Arthur Conroy: Tragedy x 2

I came across a death record of my 2nd great grand uncle, Arthur Conroy, who died in Billerica, MA in 1864 at the age of 24.  Listed as the cause of death was "Acute Peritonitis".  Peritonitis can be a complication of cirrhosis of the liver, or it can caused by bacteria spilling into the abdominal cavity, either because of an ulcer, rupture or injury of some kind.

One year after Arthur died, his sister Rachael gave birth to a son out of wedlock.  She named him Arthur, no doubt as a tribute to her late brother.  In 1899, Arthur Conroy was shot dead by a woman who mistook him for an intruder, as he drunkenly tried to get into her house in the middle of the night.  He was 33.

The Realization

That it's not a pleasant experience for some people to learn about their ancestors:

Like others, Hoess had to overcome fierce resistance within his own family, who preferred that he "not poke around in the past." Undeterred, he spent lonely hours at archives and on the Internet researching his grandfather.

Rudolf Hoess was in charge of Auschwitz from May 1940 to November 1943. He came back to Auschwitz for a short stint in 1944, to oversee the murder of some 400,000 Hungarian Jews in the camp's gas chambers within less than two months.

The Centenarian

OK, so she might have been off by a few years.  But given that she saw virtually all of the 19th century firsthand, I'll spot her a couple.  She was my third great grandmother, and her life spanned from the end of the Georgian Era, through the Regency Era, and to the very end of the Victorian Era. Her parents John Kierce and Catherine Kane were probably born during the American Revolution or not too long after it began.

Bridget Kierce was born in 1805 in Ireland, likely in Mollaneen, Dysart, Corofin area of County Clare:

[Corofin] is situated on the River Fergus ten kilometres from Ennis.The village takes its name from an ancient fording place on the river Fergus,associated in legend with the romantic hero,Fionn Mac Cumhail and his chivalrous warrior band - Ireland's answer to King Arthur and his Knights. The hinterland is known as Clare Lakelands and Lake Inchiquin beside the village-often referred to as the "Killarney of Clare" was the setting for Barker's well known An Angler's Paradise.

Set in the unique Burren landscape, Corofin is an old settlement of considerable historical importance having its roots in an estate village created to service the O' Brien barony of Inchiquin. Catherine Keightley, wife of Lucius O' Brien and first cousin to the two English monarchs, Queen Mary and her sister Queen Anne, built St Catherine's Church in the early eighteenth century.

The area of Corofin, in County Clare, Ireland

Bridget was married at 18 to James Burns.  They had eight children (that we know of), all born in Ireland between 1824 and 1850.   The Potato Famine was at its height in 1845-55 and she and James lived in an area that was heavily affected by the Potato Famine and the emigration that resulted from it:

Population percent decrease  for years
1841 - 1851 during Potato Famine.

How they fared during the famine years is unknown, but by the time she emigrated to the US in her sixties, the worst of the famine had passed. I imagine she migrated after she was widowed, since her husband James does not show on any records I could find nor was he mentioned in her obituary.  Some of her children were already here, but not all of her children followed her to the States. One of her children who stayed behind was my Second Great Grandmother Bridget Burns Meehan.

Bridget moved in with her son Malachi in Dracut and then followed him again when he moved to Lowell.  In 1870 she was working as a housekeeper and continued to "keep house" well into her old age.  And though she spoke English, she enjoyed speaking Gaelic any chance she got.

Bridget was 96 years old when she died on the 19th of Feb 1901.  Her obituary states that she was remarkably active for one so advanced in years,

and up to the time of her illness a few days ago was able to be out.  She was taken ill last Wednesday, and each day her condition grew worse until the end came.  She resided in Belvidere twenty five years and prior to her taking up residence in that section she lived at the Dracut Navy Yard* where she had many friends. During her residence in Lowell she worshiped at the Immaculate Conception church of which she was a devout member.

Some events she was alive to witness (or hear about):

• War of 1812
• Battle of Waterloo
• Washington D.C. burned by the British
• The Death of Napoleon
• The Emancipation Proclamation
• Lincoln Assassination
• Dawn of Electricity

 *A Navy Yard in Dracut? Apparently the Dracut Navy Yard wasn't a Navy Yard as I'd imagine it. It was a section of Dracut with textile mills that had at one time made uniforms for the navy.  Or so someone said online, and it sounds like a likely explanation.

The Weaver

In  a 1901 Billerica town directory, Mary Jane was listed as "Widow of Cornelius, Weaver, 15 Lowell Street".  She was a mother to 4 children, and held down work in the mills.

She was born Mary Jane Cox to John and Mary Cox in Fermanagh, Enniskillen, Northern Ireland and left to come to the US, on her own, when she was just 15.  Her brother John stayed behind in Enniskillen to start a family.  He was her only relation that we are aware of.

