A family tree mystery solved (kind of)

Those of you following along with my family tree research know that I’ve come across several mysteries just begging to be solved. One of the chief has been a mystery invoving my great, great, great grandmother Catherine Toohey Larkin and young man named Martin Daly.

In 1870, Catherine Toohey (or Tuhey) and her husband Michael Larkin were living with their children in Pittsfield, MA. Living with them were Catherine’s brother Martin, sister Ann, a man named Henry Hurst (whom Ann would marry a few years later), Catherine’s mother Bridget (Eagen) Tuhey, and a 14-year-old man named Martin Daly.

Martin Daly was a mystery to me – who he was, how he was related, why he was living with the Tuhey/Larkins. Tracing census records it turns out that Martin was born in Galway, Ireland to parents Patrick Daly and Catherine Toohey.

It was way too much of a coincidence, right? His mother is Catherine Toohey and he’s living with Catherine Toohey Larkin. He’s born a year before Catherine and Michael’s first child Mary Ann is born in Ireland.

One idea is that Martin is Catherine’s son from a previous marriage. Definitely possibe but the timing between Martin’s birth and Mary Anne’s birth are very, very close. Perhaps there is another Catherine Toohey somehow related to my Catherine Toohey who had a son named Martin who, when he emigrated to America, came to live with distant relatives.

Well, after much research – and a major clue from the folks at the Pittsfield Library Local History Department – I can confidently say that my Catherine Tuhey/Toohey is not Martin Daly’s mother.

The folks at the library shared information from Martin Daly’s obituary, including the note that at his death he was survived by two brothers and a sister living in New Zealand. I’ve also found another brother named Charles living in Pittsfield.

In the 192o census, my Catherine (Toohey) Larkin tells the census taker that she’s had 8 children, 6 of whom who are living. I can account for all of her 8 children: Mary Ann, Michael, Margaret (Jennie), William, Ellen, James, Katherine, and Annie.

That means the numbers simply don’t add up.

Another clue: at no time after the 1870 census do I find Martin living with or next door to the Larkins. Given that my family literally lived within shouting distance from each other (including inlaws and their families) – and when I say shouting distance I mean from the kitchen to the front porch - it’s a little suspicious to not have him living on the same street. Not impossible – eventually Michael Larkin Jr will die in an old age home, despite the fact that he has siblings and family living in Pittsfield. (Another mystery: in the family that literally lives together from birth to death, how did one member end up in the home for the aged? Was he ill? Cuckoo? I don’t have any record of him living with any of the siblings once his mother Catherine dies; in fact, in 1920 he’s living in a boarding house.)

It’s likely that my Catherine’s father Patrick Toohey had a brother who had a daughter named Catherine, who would of course been Catherine Toohey. That’s very, very possible. Or maybe Martin’s mother Catherine Toohey is even more distantly related – a cousin of a cousin. He may have even been related somehow to Henry Hurst, who was staying with the family. People tended to immigrate together, either with or to stay with family, neighbors, etc. they knew in Ireland.

So while the mystery isn’t solved, I can eliminate a rabbit trail of research – although I would someday like to find out why Martin Daly was in the Berkshire prison and how he came to stay with the Larkins when he came to America.

Unfortunately, I had also hoped that this would place my Catherine Tuhey (Toohey) in Galway, Ireland so I could begin to look for records there. Now I’m not so sure that’s the right place to look. I’m not back to square one, but I’m close.

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My own little Lottie and it’s a long way to Tipperary

It’s been an eventful few weeks here at the Funny Farm as I trace my family tree. Not only was I able to find the birthplace of my great, great, great grandfather John Maloney in Ireland – Tipperary! – I also discovered that my great, great grandmother Annie Larkin Maloney’s had a niece was named Charlotte  Mountain - or, as the family called her, Lottie. (It was inevitable, wasn’t it, since it was a Lottie that started this whole mess.)

Annie’s sister Margaret – or Jennie, as the family called her, married a man named Edward Mountain. Lottie was one of their daughters. These people are so distant from me, time-wise; Charlotte Mountain was born in 1893. But they seem so real to me the more I get to know them. It’s like having a whole neighborhood living inside my head.

That’s the latest on my family tree – what are some interesting things you’ve been learning about your family?

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Tracing my family tree: a million crazy puzzle pieces

A family notes sheet in the early stages. I just learned the names of Mary Ann McDevitt’s parents, so I started a family sheet for them, plugging in what little information I have. Their children – Sarah, Ellen and Mary Ann – all have sheets of their own with their family information.

Tracing your family tree is a little like trying to put together a puzzle when the pieces are scattered in a thousand boxes all filled with pieces that belong to other people’s puzzles. You have to sift through millions of pieces to find the ones you need.

