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!