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.

Working on the Railroad

My last two blog posts both dealt with the Driscoll and Collins families in Oswego, New York. I’m going to continue on that thread here and in the next post as well. This line of research has been very fruitful, although not without a few roadblocks along the way. However, there are so many paths to explore, that I’m far from running out of leads to follow.

To quickly recap: I’ve already written about three ancestors who emigrated from West Cork. These were my great great grandmother, Ellen (Collins) Driscoll, her daughter Hannah, and her brother, Peter Collins. It turns out, though, that they were only the tip of the iceberg. The story of the Driscolls and Collins in the U.S. has really expanded thanks to DNA tests. As I tried to understand and reconcile some mysterious close DNA matches, I found out just how little I knew.

This story begins with a DNA match with my mother, a match that Ancestry.com estimated was a 4th to 6th cousin (a total of 41 centimorgans of shared DNA over three segments). That was enough to get my attention, and my interest was further piqued by the family tree this user had: the father and paternal grandfather of the person whose DNA this was were named Collins. So I explored a little further.

The grandfather’s name was Thomas J. Collins, and his son, also named Thomas, was born and died in Norwich, New York. (A warning: we're going to encounter a number of people named Thomas Collins. To help keep them straight, I'll give them nicknames. For reasons that will be clear soon, I'll refer to the first one, Thomas J. Collins, as Engineer Tom.) The fact that Engineer Tom lived in New York State led me to explore that combination of name and place in the website fultonhistory.com. I’m not sure if I’ve already described this website before, but this is an admirable one-man operation run by Tom Tryniski out of Fulton, New York, just south of Oswego. He’s been digitizing, databasing, and providing free on-line access to historical newspapers, originally mostly in New York State, but lately expanding ot other areas. According to the website, there are now over 49.5 million pages available on-line. Being from Fulton, it’s not surprising that there are extensive records for the papers from central New York.

As I rummaged through the fultonhistory.com resource I was surprised to find that an obituary for Engineer Tom was published in The Oswego Daily Palladium on 17 May 1916. Like his son, Engineer Tom also died in Norwich, but the obituary reported that he was a former resident of Oswego. Now the combination of Collins, Oswego, and the DNA match really had my attention, and I ended up researching this line for months. One other thing in the obituary was notable. In addition to the typical regrets were these sentences:

He was a patriotic citizen, a useful member of society, a loving husband and devoted father, and a delightful companion who faithfully discharged every duty and obligation. Seldom has the death of any one brought keener sorrow to so many hearts. There was no one along the O. & W. lines or among those with whom he came in contact that was not his friend.

Another death notice published in the Middletown Times-Press noted that Engineer Tom was “a well known locomotive engineer on the O. & W.” The O&W began its life as the New York and Oswego Midland Rail Road, the brainchild of Dewitt C. Littlejohn (1818-1892). Construction began in 1868 for a line that would run from Cornwall, New York (on the Hudson River) northwest to Fulton, with a branch to Utica. I was fascinated to learn that the funds to build the railroad came largely from the towns along its route, a kind of pay-to-play scheme. As a result, the road was long and winding and included some steep grades and deep cuts. The scale of these construction costs forced the company into bankruptcy within a month of the actual completion of construction. The company was then reorganized in 1880 under the name of the New York, Ontario & Western Railway, or the O&W.

Dewitt Clinton Littlejohn, founder of the New York and Oswego Midland Rail Road. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Frederick Hill Meserve Collection.

The relationship of the O&W with other railroad companies was complicated: the owners were also involved in other companies, rail lines were shared between rivals, and the many original small companies were being gobbled up by the big conglomerates. This was the heyday of Corrnelius Vanderbilt and the New York Central Railroad. Vanderbilt started out owning companies in the New York City area, expanded northward through the Hudson Valley, and then his acquisitions turned toward the west to Buffalo and beyond. The O&W also expanded its own lines, sharing track with the New York Central from Fulton to the port in Oswego and also opening a terminal in Weehawken, New Jersey, just where the Lincoln Tunnel is today.

The main businesses of the O&W were carrying passengers, mainly tourists going from the City to the resorts in the lower Catskills; hauling milk and other dairy; and eventually getting deep into the transport of coal out of the fields in northeastern Pennsylvania. One of my sources said that by the early 1930s coal accounted for 50% of the O&W business. By that time the company also owned three collieries, an early 20th century example of vertical integration. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a fraught financial decision. Two of the coal companies defaulted on their loans from the O&W, forcing the railroad in turn to default on its own mortgages. The O&W eventually declared bankruptcy (again) and the last train ran in 1957.

