The Blacksmith

In this post I'm going to shift to my mother's side of the family, and specifically to her maternal grandfather, Frank Burns. Frank – if I may be so familiar – died on Mar 5 1954, just four months before I was born. So I never knew him, and almost everything that I've learned has either come from conversations with my mother and Aunt Nancy (Harrigan), or is information from newspapers.

Let's start where I began, with his obituary. This one was published in the Utica Daily Press:

Frank Burns, 86, of 5 Church, Mohawk, died Mar. 5, 1954 in Herkimer Hospital after a long illness. This address is familiar to me as the house where my grandmother, Kathryn Frances Burns, lived.

Mr. Burns was born Sept. 10, 1867, at Grand Rapids, Mich., a son of Patrick and Bridget McLoughlin Burns. In recent years he lived in Oswego and later came to Mohawk to live with a daughter. He had followed the trade of blacksmith but had been retired for some time.

That was a really loaded paragraph, and it provided months and months of fodder for research. A record of Frank should appear in the 1870 census – remember, this was just six years after the end of the Civil War, and sure enough there he was. We find him living in the township of Wyoming, Kent Co. Michigan with father Patrick, mother Bridget, and a younger brother Dennis. Patrick is 30, so he was born around 1840 in Ireland. Bridget is 25, also born in Ireland. Neither parent can read or write, and Patrick's occupation is given as day laborer.

That was easy. Now, where is the family in 1880? This was one of the early roadblocks: there is no family with those people in the Grand Rapids area in 1880. The obituary said that Frank lived in Oswego, so what about there? Again, no dice. Eventually Frank and Dennis Burns are clearly identifiable in the national census, but this isn't until 1900, leaving a big gap of 30 years in his history.

Back to the obituary: He [Frank] leaves a brother Daniel, Wisconsin; three sisters, Miss Gertrude Burns, Wisconsin, Mrs. Elizabeth Prendergast, Michigan, and Mrs. Patrick Harrigan, Mohawk, and five grandchildren. The last is bogus, as Mrs. Patrick Harrigan was actually Frank's daughter. But holy procreation, Batman, where did those other people come from?

Well, I don't think that I can accurately tell the story any longer of how this was resolved in my research. All the various threads are now so thoroughly entwined, that I confused myself as I tried to remember. But there were a few important elements to the resolution. First, my mom and Aunt Nancy corroborated details in the obituary. They remember an Aunt Gertrude and Aunt Elizabeth. My mother even recalls going to Grand Rapids in the '40s with Gertrude. Then there were two “luck of the Irish” finds on the Internet. One was a record of the death of a Miss Gertrude Burns. This was in, of all places, Alabama! The second was finding an abandoned family tree on the web, one with a patriarch named Patrick Connel Burns along with a raft of children, and among them were the same names from Frank Burns's obituary. Particularly compelling was the name Elizabeth Prendergast. Come on, what were the odds?

So here's how this chapter in Frank's life seems to have turned out. After the 1870 census his mother, Bridget McLoughlin disappears from the records. I have no proof of why, but likely she died sometime between 1869 and 1873. His father was remarried to a woman named Mary Elisabeth Gallagher. That union produced a total of eight children. This family does show up in the 1880 census. Remember that I said that the Burns family wasn't found in the 1880 census in Oswego? Well, not the family, but there is a Frank and Dennis of the correct age, living with two separate families named McLaughlin! My interpretation is that their mother died, and their father sent them back to Oswego to live with relatives, one with their grandfather and the other with their uncle.

Now let's fast-forward to 1900, the year my grandmothers were born as well as another national census. Do we find a Burns family? Well, no: we only find the two brothers Frank and Dennis listed as boarders at 90 East Fifth Street in Oswego. But now, Frank is already listed as a widower. I haven't yet found the precise date of the wedding, but in sometime in 1898 Frank had married a young immigrant from Skibbereen, Ireland named Hannah Driscoll. Skibbereen in notorious as one of the areas most severely hit by the Irish potato famine in the 1840's. My Grandma Burnsy was born on 11 Apr 1900, and then Hannah died about two weeks later on 24 April. The family story is that in the short run the baby Kathryn Frances was put up in an orphanage, hence the census record showing the two “bachelor” brothers.

Sometime before 1910 Frank was remarried to Helena McCarthy. She was essentially my grandmother's mother and was called that. Another story that Aunt Nancy relates is that Burnsey's grandmother, Ellen Driscoll who also lived in Oswego, would call to her as she passed on the street saying that the woman she lived with was not her real mother! I can see the finger wagging in the air. Helena also died young, in 1923, at the age of 48. There is a poignant letter that Aunt Nancy has in which Gertrude Burns (Frank's half-sister, see portrait) consoles my grandmother on her loss and offers to fill the place of mother.

One of the fascinating aspects of Frank Burns's life is that we can follow so much of it through the accounts in the local newspapers like the Oswego Palladium. Frank's blacksmith shop was close by a fire station, and he was paid a fee every year by the city to shoe the station's horses (and, probably, other blacksmithing chores). Those payments are recorded in the papers. When we visited Oswego last year I tried to track down the exact site. The old firehouse is the Firehouse Complex at 112 E Bridge Street. Going west, toward the river, you go past A&J Music, and then there's a little garage set off the street a bit. That's where the blacksmith shop was, maybe not the same building, but I'll bet it is. Now it's a little detached garage next to the house on the corner. In the newspapers – especially if you read between the lines – you can learn a lot about everyday life. You can find Frank and Dennis attending local union, political and Irish expat meetings. There's an account of when he was hit by a car in Oswego – no damage done, apparently. When Frank retired blacksmithing, you can find the advertisements that his cousin placed in the paper to sell his tools. And there's a thought: what was it like to be a blacksmith during that period in history when horses were being replaced by automobiles?

Frank Burns (second from right) outside the blacksmith's shop.

It's possible to follow this history through the papers as a result of a fairly unique resource: the fultonhistory.com website. Tom Tryniski, of Fulton, NY (hey, I know someone else who lives in Fulton!) has taken up the task to scan, OCR, and provide search tools to browse through over 26 million pages from newspapers in New York state. These include a number of important sources to me like the Little Falls Evening Times, Oswego Palladium, Utica Observer Dispatch and the Utica Daily Times. This is a monumental effort, and I really appreciate it most when my research takes me to other states. I find that the interface is sometimes difficult to work with, but there's still gold in them thar hills!

Now I'd like to enlist your help by giving me your opinion on the possible identity of people in a couple of pictures. In the next picture below is a wedding picture. That's Frank with his wife. But the question is: which wife? After that, the next picture is of the second wife, Helena McCarthy. Is the bride in the earlier picture Helena? Or could it possibly be the first wife, Bridget McLaughlin? (We have a split opinion here, so what do you think?)

Second, my aunt had the following picture of two young men in the scrapbooks from my grandmother. There's no writing on it to indicate the identity of the duo, but as I was writing this blog - literally - I suddenly had the thought: could this be an early picture of Frank along with his brother Dennis? I would guess just by the posing that the one sitting is the elder of the two, which would be Frank (if that's who these two are). Try comparing the picture with the other images I have here of Frank. It's not an easy call, I know, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts. See any resemblance?