.6 billion.

The city of San Francisco in flames following the 1906 earthquake.

On the day of the quake, a proclamation was posted in the newspapers and around the city by the Mayor, Eugene E. Schmitz:

Eugene E. Schmitz. Proclamation by the Mayor, broadside. April 18, 1906. (Gilder Lehrman Collection).

I’m not sure if anyone was actually shot on sight, but the aggressive, take-charge attitude earned Schmitz publicity around the country and around the world.

Mayor Eugene E. Schmitz. Original image from San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. www.sfpl.org

Schmitz was the son of a German father, Joseph L. Schmitz, and an Irish mother, Charlotte Hogan. He was born in 1864 in San Francisco, and he grew up to be a musician and composer, a violin player. That wouldn’t seem to be the typical route into politics, but in San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century labor relations were one of the hot topics. Gene Schmitz was elected to be President of the local Musicians’ Union.

As the leader of one of the city’s labor unions, not to mention his charisma and good looks, one of the local political “bosses,” Abe Ruef (1864-1936, photo at right), tapped Schmitz to run for mayor on the Union Labor Party ticket in 1901. In a three-way race, Handsome Gene won election to his first two-year term. He was then re-elected in both 1903 and 1905.

By this time of his third election, rumblings of trouble began to be heard: not the earthquake, but rumblings about political corruption. The pursuit of allegations was continually stalled at the local level, so the editor of a local newspaper appealed to President Theodore Roosevelt for help. Through Roosevelt’s intercession, the sugar baron Rudolph Spreckels helped to bankroll $100,000 for investigations. I know that I shouldn’t impose modern standards on the actions of people more than a century ago, but the idea of a private citizen providing money to the government to pursue criminal allegations sounds like a recipe for all sorts of shenanigans. Maybe the people with the deep pockets are just more discrete these days.

The investigation, led by William Burns of the Secret Service, was underway on the fateful day of the earthquake. The main thrust was corruption, and one of the more salacious elements of it concerned the so-called “French restaurants.” To be fair, these establishments did serve food to customers on the lower floors, but upstairs the world’s oldest profession was the real order of business. The restaurant proprietors needed to obtain a liquor license from the city, but would often find their applications denied. Denied, that is, until they could schedule a meeting with Boss Ruef and make a contribution of $5,000 to the cause. Then, amazingly, Mayor Schmitz would make an impassioned plea to the police, and the liquor license would be approved.

The intensity of the investigation waned in the immediate wake of the earthquake. After the city stabilized, Schmitz surprised everyone by leaving for a tour of Europe in October of 1906. His expressed purpose was to visit and consult in the capitals to develop ideas about how to rebuild from the ashes. You might think that he was just skipping town in order to avoid arrest and prosecution. But when the indictments did come down, he dutifully returned to San Francisco to face trial.

That was a tease. Before telling you about the outcome of the trial, let me explain you why I’ve included Mayor Schmitz in this story.

Announcement of wedding of Eugene Schmitz and Julia Driscoll, published in The San Francisco Call, 17 Jun 1891.

It turns out that Mayor Schmitz, “Handsome Gene,” was married to the daughter of Jeremiah Driscoll, a young lady named Julia A. Driscoll. Newspaper reports tell us that Julia was educated in the public schools of Watsonville and San Francisco. The San Francisco Examiner described her in 1901: “She is eminently American – clear-headed, common, sensible, wide awake, unaffected, sincere, quick-witted, refined, practical. She is of the type that cannot be too many – the home-keeping, domestic woman, who is not swamped in her domesticity; that pleasant American type of woman who can look well to the ways of her household and still permit herself the wider range into the ways of the world.” (The San Francisco Examiner, 07 Nov 1901, page 2.)

Portraits of Mayor Schmitz's family, published following his election as Mayor of San Francisco in 1901. Julia is in the center, flanked by son Richard on the left, and daughters Eugenia and Evelyn on the right (Eugenia is the taller of the two). The San Francisco Examiner, 07 Nov 1901, page 2.