Very little of the physical footprint of the O&W remains: a few abandoned railroad tunnels, very little track, and some depots. The Oswego County Recreational Trail follows the old route of the railroad, and the Harbor Rail Trail in the city of Oswego makes use of the old railroad bridge across the river. There is still a good deal of interest in the railroad: the Ontario & Western Railway Historical Society is “dedicated to preserving the heritage of the New York Ontario & Western and other area railways.” They are involved in numerous restoration projects, maintain the company archives (600 cubic feet of records – five tons!), publish a newsletter, calendar, sponsor talks, etc.

Postcard of the city of Oswego, around 1900, looking south (upriver), with the railroad bridge in the background.

The railroad bridge in 1885.

The railroad bridge today, the Harbor Rail Trail, looking north toward Lake Ontario.

Thomas J. Collins (1867-1916), my Engineer Tom, pictured at left, was promoted to engineer on 20 Feb 1892. Together with George W. Obenauer he founded the Lyon Brook Lodge #216 of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen. Engineer Tom’s son, Tom, married Betty Ann Fagan in 1943. Both her father, John Edward Fagan (1887-1972), and his father before him, John Fagan (1854-1919), were also engineers working for the O&W. The picture at the beginning of this post shows John Fagan, on the left, with his conductor. The long family history of engineers – in total there were seven of them – was the subject of a photo-story by John Taibi, “Fagan, Batie, Colllins, & King – A family that spanned a railroad’s life.” It has quite a few historical photographs of the engineers and their engines.

Let’s retrace our steps here. I have a DNA match with a grandson of Engineer Tom, and the latter died in Norwich, but was born in Oswego. Engineer Tom was the son of John Collins and Julia (Johanna) Burns. I’m not sure about the details of her name: both are found in the records I’ve uncovered. John was born in 1846, as was Julia. John arrived in the U.S. somewhere around 1863-1864 at the age of 18, and he initially worked on the lumber docks in Oswego. Eventually, he became a coal dealer. It was this profession that made it possible for me to recognize this particular John Collins among the other men by the same name living in Oswego around the turn of the 20th century.

John Collins died sometime late in the night of New Year’s Eve or in the early morning of New Year's Day in 1917. If you check back, you’ll see that his son, Engineer Tom, died earlier in 1916, on 14 May 1916. But as John’s obituary noted, there was a third death in the family that year. Julia, John’s wife and Engineer Tom’s mother, passed on 26 April 1916. A short notice in the Oswego Daily Palladium on the 24th of January of that year reported that she was critically ill at her home on 120 East Tenth Street. It was later recorded that she had been in ill health for some time and was “very much depressed.” Sometime around 3 a.m. on April 26 members of the family reported hearing her moving about the house, going from one room to another. When they got up to check on her, she had apparently gone back to sleep. But shortly before 6 a.m. they discovered that she was missing, and her son Peter and daughter Mary began a search. The newspaper reported that they eventually found her in the shallow waters of Lake Ontario, near St. Paul’s Cemetery, roughly a mile away from home (as the crow flies). The house itself is only about 4-5 blocks away from the lake, and perhaps the current moved her northeast toward the cemetery. It doesn't record whether she was in her nightclothes or properly dressed. The most that I could find about the weather at the time was that it was predicted to be cloudy and cool in Oswego; in Buffalo the temperature range for that day was 46°-52° F. I imagine that it was pretty nippy at dawn on the lake shore in Oswego in late April.

View of Lake Ontario from St. Paul's Cemetery, looking toward the city of Oswego.

The exact relationship of John Collins was confirmed in his obituary, which closed with the words “He is survived by … one sister, Mrs. Ellen Driscoll [my 2nd great grandmother], and one brother, Peter Collins of this city.” To further support the relationship of John to my 2GG Ellen and her brother, my 3rd great uncle Peter, I obtained a copy of John’s death certificate from the office of the Oswego city clerk. On this it was recorded that his parents were Thomas Collins [3GG Tom] and Mary Gainey, the same names found for the parents of Ellen (on her baptismal record) and Peter (on both his baptismal and death records).

As I was uncovering these records and looking for newspaper articles to fill in details of the lives of John and Julia Collins, I came across this short notice published in the Oswego Daily Times on 23 Sep 1902:

Returns from Ireland

John Collins, the East Side coal dealer, and his nephew, Peter Collins, have returned from a ten weeks’ visit to Ireland. They visited its principal cities including Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Belfast and report having a most enjoyable time.

