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.

The (lost) family of Tim Driscoll

We’ve all done it: you shake a can of your favorite carbonated beverage, pop the top, and… well, you know what happens next. This happened to me a few months ago when I tried to explore some of my DNA matches.

The number of DNA matches that you’ll get is overwhelming, literally thousands. Most of these, as you’d expect, are pretty remote. One of the rules of thumb is that any match of less than 7 cM has a pretty high chance of being just a random match. That’s 7 cM out of a total of something near 7,000, or 0.1%. Most of the names of my DNA matches are entirely meaningless, and I have to try to dig in deeper to discover how they’re related. My usual strategy is to start with matches that are associated with their own family trees, the bigger the tree, the better. The next criterion is to research matches that have “unusual” names. If all you have to work with is the name, and the name is something super common like, say, Mary Jones, you’re going to run into a lot of false leads.

All this is to explain how I popped the top on my can of soda. It was a match on 23andMe; I’m going to purposely be vague on identification of these users because, you know, this can be a touchy issue. My other little dirty secret is that, for living people, Facebook is simultaneously a blessing and a curse. Some folks are extremely reticent to post anything of a personal nature on Facebook, but others spill their guts! For this DNA match that I began to explore I was able to find his/her site on Facebook. Unfortunately, that didn’t really help me out very much, that is, until I started exploring one of their friends, a sibling. Pop!

It took about two weeks worth of work, but I was able to follow this lead back five generations before it ran dry. At the end of the line was a couple by the name of Daniel O’Brien and Mary Driscoll. Of course, the wife's surname caught my attention since that was the maiden name of my great grandmother.

View of the townland of Bawngare, home of Daniel O'Brien and Mary Driscoll.

Mary Driscoll married Daniel O’Brien on 24 Feb 1846 in the parish of Skibbereen and Rath in West Cork. They lived in Bawngare in the parish of Aughadown. In the 21 years between 1847 and 1868, Mary gave birth to eleven children. I’ve been able to trace 16 DNA matches to the descendants of the children of Mary and Daniel O’Brien so far: four to their son Daniel, six to their daughter Katherine, one to daughter Margaret, two to daughter Hannah, and two to daugher Mary. It was pretty clear to me that we’re related to Mary Driscoll, but the question is: how?

Husband Daniel O’Brien died in 1874 at the age of 57. Mary, however, lived until 06 Jan 1914, and at that time the civil registration of her death claimed that she was 88 years old (so, roughly, born in 1826). The description of her funeral that was published in the Skibbereen Eagle turned out to be the key to the job of piecing together her family. Here’s the beginning of the obituary:

Mrs. Mary O’Brien, Bawngare, Aughadown.

It is with feelings of deep regret we have to chronicle the death of this respectable inhabitant, which took place at her residence on Tuesday morning. She was greatly respected by all who knew her for her high person, worth, and character. Belonging to one of the oldest and most respected families in the neighbourhood, where her ancestors have settled for many generations past in the district. Her death is sincerely mourned by a wide circle of relations and friends. The funeral, which took place for the Abbey, was, notwithstanding the inclemency of the weather was one of the largest seen in the district for some time.

The officiating clergymen were Rev J O’Sullivan, P P, Aughadown; Rec T Hil, C.C., do.

Then, the important part:

The chief mourners were – Daniel O’Brien, R.D.C. (son) [RDC = Rural District Council], Mrs O’Brien (daughter-in-law), Mary, Kate, John, William, Ellie, Dan, Stephen, Denis, Bridie, Kathleen, Michael, (grand-children), Mrs. Collins (sister), Timothy Driscoll (nephew), Mrs. McCarthy, Mrs Holland, Margaret M Collins (nieces) ....

Aughadown Cemetery, from the Skibbereen Heritage Centre. While Mary O'Brien lived in Aughadown Parish, I don't know in which graveyard she was buried.

Mrs. O’Brien, Daniel’s wife, was named Mary Anne Dwyer (1866 – 1952). The grandchildren listed were all the children of Daniel and Mary Anne. I still have not identified exactly who the nephew Timothy Driscoll was. After some digging, I was able to uncover that the sister, Mrs. Collins, was named Hanora. Margaret Mary Collins, as I expected, was her daughter. The other two nieces were more difficult to identify. I finally discovered that Mrs. McCarthy was another of Hanora’s daughters, Rebecca. The mysterious Mrs. Holland was more of a struggle. I will return to her shortly.