Making the task more difficult, as you’re searching, you often don’t know what you’re looking for: an edge, a corner, a blue or pink piece?

Here’s a tip to get started: first, write down all of the facts that you know for sure. Parents names, birthdays, marriage dates, names of siblings, their vital information. Ask questions of living relatives to get the information. These are things you can write in black sharpie marker and know you won’t have to change them, details you can ask of living people and that you can usually verify pretty easily.

My family tree: famine, poverty and religious persecution

Famine Memorial, Dublin, Ireland. (Photo courtesy AlanMc, WikiCommons)

As I’ve been researching my family tree, I keep coming back to one question: why did my ancestors leave Ireland?

Confession: I know very little about the country where so much of my heritage was born. For that matter, I know very little about American history, other than the major events. And I’m pretty fuzzy on a lot of them, too.

I’ve heard of the Irish potato famine but know nothing about what it was, the havoc it caused, and the poverty and hunger that drove the Irish to America.

I know nothing about the religious differences that have divided Ireland for generations; “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was just a U2 song, right? And how can Catholics and Protestants be at war in this modern, tolerant world, anyway?

Like I said, I’m clueless. And yet, the little I have learned about my family makes all of those issues in history alive for the first time.

It seems that my first Irish ancestors arrived in America in about 1847, with my great, great, great, great grandmother Mary Branagan. A few years later, in 1850, my great, great, great, great grandfather John Maloney immigrated; he and Mary Branagan would marry in 1852 in Cummington, MA and have, among other children, a son named Charles.

My great, great, great grandparents Michael and Catherine Touhey Larkin came to the U.S. in 1857; they had an infant daughter Mary with them. Michael and Catherine went on to have seven more children, five of whom lived. One of them was Annie.

On November 21, 1883, Annie Larkin married Charles Maloney, thus uniting one branch of my Irish family tree.

I have no records showing the exact dates of immigration for anyone on this side of the Irish family tree, where in Ireland they’re from, when exactly they came, or in what occupations anyone was employed while in Ireland. I know when John Maloney arrived in Massachusetts, he worked as a farm hand while the rest of the family, as they grew, worked in the woolen mills.

In fact, my entire family is filled with family who worked in the woolen mills. When Charles was 12, he was employed in the woolen mills; so far that’s the youngest I’ve seen but with 10 years in between each census, it’s not unlikely that some of my ancestors who are in their early 20s were employed as spinners and sewers as children or teens.

I’ve asked myself more than a few times what life in Ireland must have been like. Because in America, things weren’t all the cozy, at least looking back from the comfort of my modern home. No running water. No sanitation. A nation on the verge of Civil War. Jobs in mills were long and difficult.

And yet wave after wave of immigrants came, believing that what they would find here would be better than what they left behind. And it sounds like, in the case of Irish immigrants during this time, they were right.

In the book “Immigrants in America: The Irish Americans”, author Karen Price Hossell explains that the plight of Irish Catholics in the middle of the 19th century was worsened by British penal laws of the 17th century depriving them of the abilty to own land.  By the early 1800s, she writes, ”Catholics owned about 7 percent of the land in Ireland, even though they made up mor ethan 80 percent of the population.” While the penal laws were repealed in 1829, by then the damage was done. The Catholics were too poor to buy land even if they could.

And then, there was the potato blight.

In 1845, a potato blight that had first affected England and parts of Europe  spread to Ireland. That year, about 30 to 40 percent of the potato crop in Ireland was destroyed, but the following year nearly all of the potato crops in the country were ruined.

I don’t think we realize how well-fed we are in America.

It’s difficult to imagine today that an entire country could starve because of the failure of one crop. In modern America, we’re used to going to the grocery store and enjoying a selection of fresh meats, vegetables, and fruits that are not always even in season.

But for the Irish on the 1800s, meat was a rarity and the grain and other crops grown on the estates of landlords, as well as the livestock, was exported to England. As my mother likes to say, the cobbler’s children went barefoot.

So without the potato, the people of Ireland starved. They ate grass, seaweed, the rare cabbage. An inconsistent diet; if they weren’t starving they were sick from what they could find to eat. The Irish who worked the land as tenants found themselves in increasingly dire circumstances when they were evicted by landowners who were not obligated to provide them shelter.

In short, it was a desperate, desperate time.

It’s difficult to sit here in 21st century America and imagine that the failure of crops of potatoes could send an entire country into a devastating famine. And yet, it happened.

To put this into a little perspective, Quakers in Ireland offered some relieve by opening soup kitchens; by July 1847 there were about 2,000 soup kitchens serving hot meals to three million people every day.

The Poor Law Extension Act of 1847, an extension of the 1838 act establishing workhouses for the poor,  offered shelter – all the suffering had to do was turn over their land and agree to live in appaling, overcrowed, unsanitary, disease-ridden conditions. By 1851, three hundred thousand people lived in workhouses, and there was a waiting list of many more.