She listed her year of immigration as 1873, and she married Cornelius McCusker in Lowell on May 7th, 1880. She and Cornelius show as borders on 44 Williams Street in Lowell on a 1880 census with a Devlin family.  They were surrounded by other young Irish immigrants who found work in the Mills.

Lowell Mill girls, 19th century

Mill work was dusty, monotonous and loud.  Very loud.  An operative in one of the mills wrote about how life in the mills wasn't all bad.  Methinks she doth  protest too much:

Pleasures, did you say? What pleasures in factory life? From many scenes with which I have become acquainted, I should judge that the pleasures of   factory life were like  "Angels visits, few and far between"-said a lady whom fortune had placed above labor. I could not endure such a constant clatter of machinery, that I could neither speak to be heard, nor think to be understood, even by myself. And then you have so little leisure-I could not bear such a life of fatigue. Call it by any other name rather than pleasure.

But stop, friend, we have some few things to offer here, and we are quite sure our views of the matter are just, having been engaged as an operative the last four years. Pleasures there are, even in factory life; and we have many, known only to those of like employment. To be sure it is not so convenient to converse in the mills with those unaccustomed to them; yet we suffer no inconvenience among ourselves. But, aside from the talking, where can you find a more pleasant place for contemplation?

 I'm sure I could come up with a few.

The work was drudgery and the hours exhausting.  They worked six days a week, twelve hours a day.  They got out "early" on Saturdays when the dismissal bell rang at 5:00 pm.

 The work schedule for the mills.  From 6:30 am to

6:30 pm with a half an hour for lunch.

But the work allowed her to save enough to help her daughter with a down payment on a house years later.  And she was known to send money back to her brother in Ireland.

Mary Jane was widowed in 1896 when Cornelius died at age 38.  By this time they were living in Billerica.  The 1910 census says that she had 5 children, 4 of them still living. 

She would lose 2 of those 4 surviving children during the 1917/1918 epidemic.  Etta and Joseph were in their 30's when they passed away.  Uncle Vin's memoirs says there is reason to believe the cause was possibly the Spanish Flu which was quite lethal at that time, but I have not been able to find their death records online to verify.

In 1930 she was 69 and  living with her daughter, my grandmother Anna R. and  grandfather Frank Mahoney in North Billerica.  My uncle Vinny remembers her this way:

Grandma McCusker was a very nice woman. I remember her well.  She was a quiet, kind woman who minded her own business, a woman who certainly couldn't have had a very soft life.  

Physically, Mary Jane was a fairly tall and spare woman.  She had a good sense of humor, but a very subtle laugh, almost a chuckle. I never remember her roaring with laughter like the Mahoneys.

Things, mostly little things that I remember about Mar' Jane (pronounced by her friends as   "Mare Jane  "): her hair bun almost on top of her head,(I swear Grandma and mother both called these "pugs".  Perhaps it's an old Irish expression?) her metal rimmed glasses; her long slim, wrinkled aging fingers; her gold tooth (only one I think, but she had her own teeth until she died.)

She and mother took me to Lowell occasionally.  On one occasion they took me to a Chinese restaurant roughly located at Merrimack and Central upstairs over the "Five and Ten".  I was probably under 5 years old, and I was scared to death.  It was not only the looks of the Chinese and the fact that their English was barely understandable (although that was a lot of my problem) but the booth with the glass bead curtains or whatever they were plus the food, to which I was absolutely new - all in all it was too much.  I don't imagine mother and Grandma had a very enjoyable meal!

[But] Grandma McCusker was always  "there  " with Christmas and birthday gifts for Henry and me. Things like sheepskin coats and snow boots. 

 She was a great Grandma.

The American Picker

I don't know much about my great great grandfather Patrick J. Smith, except what I can glean from the civil records.  There is no one now alive who knew him personally.  The best I can do is try to fill in gaps between the "bones" of the recorded milestones of his life.

Patrick was born in Ireland, but came to the US in 1857 at the age of 5. He married Ann L. Smith in 1870 at 18 years old.  Of 9 children, 6 survived, including my great grandmother Ann.

By 1880 he was 28 years old, newly naturalized, and  in a partnership with a guy named William Langley.  They set up Langley & Smith at 69 & 71 Middle Street. At a time when nearly everyone in Lowell worked in the Textile Mills, Patrick certainly seemed to find his own way. Langley was an older man, aged 61, and it's possible that Patrick started with him as a clerk and was groomed to take over the business on Langley's retirement.  On his census, Patrick referred to his occupation as "Works a Junk Shop".  Eventually Old Man Langley retired sometime before the turn of the century and moved back up to New Hampshire where he died of heart disease in 1904 at the age of 85 years.

Ad from the Lowell City Directory of 1880. 

Sometime in the 1890's Patrick had taken on the shop as his own - Patrick J. Smith.  As far as I can tell, he continued the business model that he and Langley had used..  Mostly scrap material from trade processes of the day, such as from builders, tailors, and especially the cotton and woolen mills.  The shop started out on Middle Street, but eventually moved to Market Street, before the turn of the century.

