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.