A nephew Peter Collins? John had a son named Peter, but neither the Ellen nor the Peter that I knew had a son by that name. Who was this person? This was the door opening into yet another part of the family. Recall from my last blog post that the earliest U.S. record I have of my great grandmother, Hannah Driscoll, came from the 1892 New York census. There she was listed immediately after the entries for a Thomas Collins – yes, another Tom Collins – followed by a Peter and a Nellie Collins. This Thomas was then the sexton of St. Paul’s Cemetery, so I'll refer to him as Sexton Tom. His wife, Ann Burns, had died in 1889, and they had had five children. Two daughters, Mary and Catherine, died young, and, of course, there was a son named Thomas. Tom the Sexton's son died in 1888 at the age of 22 in a railroad accident. Sexton Tom died of a heart attack in 1894. By that time his his brother (I think) Peter had already come to Oswego from Ireland, but his sister, Ellen, would not arrive for another year or so. I’m hedging a little bit here: so far I’ve not found any DNA match with Sexton Tom’s descendants. However, and you won’t be surprised at this, 3GG Thomas Collins and Mary Geaney in Drishanebeg did have a son that they named Thomas who was born at about the same time as the sexton. Whether that Tom and Sexton Tom are one and the same seems very likely to me, but I’m still missing definitive evidence. Similarly, I am just so tempted to infer some relationship between the wives of Sexton Tom and John the coal merchant, both of whom had the surname Burns. I haven’t tracked that one down yet, but it is very intriguing.

So far, then, I have (I think) four Collins siblings in Oswego: Sexton Thomas, Peter, Ellen, and John. I went back to the baptismal records in Skibbereen parish in Ireland looking for additional children born to 3GG Thomas Collins and Mary Geany. Indeed, there were more: a son named Jeremiah who was born in 1826, and another son, Barry born in 1829. That means that the four children who moved to Oswego were the youngest of the family. I’m still trying to run Jeremiah and Barry to ground. It appears that they both stayed in Ireland on the old homestead in the townland of Drishanebeg. And I have found at least one DNA match with a descendant of Jeremiah. For what it’s worth, I think that it’s noteworthy that Sexton Tom’s son, Peter, had the middle name Barry, just like his putative uncle. I take that as some confirmation that I’m on the right track. There are lots of trails to follow still, but it looks very promising. I know that the similarity in names is probably confusing. By my count, in this post alone there are five different people named Tom Collins. That’s confusing for me as well, especially when a document only has the name and nothing else. One example of this is the death certificate of Sexton Tom. The danger of confirmation bias is also something that I try to be aware of, but I’m only human. I hope that, with enough pieces of evidence that fit together, we can try to cobble together a coherent picture.

You knew this was coming, didn't you? I had to close this post with a sixth Tom Collins!

Sources

• Taibi, J. Fagan, Batie, Collins, & King - a family that spanned a railroad's life. The Northern Division Bridge & Building Dept., No. 113. http://ontarioexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/nd_FBCK.pdf
• Ontario & Western Railway Historical Society, Inc. http://nyow.org

Search for the One-Armed Man

Those of a certain age will remember the TV show The Fugitive, "...starring David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, an innocent victim of blind justice. Falsely convicted for the murder of his wife ... reprieved by fate when a train wreck freed him en route to the death house ... freed him to hide in lonely desperation ... to change his identity ... to toll at many jobs ... freed him to search for a one-armed man he saw leave the scene of the crime ...."

My search for the one-armed man began with an email from a cousin Amie - 4th cousin once removed, to be precise - asking about a certain Catherine Collins. To orient you, we're on my mother's side of the family, all Irish. Specifically, it's Hannah Driscoll's side of the family (my maternal grandmother's mother). The focus of Amie's question, Catherine Collins, was Hannah's first cousin, the daughter of her uncle Peter Collins (1838-1923). Amie had had a hard time finding records for Catherine and was curious if I might be able to contribute.

My first concern was to verify that the information that I did have was accurate. I had been exploring the Oswego connections very early in my family history research and hadn't pursued it recently. To be frank, I wasn't entirely confident that what I thought I knew was really true. I had made the link from my 2nd great grandmother Ellen (Collins) Driscoll to Catherine's father, Peter, through a line in Ellen's obituary:

She is survived by four sons, Jeremiah, Timothy, Daniel and Michael of this city [Oswego, New York] and two daughters, Mrs. Patrick Cotter, Ireland, and Mrs. Frederick Bough; also a brother, Peter Collins of this city.