Monetary donations came from the US, India and other countries and while the blight was less severe in 1847, the crop of potatoes was sparse. The famine continued in this fashion until 1850, when the blight ended as quickly and mysteriously as it began.

Hossell writes that the English has little sympathy for the increasingly dire situation, owing to the fact that the English were predominantly Protestant and the suffering Irish were Catholics. (Ah, now the conflict in Ireland is starting to make sense.) In fact, the British response to the Irish famine is charged issue, referred to as “genocide by starvation”.

It was during the years of this devastation that my family began to arrive on U.S. shores. They weren’t alone. In 1840 about 1 million of the 17 million people living in America were of Irish descent; by 1854, that number more than doubled.

For the first time I am beginning to understand what drove them here, poverty I can’t imagine and perhaps a religious persecution that suddenly clears up the conflict in Ireland.

Like I said, I don’t know exactly where in Ireland they came from, or exactly why. But given the conditions in Ireland at the time, it makes sense that the potato famine was a catalyst, at least for the earliest of immigrants. Working in a woolen mill, living in a house, not facing famine, I suppose those things were a better life despite the fact that it doesn’t seem that way looking backward.

And it explains the deep Catholic roots of my family in Massachusetts. Not like today’s evangelical Christians spreading a doctrine, but in a lifestyle way. My family is Catholic. That’s just who they were. (It also explains why it was such a big deal that, as a teenager, I make my first communion. Despite the fact that both of my parents grew up Catholic, I grew up in a loosely faithful evangelical family and as such didn’t engage in those religious rites. But how that all came about is another story for another day.)

That’s just who we are, I guess. Devoted family, deeply faithful to their beliefs, willing to work for a better life for their children.

In other words, American.

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• The scent of my family tree – a little dust mixed with a lot of history
• Tracing my family tree one leaf at a time
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I’d blame Lottie, if she wasn’t dead

This is the family plot where Susan B. Anthony rests in Mt. Hope Cemetery.

I’d blame Lottie for this obsession, if she wasn’t a total stranger. And dead.

You remember Lottie. She was the name on the headstone at Mt. Hope Cemetery, the lonely headstone in a field of weeds, no dates, no last name, just “My Lottie.”

Bandit and I had started walking at Mt. Hope, and I’d already been captivated by the stories on the graves, especially by the stones that listed several children who had died. I’d done a little digging at the library, but it wasn’t until I met Lottie that things took a serious turn.

“Met” being a relative term; like I said, she’s dead.

On the day I met Lottie, I’d been exploring among a section of the cemetery that plays host to some impressive obilesks and monuments, each appearing to outdo the other for prominence, much the way the souls who rested beneath may have done in life.

The monstrously huge monument of Michael Filon; see Bailey in the front to understand its enormity. Who is Michael Filon and why does he deserve such a huge monument?

In particular was one monument that stands almost as tall as a two story house with the name Filon boldly emblazoned on it. I had no clue who Michael Filon was, but apparently he was some hot stuff, at least in his time.

Around the corner from Mr. Filon is the family plot of Susan B. Anthony. Understated and reserved, it doesn’t begin to hint at the significance of the woman buried there. Other than the marker and two small American flags, you could walk right by the plot and not realize you’d just passed history. (*There’s more about Michael Filon this at the end of this blog post.)

And then there was Lottie.

There are a lot of famous people buried at Mt. Hope, people who made significant contributions to American culture, politics, society. There are also a lot of people who thought they made contributions and so honored themselves with grotesquely huge monuments.

But my heart is for the nobodies. And  with no name or dates or other identifying marks on her headstone, Lottie was as nobody as nobody could be.

As you might remember from an earlier blog post about some of the headstones I’d been investigating , I learned that Lottie is Charlotte Harcourt, who died at the age of 15 on  29 Sept 1861 of neuralgia of the stomach.

I know nothing else about her, but I know that at least she is not forgotten.

This obession might have ended there had a librarian at the local history section of the Rochester Public Library not said something that has changed my life: “Why aren’t you researching your own family tree?”

I’m pretty sure I told her that there wasn’t anyone famous in my family, that we hadn’t made any significant contributions to the world, that while I’d done some research a few years earlier I really didn’t think it would be that interesting since we were just nobody.

I know, did you see the light bulb go off over my head, too?

Here I was, spending time and effort to ensure that the name of this total stranger, My Lottie, wasn’t lost forever. If I liked to champion nobodies, well, my family tree is full of them.

And so it began. I pulled out the old folders. The library edition of Ancestry.com became my new best friend. I started taking notes, bugging the librarian, and before long I was knee deep in names, dates, questions and a whole lot of fascinating stuff about regular people. No inventors or politicians (at least not until the 21st century; on the Italian side, I found a cousin of my mother’s who recently ran for mayor in her town) or world changers. Just people who were born, lived, married, worked, played and died.