Five of the daughters of Daniel and Mary O’Brien – Mary, Margaret, Annie, Hannah, and Ellen – emigrated to the United States and settled in California, living in San Francisco and Alameda Counties or a bit farther south in the coastal farmlands of Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties. Knowing that, my interest was piqued when I started pursuing a new and different set of DNA matches, matches who lived in exactly the same area of California.

Panorama of the city of Watsonville, California.

These new matches, as far as the records would take me, traced back to a couple named Jeremiah Driscoll and Johanna Hickey. The American records say that Jeremiah was born around 1830 and died in 1884. He originally went to northern California to work in the mines, and then moved south to settle in the Pajaro Valley of Santa Cruz County, near the modern town of Watsonville. He and Johanna had nine children together. I’ll have more to say about Jeremiah’s family in a subsequent post. I have three DNA links with Jeremiah’s descendants, both through his son Richard.

In the 1860 Federal Census Jeremiah, age 27, is recorded living with his wife Hannah and their newborn, first-born daughter, Mary. Also listed is a man named Daniel Driscoll, age 29, a farm laborer born in Ireland. On the basis of this record, I have seen some speculation that this Daniel was Jeremiah’s brother.

To briefly review, my 2nd great grandfather, Timothy Driscoll, was born sometime around 1836. Mary Driscoll, a relative of some sort, was born around 1826. She had a sister Hanora (Mrs. Collins). Jeremiah Driscoll was supposedly born in 1830. And, finally, Jeremiah may have had an older brother Daniel. How to reconcile all these facts? I suspected that all of these people – Timothy, Mary, Hanora, Jeremiah, and Daniel – might be brothers and sisters. But that guess was based only on the DNA matches and the rough similarity of their ages (born about 1826 to 1836).

The Mysterious Mrs. Holland

There was one more loose thread: the mysterious niece, Mrs. Holland, mentioned in Mary O’Brien’s obituary. Who was she? To resolve this I used the church and civil registrations of births and marriages in Ireland. The civil registrations began in 1864, and I presumed and hoped that a niece of Mary would likely have been married after that date. This was important because the church records usually would only show the names of the bride and groom and the names of the witnesses. They might also include the name of the officiant, and even less commonly where the couple came from. The civil records, in contrast, give all of that information, always with the homes of both bride and groom, and the names of the couple’s fathers as well. So there’s a lot more information to work with there.

Home page of IrishGenealogy.ie, a source for transcriptions and images of church and civil records in Ireland.

In the civil records (accessed through irishgenealogy.ie) I found that between 1890 and 1914 there were eight marriages recorded in the D.E.D. (District Electoral Division) of Skibbereen records and two in the D.E.D. of Schull in which the groom was named Holland. (Thank goodness for uncommon names!) I also assumed that when the newspaper reported that Mrs. Holland was a niece of the deceased Mary O’Brien they were being literal. That is, that Mrs. Holland was either the daughter of one of Mary’s siblings, or she was the daughter of one of Daniel O’Brien’s siblings. Therefore, if Mrs. Holland was the daughter of a brother or sister of Mary, then her maiden name would either have been Driscoll (if she were the daughter of a brother) or her mother’s maiden name would have been Driscoll. I could get this information from Mrs. Holland’s marriage record or from the marriage record of her mother. Similarly, if Mrs. Holland were the daughter of one of Daniel O’Brien’s siblings, then either her maiden name was a variant of O’Brien or her mother’s maiden name was. Finally, the civil registration of the marriage of Mrs. Holland would tell me the name and residence of her father.

Civil registration of the marriage of Patrick Holland and Annie Driscoll.

The only marriage that fit these criteria occurred on 19 Feb 1903 in Rath Church in which Patrick Holland and Annie Driscoll were wedded. Annie was recorded to be living in Ardagh at the time of her marriage, and her father’s name was Patrick Driscoll. I then checked the civil birth records for an Annie born to father Patrick Driscoll in the years 1864 – 1883 (so that Annie would have been at least 18 when she married). There were three such cases, but all born in Cork City. I then expanded my search into the church records, and found a baptism for a Nancy Driscoll, 15 Jun 1865, in the parish of Rath and The Islands. The parents of this child were Patrick Driscoll and Margaret Driscoll. Now while there is a townland called Ardagh a good distance east of the area of my focus, there were also two others in the immediate area: Ardagh North and Ardagh South. If you enlarge the image of the registration of their marriage, you'll see that one of the witnesses has a familiar name: Margaret Mary Collins. Therefore, this lead seemed very promising, and so this is where I concentrated my attention.

