Four-leaf clover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eureka - or not

Whether it's Archimedes in the bath, or a personal epiphany, the eureka moment is usually a fraud. Rather than an instantaneous revelation, my experience is that it's more of a Homer Simpson “Doh!” It's right there in plain sight, if only you could see it!

All this is to report some progress on following the story of Mary Elizabeth White back a bit in time. In my last posting I'd been lamenting about how the trail seemed to stop with Elizabeth (died 1956) and her husband Luke (died 1928). Well, I'm happy to report a few cracks in the metaphorical brick wall. I don't have a well-rounded story yet, but there are some tidbits that are very enticing. Here we go.

After writing about my experiences trying to dig into the White line, I tried digging a little further into the newspapers. I don't know why or how I came to it, but I tried searching on the fultonhistory.com website for “Lillian White.” As you no doubt recall, Aunt Lillian (1902 – 1952) was the second child of Elizabeth and Luke. The fultonhistory.com website has a large number of newspapers from New York state that you can search on-line. Recently he's started to delve into papers outside of the state as well. My search for Lillian turned up three interesting snippets. These all come from the columns in which small tidbits of news of local residents is reported in the papers. Here are the first two:

Mrs. Elizabeth White and daughter, Lillian White of Ilion are visiting Mrs. Kate Fitzpatrick." Schenectady Gazette, 14 Jul 1930.

Voorheesville Notes. ... Mrs. Kate Fitzpatrick entertained Sunday Mrs. Elizabeth White and daughter, Miss Lillian White, Mrs. Ella Farley, and daughter Miss Margaret Farley, and Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Spraker, all of Ilion, and Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Spraker of Cherry Valley." Schenectady Gazette, 12 Aug 1930.

For those of us, like me, ignorant of New York geography, the village of Voorheesville is in the township of New Scotland in Albany county. This picture below, lifted from Panoramio.com, is a view from John Boyd Thatcher State Park east toward the town. According to Wikipedia, it is a suburb of modern Albany and part of the city's historical metropolitan area. This agreed with the information from Elizabeth's obituary that she was born and married in Albany. But I wasn't familiar with any of the people mentioned other than Elizabeth and Lillian. I also was wondering how they got from Ilion to Voorheesville, a distance of roughly 70 miles. Train? Bus? Car?

The third little note was a bombshell for me:

Mrs. Kate Fitzpatrick has moved from this place to Utica, where she will reside with her daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth White." Schenectady Gazette, 17 Jun 1931.

At this point I had to stand up, get away from the computer, and make sure that I was accurately understanding what I'd just found. If Kate Fitzpatrick is Elizabeth White's mother, then this must be the Catherine McGuire mentioned in Elizabeth's obituary! The bit about moving to Utica, as opposed to Ilion, I chalked up to ignorance on the part of the Schenectady reporter. The big discrepancy to be resolved, though, is the surname. Elizabeth White's maiden name was Farnham (there's lot of leeway here on the exact spelling). If Catherine Farnham and Kate Fitzpatrick are one and the same, well, in the words of Ricky Ricardo, I got some 'splainin' to do.

A straightforward explanation of the difference would be that Kate's first husband, Barney Farnham (according to Elizabeth's obituary) had died, and that she remarried Mr. Fitzpatrick. The easy part is to deal with Fitzpatrick first. The critical clue here is that when Elizabeth and Lillian travelled to visit Kate, she was living in Voorheesville. Censuses for that area, in particular the township of New Scotland, have records for a Kate Fitzpatrick in 1930, 1925, 1920, and 1915, but all for Kate alone as a widow. Her spouse, John Fitzpatrick appears in the 1910, 1905, and 1900 censuses (the image below is the listing in 1900). He was substantially older than Kate: she was born in 1854, he in 1830. The census records also indicate that they were married sometime around 1890. That should be taken with some caution, though, as many “facts” in the census turn out to be wrong. I raise that point now because while John Fitzpatrick appears in the 1892 census of New York, Kate is not listed with him. I don't know if that's significant, because there are quite a few illegible entries in the copy of that census that I saw.

So none of these census records had any children for Kate. I was hoping that the 1892 census would have something to definitively link this Kate with Grandma White, but no such luck. So let's step back a little further in time. Earlier I'd looked for Barney and Catherine Farnham in Albany and had had no success. Perhaps, they weren't exactly in the city limits of Albany, but rather in New Scotland.

To figure this out, because I had no confidence in how the name Farnham might be spelled, I simply went through the censuses for 1880, 1875 and 1870 the hard way, from front to back. Thankfully, New Scotland was fairly small at that time, something like 2000 people in total. Just as a reminder, here's what I “knew” as I started. Elizabeth White was born in 1878. The censuses for Kate Fitzpatrick, her mother, gave her birth date as sometime around 1854 plus or minus. They also said that she'd immigrated into the U.S. Around 1870. I had no dates for her husband, Barney Farnham, and “Barney” didn't sound like a traditional Christian name for the times. It was probably a nickname, but a nickname for what I didn't know. Bernard, maybe.

The 1870 census for New Scotland (see the picture), amazingly, records the presence of a 16-year old girl, Catharine Mcguire, working as a domestic servant! The only other information is that she was born in Ireland, both of her parents were of foreign birth, and she could neither read nor write. It's amazing to me that I would be able to pick up a record of her so soon after she arrived in the U.S. She must have headed directly for New Scotland upon arriving. It looks like she was living in the household of George and Elizabeth Reid. His occupation is “keeping hotel.” I'm guessing that in those days the word “hotel” was a combination of sleeping accommodations for travellers as well as the local watering hole. Perhaps the Reids had advertised for some help, and Kate responded to that(?). [You know, as I was writing this my eyes strayed upward on the 1870 census sheet. In the household listed just above the Reids there is another domestic servant named Margaret Mcguire, aged 23. Coincidence? I wonder, and I wonder how to tell if it is or not. Probably I should check ships' passenger lists to see if I can find Margaret and Catharine McGuire travelling together.]