Just like millions of other Americans.

The truth is that the people who make headlines are few and far between. I think we forget about that in our media-driven, celebrity-obsessed culture. We revere singers and actors and politicians and people who manage the once-in-a-million achievement while the garbage men and factory workers and construction flag men and secretaries and Walmart greeters and other working class joes do the bulk of the labor, and keep the country and economy moving.

A bunch of nobodies. Just like me!

Good grief, that makes me feel good.

See, I turned 48 a few weeks ago, and have been wallowing in my “I’ve done nothing with my life” self pity, lamenting my lack of contributions to the world while my clock is slowly ticking down. But I’m beginnig to realize that I’m not “nobody.” I’m actually everybody.

(As I typed that, the Beatle’s song “Nowhere Man” came onto the radio. I am not kidding. )

So for much of the last few months – and by “much” I mean almost every waking minute – I’ve been meeting my ancestors and even connecting with living relatives.

I thought that as I researched I’d share some of the stories I’m finding. Aren’t you excited?

The scent of my family tree – a little dust mixed with a lot of history

Pittsfield, MA c.1860; lithograph of painting by artist James Colt Clapp

There’s a spot in my house, as you walk up the stairs to the second floor and make the turn on the landing, where, if the conditions are right, it smells like my grandparents’ house.

It’s the smell of tiny dust particles suspended in the air, warmed by the bright sun that shines through the windows that overlook the driveway (and my neighbor’s house). It’s a quick scent of a sleeping dog and wooden banisters polished smooth by a hundred years of hands grasping on the way up and on the way down. It’s the smell of plaster walls and dark attics and creaking stairs, if creaking stairs have a smell. Which I think they do.

It only lasts a moment – less than a second – but when I smell it I’m transported to their house in Pittsfield, MA, an ancient triplex row house where my mother grew up, where her father lived. It’s the house her grandparents and great grandparents and great great grandparents either lived in or next to or around the corner from.

I think the smell of my grandparents’ house is actually the spirit of all of those people who slept, ate, laughed, cried and lived in those rooms for more than a hundred years. And as I’ve been tracing my family tree, those spirits have come alive for me in a way I didn’t expect.

It’s one thing to create a family tree – a bracketed chart that lists the basic details of my grandfather’s parents, their parents, their parents and their parents.

But those simple details – date of birth, date of death, date of marriage – don’t even begin to share the information I’ve amassed about their children, siblings, family. Where they lived, where they worked, how they died, and what the world was like when they walked the earth.

Take one set of my great, great, great grandparents on my mother’s side, for example.

Tracing my family tree one leaf at a time

My great-grandparents, James Francis and Mary Ellen Maloney Sheerin.

All of this cemetery walking I’ve been doing has piqued my curiousity about my own family tree.

Over the years, I’ve dabbled in tracing my roots. I’ve had some relatives who have done a lot of work and they’ve shared some information – although no one really wanted to share the bulk of the information. Just bits and pieces here and there.

And tracing your ancestry is like a mystery with a thousand plot twists and a million roads that will all lead to a legitimate clue. You’re only hinderance is time and patience.

So last week, I pulled out the old notebooks and folders and headed to the Rochester local history department, and then Brighton Memorial Library, because they have a free library edition of Ancestry.com.

I’ve been working on one mystery in particular: why my great, great grandmother is known as both Mary Ann McDevitt and also Mary Ann McDade.

Here’s the mystery: on the birth records and marriage records of the children of my great, great-grandparents John P Sheerin and Mary Ann McDevitt, her last name has been listed as McDevitt, McDavett, McDavid and McDade, McDeid, McDaid.

The first time I came upon the McDade variation, I passed the record up, because it was a birth record for a son, John, born in Willksbarre, PA. Wrong last name of the mother, and the other children I’d already found were all born in Berkshire County.

Then I found a photo that my mom’s cousin Suzanne had given to me before she died: a photo of two women she identified as “Mary Ann McDevitt (McDade)” and her sister, “Nellie McDevitt (McDade).”

Huh.

Finding peace and quiet in the cemetery

Key West Cemetery, Key West, FL Photo: (c) 2006 Wonder Dog Communications/Joanne Brokaw all rights reserved

I was getting my hair done today and my stylist was joking about how her kids were driving her crazy. “Sometimes I think the only peace I’ll get is when I’m dead,” she laughed.

Ironically, I was thinking about that today, too.

For the last few days I’ve been taking the dogs to walk in a local cemetery. While we wandered around the tombstones, some of them almost 200 years old, I was struck by how peaceful it was in the park. I thought about what the people buried there might say about the cemetery if they were able to talk.