In the 1901 Census of Ireland for the D.E.D. of Tullagh there is a record for an Annie Driscoll (age 28) living in the home of her brother Michael (age 36) and his wife Mary in the townland of Ardagh South. I could not confidently recognize either of Annie’s parents, Patrick or Margaret, anywhere in this census. In a search of the civil death records I found one Patrick Driscoll of about the right age in the period from 1865 – 1901. This man died in 1877 at the age of 62 (therefore, born around 1815). I failed to find a Margaret, at least one that I could confidently identify as the mother of Annie. There were several possibilities, but with little information to distinguish them.

I went back and searched the birth records for children born of parents Patrick and Margaret Driscoll. I found seven, Annie being the youngest. Five of these children emigrated from Ireland and lived in either Santa Cruz or Monterey Counties in California. Coincidence? I think not! I have one DNA match with a descendant of Patrick and Margaret (and six additional matches with the descendants of that match). This reassured me that I’d been lucky enough to find the right Mrs. Holland!

Now I have another potential sibling of my 2nd great grandfather, but was it Patrick or Margaret? Both had the surname Driscoll. All told, I had six potential brothers and sisters. The next step was to try to pull all these threads together, and if they were siblings, who were their parents?

Pulling the Threads Together

For years I had despaired of learning more about the ancestry of my great-great-grandfather Tim Driscoll. Both his given name and his surname are very common in the area of West Cork. I could find lots of Tim Driscolls in the records, but I had no way of knowing which one was the right one. The same is true for all of the rest of the names I’d uncovered: Patrick, Daniel, Jeremiah, Mary, Hanora, Margaret, and Johanna. Then the thought occurred to me that even if I couldn’t confidently associate an individual with a specific record, perhaps I could make some progress if I looked at this as a family. My question, therefore, became: how many families in West Cork had children with all of the names Mary, Jeremiah, Timothy, and Hanora? I didn’t include Daniel in this list because the evidence was pretty slim that he was actually Jeremiah’s brother. Also, I didn’t know if it was Patrick or Margaret who was a member of this group.

I have a long list of reasons why this search strategy could fail. But basically, here’s what I did. I tabulated the parents and the baptismal date for all the Driscoll children with these names who were born between 1820 and 1840 in the parishes of Aughadown, Caharagh, Muintervara, Rath and The Islands, Schull East, Schull West, and Skibbereen. A total of 479 families in these West Cork parishes had at least one child with the name Mary, Jeremiah, Hanora, or Timothy. But I was pleasantly surprised – no, ecstatic – to find that only one family had kids with all four of these names.

The parents in this family were named John Driscoll and Mary Hourihane. The baptismal dates for the four children where Mary, 15 Apr 1825; Jeremiah, 08 Feb 1829; Honora, 09 Jun 1833; and Timothy, 18 May 1835. This is exactly the same birth order that I’d gleaned from other records, and the dates are close. Remember, that in those days people were a lot more free and easy with this information than we are today. For two of the baptisms the townland is recorded: Ballymacrown. This is the same place that my 2nd great grandparents Tim Driscoll and Ellen Collins had lived. I then searched the baptismal records of Skibbereen to find any other children of that couple, and I came up with four more names: Daniel, baptized 04 Feb 1827 from Ballymacrown; John, 23 Jan 1831 also from Ballymacrown; Michael, 08 Apr 1837; and Johanna, 15 Jun 1840.

Registration of the baptism of Deniel Driscoll in the register of Skibbereen (Creagh and Sullon) parish.

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

A Sable Galley

We all had such great plans for 2020, didn't we? My plan for the summer was to attend the International Congress of Entomology, scheduled for mid-July in Helsinki. After a week of binging on bugs in the capital city, we were going to spend a week traveling in Finland, followed by a week in Ireland. I had all the places lined up for a bit of a family history tour. Well, that plan didn't work out so well. The Congress has been postponed for a year, but with any luck I may still be able to make the trip. Until then everything has to be virtual. I had done a fair amount of preparation, though, and since I couldn't go to Ireland in person, I thought that I'd try to pre-create (is that a word) my planned trip.