So 1870's a hit! What about the next two censuses? In 1875 Elizabeth Reid is still running the hotel, although there's no record of George. (There is a George Reid, 19 years older than the one in 1875 and listed as a boarder. Perhaps the father?) Included with the household is our target Catherine, 21 years old, and now she's married. Her husband is Michael Farnan – not Barney! He's listed as a farmer and 42 years old. They also have a child, Joseph, 8 months old. In an exchange on Facebook recently, Aunt Phyllis said she thought that Elizabeth Farnham had a couple of brothers who'd died young. Apparently, this is one of them. In addition, the 1910 census notes that Kate had had four children, only one of whom had survived to that point.

In 1880 Michael and Kate have moved from the Reid household, but still in New Scotland. No sign of Joseph, but Elizabeth appears in the record. Now the census says that Michael is 39 years old: so in the passing of five years his age decreased by 3 years. Maybe he's our Benjamin Button? Occupations: he's a farm laborer, she keeps house. The surname in this record is spelled Farnaim. When I think about it, though, this spelling inconsistency shouldn't be surprising. If you can't read or write yourself, I don't suppose you'd care very much about how someone else chooses to spell your name, would you? So far, this is the last record I have of Michael (= Barney) Farnham. The next record of Kate doesn't appear for 20 years, in the 1900 national census.

So who was Kate's second husband, John Fitzpatrick? He was born in 1830 in Ireland, so he was 24 years older than Kate. He arrived in the U.S. in 1847, hot on the end of the Irish potato famine. It's very hard to trace single men in the records: they keep moving around as their work takes them, and having a common name like John Fitzpatrick just makes it next to impossible. John – I think it's the right one – appears in the 1892 census in New Scotland, but he's alone and not linked with Kate. John is a Civil War veteran: he served in the 91st Regiment of New York Volunteers, Company C. This regiment was recruited in 1861 and shipped out, first, to Governor's Island, then to Key West for four months of training. They then transferred to Pensacola, Florida and then to New Orleans. They eventually headed north and participated in the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana which lasted from May 22 – July 9, 1863. The Ninety-first eventually came home in July, 1864, then was sent to participate in the closing battles of the war in Virginia. They were finally mustered out on July 3, 1865. John died on 9 Oct, 1911.

Apparently, in the following years Kate received a widow's pension, I presume on the basis of John's service in the Civil War. There is a newpaper article in 1928 in which some of the widows living in the Utica area receive an increase in their pension. Kate is mentioned by name, with her address given as 132 West Clark Street in Ilion. Her pension is increased to $50 per month. It's still a mystery to me why this address is given, when the censuses and newspapers indicate she was living in New Scotland.

So this is as far as I'd made it as of yesterday (Friday, 12 Sep 2014). Then I received a letter from the Herkimer County Historical Society. If you recall from the beginning of this post, the Schenectady paper said that in 1931 Kate was moving to live with her daughter. The 1930 census has her still living in New Scotland, as expected, and at that time she would have been 76 years old. She is not listed in the 1940 census nor in the 1936 directory of Ilion, Herkimer and surrounding towns. I did everything I could think of on fultonhistory.com, but could not find anything about her. So I wrote to the Historical Society asking if they could check their records of obituaries in the Herkimer Evening Telegram, looking for Kate sometime between 1931 and 1936. On Friday they responded that they'd found the obituary I was hoping for, dated 18 Mar, 1935. Here's the text:

Mrs. Fitzpatrick, 80, passes away in Ilion.

Ilion - Mrs. Catherine Fitzpatrick, 80, widow of John Fitzpatrick, died unexpectedly at her home, 132 West Clark street, on Sunday.

Dr. C.C. Whittemore, this village, coroner, who was called, said death resulted from complications.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick was born in Ireland, June 16, 1854, and came to this country 64 years ago. She had been a resident of Ilion for about 40 years and was a member of the Church of Annunciation. She leaves one daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth White, Ilion; five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Funeral will be held Wednesday at 9 a. m. from the home, and at 9:30 from the Church of Annunciation.

I think the 40 years in Ilion is just incorrect. Maybe the reporter got mixed up with her daughter(?). It also looks like something got left out of the coroner's statement. The next step for me, I guess, is to write to the Ilion town clerk and request a copy of the death certificate. And let's count: the five grandchildren would have been Nellie, Lillian, Ed, Mary and Kaddie White. The five great-grandchildren would have been Nellie's children Alfred, Ed, Joe, Phyllis and Norman Johnson. I would also guess that Kate is buried in St. Agnes Cemetery, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if her grave is in the same area as that of her daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter. I probably looked right at it this spring without recognizing it. Something else to do next time I'm in the valley.

I need to give out a couple of prizes (sorry, no cash awards) as a result of responses to my last post. Bryan receives second prize for recalling – somehow – that Fitzpatrick was the surname of a female ancestor, although he came up one generation short. Maybe third prize should go to Michelle Keogh: she'd taken notes from conversations with Uncle Joe and had recorded that Grandma White's mother's name was Fitz.... gerald or ...patrick. But first prize goes to Aunt Phyllis who pointed out that Elizabeth's Farnham's mother's name was Fitzpatrick. Amazing what information we all have tucked away, if only someone would ask the right questions!