I was a bit concerned that the Peter Collins I'd latched on to wasn't actually Ellen's brother, but just another guy with the same common name. Actually, the fact the Amie found me should have been reassuring: it turns out that there's a DNA match between the two of us. With that independent confirmation of a relationship I was much more confident that I'd found the right Peter.

Catherine Collins was baptized on 20 Aug 1865, the child of Peter Collins and Bridget Heagerty, in Skibbereen, County Cork. I'm not sure when she emigrated to the U.S., but she married a man named Luther E. Church on 04 Dec 1885 in Fulton, New York. I also found her name mentioned in the obituary of her son, Thomas D. Collins, who died 20 Sep 1945 in Syracuse, New York. As a sharp-eyed reader, I'm sure that you've caught the fact that Thomas used his mother's maiden name Collins, and not Church.

Baptismal record for Catherine Collins from the parish registers of Skibbereen parish.

So this was the state of my records when Amie contacted me, and that prompted me to dig a little deeper. I found conflicting stories about Luther Church and Katy Collins, and I thought that I would let you be the judge and decide which one you believe. Let's begin with Luther Church, as that's the side with the most detailed paper record.

Luther Church

Luther Church was born in Ohio in 1848 to Daniel Church and Sarah Anne Harvey. The family had moved to Ohio from New England (Massachusetts and Connecticut). He had 5 sisters and 2 brothers: Luke Ancil, Sarah Jane, Elizabeth, Adeline, Almina, Eli, and Sophia. In 1850 they were living in Scipio Township in Seneca County, Ohio. That's about an hour to the north of where I live in Columbus. On 03 Oct 1863 Luther and his brother Eli both volunteered to join Company I of the 9th Ohio Cavalry. A little arithmetic, and we see that Luther was not 18 years old as he claimed (and as Lieutenant Turner confirmed), but only 14!

Volunteer enlistment of Luther Church into Company I, 9th Ohio Cavalry.

Luther's army career was short-lived. Here is his account as related in a deposition in 1865 (with some punctuation and capitalization edited):

...while with and acting as a private in said Co & Rgt [Company I of 9th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry] at Decatur Alabama. Early in the morning of the first day of June 1864 they were attaked by Rebell Cavalry or an alarm given in the Union camp when hasty orders were given for his company to saddle. When he in attempting to get his saddle out from an old building said saddle having a carobine lashed to it in attempting to pick up or draw his said saddle to him the cock of said carobine ketched and drew it back so that when it come loos it caused the carobine to explode and sent its contents through his left arm near the shoulder nearly severing the arm from the shoulder. He was immediately taken to the General Hospital where his arm was amputated about one hour after the accident. That he was in line of duty and trying to obey his commanding officers at the time of the accident.

This account was corroborated by Sergeant Rush P. Baldwin later, interestingly using many of the same words:

"Rush P. Baldwin ... says that he is a sargent in Co. I of the 9th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry. That he was with and had command of a detachment from said Co. & Regt. on or about the first day of June 1864. They was then at Decatur in the State of Alabama and on or about said first day of June 1864 Luther E. Church, a private in said Co. & Rgt. was shot through the left arm near the shoulder by accident. Which happened as follows to wit - We camped over knight in a building. The next morning orders was given to saddle. When said Luther E. Church in attempting to pickup his saddle which had a carobine lashed to it, the cock of which kitched, and in picking up or drawing said saddle to him drawed the cock back and caused said carobine to explode and send its contents through the left arm of said Luther E. Church making a bad wound and rendering amputation necessary. He said Luther E Church being in line of duty at the time of the accident."

Deposition of Sgt. Rush Baldwin concerning accidental wounding of Luther Church.

Luther's arm was amputated in its upper third, leaving a stump that was not long enough for him to later be fitted with an artificial arm. He was moved from the General Hospital in Decatur to another one in Nashville; Tennessee; then on to Madison, Indiana; and finally to Camp Dennison in Ohio (near Cincinnati). There he was formally discharged on 29 Oct 1864, just a bit over a year since he volunteered.