Let's begin with my great grandmother - my mother's mother's mother. Her name was Hannah (or Johanna) Driscoll, and she was born in West Cork, Ireland in the townland of Ballymacrown (in Irish, that would be Baile Mhic Eiriúin). She was baptized in the Catholic parish of Rath and The Islands on March 1st, 1870. Well, that's what the parish record says, anyway. In later life she would say that she was born in 1872. Time seems to have been a flexible commodity in that era and that place. Her parents were Timothy Driscoll and Ellen Collins, and the baptism was witnessed by Barry Collins and Ellen Sullivan. (Barry was probably her uncle.) Today, the townland of Ballymacrown is in the parish of Skibbereen, so the extent of the parishes must have changed over the past 150 years. It turns out that there are lots of older family connections throughout West Cork. Both of the surnames Driscoll and Collins are very common in this area, and the names Timothy, Ellen, and Johanna are found everywhere (although, not so nearly common as Mary!).

Baptismal record for Johanna Driscoll from the parish register.

As far as I've been able to determine, Hannah and her brother Jeremiah were the first of her immediate family to emigrate to the U.S. The oldest record I've found is in the 1892 census of New York State in which she is described as a domestic and living in the city of Oswego, New York. This document does not explicitly say anything about the relationships between the people listed, nor does it specify the address. That said, it is more or less organized by households since the surnames are clustered and children are generally listed in order of age. So I think we can make some tentative interpretations: the name immediately before Hannah's is "Jerrimiah," 22 years old, and that age corresponds with what I found in the Irish parish registers. The next three names above Jeremiah's are interesting, and something I hadn't noticed until writing this blog post: they are Thomas Collins, aged 54, sexton; Peter Collins, aged 18, laborer; and Nellie Collins, aged 15, domestic. This meant absolutely nothing to me when I first found this record several years ago, but on the basis of this summer's research I think that I know who these people were! That'll have to be the subject of one of the next blog posts. (I'm really excited to see this now.)

1892 New York census record for Hannah Driscoll and her brother Jeremiah.

In 1895, following the death of her husband, Ellen Driscoll emigrated to the U.S., travelling with her four children Timothy, Ellen, Katie, and Michael. They entered the country in Philadelphia, came from Skibbereen, and their destination was recorded as "Sister Hannah, 152 Water St., Oswego."

Immigration record for Ellen Driscoll and children (lines 7-11) at the port of Philadelphia.

My goal in this post is not to pursue the fate of all of these children in America, but rather to go in the other direction, back to Ireland. Skibbereen (An Sciobarín) is a small town, with a population of 2,778 in 2016, located about 50 miles southwest of Cork city. The town sells itself today as the "hub of West Cork," a base from which to explore the area. However, it gained international fame during the years of the Great Famine (an Gorta Mór, 1845-1852). The Illustrated London News sent an artist to the area in early 1847 to report on the conditions and provide pictures of what he found. Some of these pictures are very famous and have been reprinted many times, particularly the images of people suffering.

Mahony also sketched the town of Skibbereen. The caption says the vantage point was Clover Hill, and this is basically the northern entrance into town. The two buildings in the drawing are still there. On the left is the Courthouse, still serving that function today. On the right is the schoolhouse that had just been built. Today that building is the headquarters of a local tech company, Spearline. You may find a discrepancy between the two pictures of the schoolhouse: renovations in the 1970s converted the two-story building to three.

One of the highlights that I was looking forward to was a visit to the Skibbereen Heritage Centre. I found the story about the Courthouse and schoolhouse on their website, and you can find more details in their story about an Interesting history of two prominent buildings in Skibbereen. I had scheduled an appointment with Margaret, the genealogist at the Heritage Centre, but of course I had to cancel. That might have been a bit of a blessing: I've discovered so much about my Driscoll and Collins relatives over the summer. When I do get a chance to meet with her, I'll have a lot more background material for her.

I believe that Ellen Collins was born in the townland of Drishane. The photograph of her baptismal record is barely legible, and I don't think the townland was recorded. It is recorded, though, in the baptismal records of some of her brothers. Drishane borders the village of Castletownshend, which is only 5.5 miles (8.8 km) southeast of Skibbereen. At the end of this post is a map of West Cork with all of these places labelled. The townland is the location of Drishane House, built in 1780, the ancestral home of the Somervilles. Some of you may recall the television series produced by Ulster Television and Raidió Teilifis Éireann (Irish Radio & Television) from 1983-1985, The Irish R.M. (R.M. stands for resident magistrate.) I saw it occasionally in PBS reruns. The connection is that the TV series was based on stories authored by the cousins Edith Œnone Sommerville and her (female) cousin Martin Ross. I've added a short video with an aerial view of Drishane House.