When Schmitz was first elected, the couple had three children: Eugenia Clara (born 1892), Evelyn Heller (born 1894), and Richard Ambrose (born 1896). In the interview published in The San Francisco Examiner in 1901, Julia explained why she had been certain that her husband would win the election:

"Somehow," she says, "I felt confident from the very first. Mr. Schmitz had never been in politics. He had gone along quite contentedly, never thinking of anything beyond success in his profession and in a business way, perhaps, yet, when the matter was first broached and the nomination offered to him, and he came home and told me about it I felt he would be elected, and through the campaign I never lost my belief. Through all his anxieties of the campaign I tried to keep up his confidence and hope with my own, for I never wanted him to feel for a moment that he wouldn’t win."

And what kind of a Mayor do you think Mr. Schmitz will make?

"Why," answered Mrs. Schmitz, "I have always felt that he had exceptional ability, that opportunity would bring it out, and," here Mrs. Schmitz smiled a smile of wifely pride, "if Mr. Schmitz makes as good a Mayor as he has made a husband, he'll make a very good Mayor indeed!"

Unfortunately, that didn't turn out as well as Julia had hoped. Abe Ruef "copped a plea" for which he received immunity from most of the charges against him in exchange for his testimony against Schmitz. On 14 Jun 1907, Mayor Eugene Schmitz was convicted of extortion. Ruef was convicted of bribery in 1908, and he was sentenced to 14 years in San Quentin, a sentence he finally began serving in 1911. Schmitz was down, but not out, though. He appealed his conviction and won. However, he was tried again, this time for bribery. At the second trial Ruef refused to testify against him again, and Schmitz was cleared.

Front page story in the Stockton Daily Evening Record reporting the conviction of Mayor Eugene E. Schmitz of extortion. Published 14 Jun 1907.

Schmitz ran for the office of Mayor twice after his brush with the law, but he never regained the post. He was elected to the San Francisco Board of supervisors where he served from 1921 to 1925. He never gave up on his music. In 1912 he was working on the music for a operetta entitled "The Maid of San Joaquin." The Pacific Coast Musical Review wrote that "...its object is to depict the early California mining life in a manner more realistic and tasteful than has been done in the "Girl of the Golden West." In hindsight, it was probably asking a lot to outdo Giacomo Puccini whose La fanciulla del West" had premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1910 with Enrico Caruso in the cast! The Review also stated, "There is no doubt that the work contains exceptional merit both from a musical and literary point of view, and in these days of comic opera stagnation, or even light opera famine, this work ought to find a place in the repertoire of the leading American companies." Apparently, producers on the East Coast were not as enthusiastic, and I could not find evidence that the operetta ever saw the light of day. However, in his obituary it was written that he had produced his own opera in New York. Perhaps it did have an audience, after all.

Eugene Schmitz died on 21 Nov, 1928, in San Francisco. He never regained the previous heights of his career, and in his later years he had shaved off the beard that gave him such a swashbuckling image. Eugene and Julia lost their son, Richard, in 1914 following an operation for appendicitis. Schmitz was in New York at the time, working on getting his opera staged. The two daughters lived long lives. Eugenia became a Dominican nun in 1914, taking the name Sister Mary Isabel. She retired as a secondary school teacher after 47 years of service, and was honored on the occasion of her 60th anniversary in the order. Evelyn lived to the age of 92. As far as I know she never married, and I have not found much information on her life. Julia, herself, passed in 1933 at the age of 68. It was reported that she took her husband's legal troubles very hard, and her health suffered for it.

I hate to end the post on such a sad note, so I would like to offer something to celebrate the life and liveliness of Julia (Driscoll) Schmitz and her daughter Evelyn. While researching for this post, I found some images of Eugene that had been posted on the web by the San Francisco Public Library. One of these showed him together with his wife and daughter Evelyn, apparently posing for photos during an election. The image on line is of only fair quality, but it inspired me to inquire at the library whether they had other pictures of Schmitz's family. They did! Not the greatest quality, but images that help to animate the facts that I was able to glean from newspapers and other sources. These images, apparently, have never been published before. I offer them with a nod of appreciation to the lives of Julia and Evelyn Schmitz.

This is the lo-res image put online by the San Francisco Public Library, with Julia on the left, Evelyn in the middle, and Eugene Schmitz on the right.

Julia (left) and Evelyn Schmitz. Undated photograph. Credit: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

Evelyn Schmitz, photo dated 1938. Credit: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

I have another story about a descendant of Jeremiah Driscoll. But this post is already long enough, so I'll save it for next time. But here's a teaser: this child had an even greater influence than the Schmitz family, an influence that I think a good number of readers can identify with. Stay tuned.