After his discharge, Luther applied for and received a pension from the federal government. His justification was that he was an orphan (his father having died in 1858), his mother was in indigent conditions, and he was unable to work because of the loss of his left arm. The application was approved, and the pension began retroactively to his date of discharge at the princely sum of $8 per month. Most of these details are drawn from his pension file from the U.S. Archives, a file that is 101 pages long. That length is primarily due to the fact that Luther seemed to be constantly applying for an increase in the amount he received each month. As far as I can tell none of these requests were approved, but over the years Congress did raise veterans' pensions: In 1866 Luther's income was raised to $15/month; in 1872 to $18; in 1874 to $24; 1883 to $30, 1886 to $45; and, finally, in 1903 his payments were increased to $55 per month. During most of his life Luther lived in north central Ohio, in Seneca County in Tiffin and Republic. There is an interlude, though, when he was in central New York, at least from 1875 to 1889. I haven't been able to figure out what he was doing there, but this will be an important part of my tale.

The applications for pension increases became more plaintive over time. Luther truly suffered, of that I am sure. How much his ailments were the result of the loss of his arm is much less certain. Toward the end of his life he was restricted to a chair. Because of dropsy, he was even unable to lie down to sleep as his lungs would fill with fluid. He died on 30 Dec 1903 in Tiffin and was buried in Farewell Retreat Cemetery in the nearby town of Republic.

Farewell Retreat Cemetery in Republic, Ohio.

Headstone of Luther E. Church, Company I, 9th Ohio Cavalry.

The life of Luther Church was notable not only for his Civil War service, but for his married life as well... his marriages.

The Three Wives of Luther Church

In 1898 the Bureau of Pensions included an additional form to be completed by the pensioner in which information was requested concerning marriage status and children. The first question was "Are you married?" Luther dutifully reported that he was married to Pearl (Bidleman) Church, and that their marriage took place on 12 Jul 1894 in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Tiffin, presided over by the Rev. McKibbins. With the fourth question, the answers become even more interesting: "Were you previously married?" It turns out that Luther had plenty of information to pass on here. He reported that he had been married to "Maggie E. Church via Harding" in 1872, and that they divorced in 1877. Further, he had later married my cousin, Kate Collins, in 1886, and they divorced in 1887. Finally, concerning any children, Luther reported "One boy living, 2nd wife, 12 years old, July 4th in Oswego NY. With his grandmother Bridget Collins. Raised him for me until 16 years of age."

Questionnaire concerning family completed by Luther Church for the Bureau of Pensions.

That sounds straightforward, but in fact Luther's record with the wedded state was much more complicated. My first hint of this came when I found a document recording that in 1887 he had been sentenced to two years in the Onondaga County Penitentiary for the crime of ... bigamy. Apparently the report that he'd divorced first wife Maggie was a bit of wishful thinking. It took me some time to find any records of that first marriage. Luther married Margaret E. Harding (born 1861) in Dryden, New York on 08 Sep 1875. Dryden is a small town about 43 miles (69 km) south of Syracuse and 13 miles (22 km) to the east of the college town of Ithaca. Five years later, in the 1880 census, they were living in Barton, New York, a town 32 miles (52 km) south of Ithaca near the Pennsylvania border. The next record I have for Luther is his marriage to Kate Collins in Fulton, New York. This is another small town but on the opposite side of Syracuse, about 30 miles (48 km) to the northwest, and only 11 miles (17.5 km) southeast of the port city of Oswego.

I'm not sure if a conviction of bigamy automatically comes with one or more divorces, but the date of his divorce from Kate corresponds to the beginning Luther's term in the Onondaga County Penitentiary. (I guess Oswego County didn't have an appropriate jail, so he was sent to the Syracuse area.) He didn't serve the full two year sentence, though. On 06 Feb 1889 his sentence was commuted to time served - 1 year, 4 months, and 16 days - by order of the Governor of New York, David B. Hill (that's his official portrait to the right). The commutation was made under one condition, that is that "Luther E. Church shall totally abstain from the use of intoxicating liquors for the period of five years...." Although the Governor has the power to commute or pardon, he also is obliged to state the reasons for his decision to the Legislature. Governor Hill's justification for Luther's commutation gives one side of the story:

The facts of this case, as reported to me, are, that some six years before the commission of the offense, prisoner's wife left him for another man with whom she has been living ever since. He was induced, while intoxicated, to marry the complainant, a woman of notoriously bad character, who, after living with him for two or three years, deserted him and became an inmate of a house of ill-fame, and, it is alleged, preferred a charge of bigamy against him, in order to rid herself of his importunities to return to him. His offense resulted in no private injury and the law has been fully vindicated by the time served.