The townland of Ballymacrown, where Tim and Ellen Driscoll farmed, is southwest of Skibbereen, near the port town of Baltimore (Baile an Tighe Mór). No, not that Baltimore: although the U.S. city of Baltimore was named for the second Baron Baltimore, his Baltimore Manor was in north-central Ireland, in County Longford. Confusingly, there were two Timothy Driscolls living and farming in Ballymacrown. It's very tempting to conclude that they were somehow related, but I haven't been able to figure that out yet. My Tim Driscoll died fairly young, at the age of 47 in 1883 of some kind of fever. One of my genealogical loose ends is that the informant in the civil registration of his death was his niece, Anne Driscoll. Frustratingly, I still don't know who she was.

View of the townland of Ballymacrown, County Cork.

Ellen Driscoll passed away in 1919 in Oswego, and her obituary states that "She is survived by four sons, Jeremiah, Timothy, Daniel, and Michael of this city, and two daughters, Mrs. Patrick Cotter, Ireland and Mrs. Frederick Bough; also a brother, Peter Collins of this city" (published in the Oswego Daily Times, 01 Jul 1919). For the longest time I had been able to account for everyone on that list except for the mysterious Mrs. Patrick Cotter. To solve that problem required a bit of speculation initially.

Headstone of Ellen Driscoll in St. Paul's Cemetery, Section Q, in Oswego, New York.

The first step was to work my way through all of the baptismal records in the area of West Cork around Skibbereen, looking for children with the parents Timothy Driscoll and Ellen Collins from the townland of Ballymacrown. At the end of this there was a grand total of ten children! Seven of these I've already named. In addition there was John, the firstborn, who died at the age of 5 in 1867. There were two Timothys, the one in the immigration record from Philadelphia, but also an earlier one baptized in 1872 (another reason to not believe that Hannah was born in 1872). I presume that this child also died young, but I haven't found a death record. And the third one, new to my list at the time, was a girl: Mary. Since this was the only daughter that was unaccounted for, I concluded that she must be the missing Mrs. Cotter. And if Mrs. Cotter was living in Ireland at the time of her mother's death in 1919, then likely she would appear in one or both of the surviving censuses of Ireland which were made in 1901 and 1911. Luckily enough, I was able to find her in both of them. Her husband Patrick is not included in either census, but he was a fisherman and likely was out at sea when the census taker came round. Mary Anne Cotter (for her middle name turned out to be Anne) had seven children, all of whom survived childhood. She worked, probably in her home, as a dressmaker in a place that the census recorded as Middle Glen, Skibbereen.

1911 Census of Ireland record for the Cotter household.

At this point it would be appropriate to challenge me: how do you know that this is the right Patrick Cotter and Mary Driscoll? These are very common names, and this may be nothing more than coincidence. In my defense, the civil record of their marriage in 1885 stated that Mary was from Ballymacrown and that her father was named Timothy (already deceased by this time). Further research has revealed several DNA matches with descendants of Patrick and Mary. Therefore, I'm reasonably confident that I was lucky enough to find the right couple.

A couple of things to note about the census record. First, Mary spoke both Irish and English. West Cork is one of the few places left in Ireland, the Gaeltacht, where Irish is a first language and is used as an everyday means of communication. Second, the "address" where they lived: Middle Glen, Skibbereen. You'd be forgiven if you thought that Middle Glen was a neighborhood in that town. Instead, Middle Glen is on Cape Clear (Cléire or Oileán Chléire), and despite its name, this is an island off the far southwestern coast of Ireland. The population of the island, as of 2011, was only 124 people on a total of 2.6 square miles (6.7 km²). Cape Clear is the southernmost populated area of Ireland.

View of North Harbor on Cape Clear.

Once I'd discovered Mary Anne Cotter (1865-1941) it felt like a door had opened, and I entered a house with dozens of new rooms to explore. Mary and Patrick had eight children: John Patrick (1887-1974), Mary Anne (1891-1961), Patrick (1893-1963), Catherine (1895-1978), James (1898-????), Hannah (1900-????), Timothy (1903-1916), and Elizabeth (1906-1980). The question marks with some of those names are a clue that there's still a lot for me to learn about the family. But from what I know so far, I've found descendants of them in Ireland (of course), England, Scotland, Connecticut, California, Australia, and even a third cousin living here in Columbus, Ohio!

The eldest son, John Patrick, has an interesting history. Like many in the family, he was a man of the sea. He only completed one year of high school education, but by 1940 his occupation is cited in the census as Ship Captain. I'm not sure exactly when he emigrated to the U.S., but in 1917 when he registered for the World War I draft he was a naturalized citizen and living, or at least based, in San Francisco. At that time he was Mate on the S.S. Ecuador, a ship then owned by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company.

During the Second World War Cotter served in a number of roles in the Navy, including captain of several different ships transporting troops around the Pacific theater of operations. Here is an excerpt from a letter the he wrote to his brother Patrick and published in the newspaper Southern Star:

We all made Brisbane safe on December 22 [1942], stayed there three weeks, then sailed for Port Moresby in New Guinea. Again I was attacked by submarines, three of them, and I had no cruiser or plane. I had to run for New Zealand, got to the port of Auckland, and had to wait there twenty-three days for a convoy. Then started out again and made Port Moresby safe. From Port Moresby we returned to Sydney Australia and loaded cargo and troops for Port Darwin in North Australia. We had a convoy of ten ships and an American destroyer [the USS Peary, I believe]. The Meigs [a troop transport] was with us.

At 10 o'clock on the morning of February 19, 1942, while getting ready to anchor in Darwin Harbour forty Jap bombing planes appeared overhead and started bombing.

Our Destroyer was the first to get hit, she went to pieces. Then the Meigs sank. I ran out under a smoke screen and made twenty-two knots an hour until dark, when I was told to return to Brisbane.

There were seven ships sunk in Darwin that morning in about forty-five minutes. I sure was lucky I had a fast ship and a good one. There was one man killed on the Meigs and several wounded including the Captain. He was chief officer with me when I was in charge of the Meigs. Everyone on the Destroyer was lost.

The S.S. West Lewark in 1921, later renamed the USAT Meigs.

I want to wrap up this post by returning to Cape Clear and West Cork. On the northwest side of the island, facing the Atlantic, are the ruins of O'Driscoll's castle (Dún an Óir, Gold Castle). There is also another O Driscoll castle, Dún na Séad, in the port village of Baltimore. These are just two fortified buildings - castles or ports - associated with the Driscoll family in West Cork. The family traces its history back into the mists of mythical times, and the name is derived from Ó hEidirsceoil. They were Kings of Munster in the 7th century and remained one of the dominant groups up until the reign of Henry VIII in England. At that point the ruling class were dispossessed, but the name remains one of the dominant ones in this part of Ireland. As I've started learning a bit more of this part of Irish history, I can tell that there is a tremendous amount of information of which I am totally ignorant. This will be an interesting area to continue to dig into.

Dún an Óir, O Driscoll "castle" on Cape Clear.

Dún na Séad, O Driscoll "castle" in Baltimore.

I've found two resources to help me to learn more about the O Driscoll family. The first is a website devoted to the O Driscolls at odriscolls.me.uk The second is a book that I saw for sale on the web: O Driscolls Past and Present by Éamon Lankford. Lankford, among his many pursuits, is the founder and director of the Cape Clear Island Museum and Archive. In addition to its exhibits, the small museum "houses the O Driscoll Memorial Archive and exhibition panels relating to the history and heritage of the Worldwide O Driscoll family" (capeclearmuseum.ie). This is certainly a place I would love to visit. After I ordered the book, I was surprised to receive a personal email from the author, inviting me to contribute my own family story to their collection of stories from the O Driscoll diaspora. He also pointed out that annually (well, in non-COVID years) there is an annual O Driscoll Clan Gathering on the last weekend in June. That's definitely something to factor in when we can feel safe in travelling again!

2019 O Driscoll Clan Gathering in Baltimore.

If you look closely at the Clan Gathering picture, you can see on the flag one rendition of the O Driscoll coat of arms. The version that I have at the top of this post, and that inspired the title of the post, comes from Lankford's book. Here is his explanation of its significance: The O Driscoll crest has a black (sable) galley on a white (argent) background. The galley represents the Clan's maritime power, while the furled sails represent constancy. The cormorant overhead is the emblem of Charity, while the white background significies Peace and Security."

To close, here is the promised map of the places that I've mentioned in the post.

Reference

Lankford, E. 2019. Ó Drisceoil. O Driscolls Past and Present. Celum Publishing, Cork. 193 pp.