Unpacking this, the information given to the Governor was that on or about 1879 (six years before he married Kate Collins and thereby committed bigamy) Luther's first wife, Maggie, left him. This is inconsistent with the 1880 census record, but it's within a year so it might be only a rounding error. I haven't yet been able to determine who this second man was. Hill's statement then gets into a bit of character assassination. He doesn't name names, but clearly the "woman of notoriously bad character" was Kate Collins, that she "induced" Luther into marriage, and then later became a prostitute. Nothing is said about the fact that there was a child involved: Tom was born on the Fourth of July, 1886. Thus, I find the assertion that the offense resulted in no private injury a bit hard to swallow.

So, was Luther Church the hapless victim of an evil woman and his love for the liquor? There are a few more items that might influence your opinion. These were gleaned from the newspapers in Oswego. Luther Church isn't a particularly common name, and in fact, there was another man by that name who lived in the area near Saratoga, New York at the same time. Identification of my target was made easier by the fact that the reporters often added a little bit of color to their story by referring to Luther's missing arm.

• From the Oswego Palladium, 26 Jun 1886: "Luther E. Church, charged with using profane and obscene language in public, pleaded not guilty; over until 4.30."
• From the Oswego Daily Times Express, 10 Sep 1886: "Luther E. Church was arranged [sic] on a charge of assault on his wife. He is a one armed man and frankly admitted committing the offence while intoxicated. Recorder Bulger asked him if he had reported around that he, Recorder Bulger, had given him $50 with which to buy votes for him and this charge Mr. Church indignantly denied, although his mother-in-law [Bridget Heagerty Collins], who was present, insisted that he had made the statement. There was quite a lively time in the court room until Recorder Bulger put and end to it by giving him a sentence of 59 days in the county jail."
• From the Oswego Palladium, 08 Nov 1886: "Luther E. Church, charged upon complaint of his wife with non-support, pleaded not guilty. Convicted and held to $300 bail or six months in the county jail for the future maintenance of his wife and family. In default of bail he was sent to jail. Church, according to his own statement receives a pension of $45 per month from the government. His wife says he spends the most of it for rum. The charge of petit larceny made against Church was adjourned for six months."
• From the Oswego Palladium, 28 Dec 1886: "Luther E. Church was arrested yesterday on complaint of his wife charged with being a disorderly person and failing to support herself and child. He pleaded guilty and was allowed to go on condition that he furnished board and paying to his wife three dollars a week.

That doesn't sound to me like a man importuning his wife to return to him. I've attempted to find out where the Governor got the information he cited in his decision to commute, but was informed by New York State Corrections and Community Supervision that "[m]aterial in the clemency file is considered confidential and will be made available only in the discretion of the Governor." It seems a little silly, 131 years after the fact, to assert that release of the information "would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy." I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that the unsubstantiated allegations about Kate made by the Governor were the invasion of privacy. I do have the option to appeal this decision and will probably do so.

Unfortunately, that's where I have to leave the story of Kate Collins. I haven't been able to find anything else about her. She is not in the 1888 or 1899 city directories for Oswego (the ones available online to me), nor in the directories for 1903 and later in Fulton. She is not in the 1900 census that I can find. Her son is, though, under the name Thomas Church and living with his grandparents Peter and Bridget Collins. According to the website findagrave.com there is a Catherine Collins buried in St. Paul's Cemetery in Oswego, but no other information is provided other than her age of 66 years. I haven't been able to figure out who that person is. We were unsuccessful in our search for that grave when we visited St. Paul's in October, even though we knew it was in Section J. In sum, I guess I didn't succeed in helping Amie much to flesh out the life of Catherine Collins. There surely were a lot of interesting detours on the way though!

St. Paul's Cemetery in Oswego, New York, right on the shore of Lake Ontario.

Gathering information in St. Paul's Cemetery. Unfortunately, these McCarthys turned out to be a false lead.

Detours

Luther Church's eldest brother, Luke Ancil Church (1831-1901) moved to California in 1851 where he worked as a prospector, miner, a stage driver, and a hotel owner. His hotel was in a place called Don Pedro Bar, an area that is now lost under the waters of Don Pedro Lake. He moved from there to Paradise, in the process taking the wood from his old hotel to build his house there. In 1870 he then moved that house to the new settlement of Modesto, the third house in the town. That house still stands to this day.

Top, portrait of Luke Ancil Church (1831-1901). Bottom, the Church House in Modesto, California.

Luther's other brother did not fare so well (if that's the right word). He volunteered for the Union cause at the same time as Luther, and so was also in Company I of the 9th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry. He died of typhus fever on 27 Apr 1864 in the Regimental Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee.

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?