The industrialization of America was still well underway.

In the 1800s, it seemed most everything had a second life. Capitalizing on the trade of used goods, a fairly sophisticated reuse and recycling system evolved to feed raw materials to the sprouting roots of industrialism.

All over the country, even middle-class people traded rags to peddlers in exchange for tea kettles or buttons," Strasser writes. "The regional, national and even international trade in rags was brisk because they were in high demand for papermaking ... Grease and gelatin could be extracted from bones. Otherwise, bones were made into knife handles, ground for fertilizer or burned into charcoal for use in sugar refining. Bottles were generally refilled."  

Materials left over from factory production combined with that generation's tendency to employ the "make do or do without" sentiments, scrap dealers were flourishing.

While the businesses ranged from large brokerages with teams of laborers to one-man operations with little equipment beside a bag to collect goods, the successful scrap traders shared the skills of identifying potentially valuable materials and identifying markets for those materials.

Nonetheless, the scrap business remained a risky proposition ruled by the cyclical dictates of supply and demand. Scrap dealers played the odds, stockpiling material when prices dropped and selling when demand drove prices up. 

In 1900 Patrick and his family lived on 27 Washington Street, Lowell. By this time his son Thomas F. joined him and so he added "& Son" to the business name.

 

 Advertisement in the Lowell City Directory 1899

 But as the twentieth century wore on, the scrap game changed:

A defining feature of the industry during the second half of the twentieth century was a shift in the large brokerages and yards from family-owned businesses to corporate-owned businesses. While industry veterans credited factors from increased government regulation of trade practices and environmental health and safety conditions to lack of interest from the younger generations to stay in the family business for the shift, the scale of the industry and its investment costs grew substantially after 1950

Neighboring Saddle shop on Market Street, Lowell at 

the same time as Patrick's shop, 1889

 

I don't know when Patrick stopped working.  In 1920, on the last census that I find him, he's still managing "a junk yard" at the age of 72.  But by now his son Thomas was working as a clerk in a saloon, so the father/son business did not continue for long.  Toward the end he was living with his daughter and son-in-law, along with his wife and some of his grandchildren from his daughter Anne.

I believe that Patrick J. died in 1924 in Lowell, probably working until the end. A death certificate states that he died of Acute Bronchitits.

The White Whale

Cyrus Ham (if that is his real name) is the elusive relation who seems to frustrate every effort to track him down.  My frequent and abrupt hiatuses from genealogical research are usually due to banging my head against a brick wall in my search for this man.

 Not Cyrus, but a close depiction of my mental image of him.

Cyrus Ham was a farmer, born in Rochester, New Hampshire in 1818.  His surname suggests that he was born into a family with roots that extend to the very founding of the city itself. Eleazar Ham was the second settler in Rochester which was founded in 1728.  By 1738 there were sixty families centered near Haven Hill, banded together to fend off Indian attacks, which were frequent enough to prompt officials to offer a $100 bounty on Indian scalps.

With what could potentially be a very prominent family, I expected some pretty meaty records.  To list off the attempts that ended in failure would bore the most ardent genie, but suffice it to say that all searches online and visits to Vital Records in Concord and Rochester have been fruitless.  

In my frustration at finding anything on Cyrus himself, I decided to "go sideways" and see if I could find a route through siblings.   His will mentions his sister's daughter Jennie Twombly, and from there I found his sister's name Lucy Swain.  Lucy Swain's death certificate states her parent as Eleazar Ham.  This is tantalizingly close, but the dates for Eleazar the founder and Eleazar the parent don't match. Not even close.  It may be one is the descendant of the other, but that conclusion will require more proof than I have right now.

What I do know about Cyrus is that he at some point moved to Billerica, Massachusetts and married Julia Ann Wood from Chelmsford.  In 1870, he was a 51 year old farmer with personal worth of  $6500, or about $110,000 in today's dollars.  He had one son, Foster, who served during the Civil War, and an adopted daughter, Ella, who was my great grandmother. (Adopted from whom? Let's say I have my suspicions.)  Foster's son Frank also lived with the family at that time, as Foster seemed to be having marital difficulties. 

It was likely due to these difficulties that Cyrus put into play restrictions on his will that would impact Massachusetts State Law.  In an attempt at keeping the detested daughter-in-law from sharing in the estate, he provided that his son Foster would be the executor, but not inheritor of his estate, unless or until the daughter-in-law was dead or divorced.  The plaintiffs in the ensuing court case maintained that this was unfair and/or illegal and it eventually made it all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, who ruled that it was neither.

Just as Robbie Burns wrote "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men often go awry" so too did the will of Cyrus backfire. Pretty spectacularly in my estimation.  Foster died before he could divorce.  There was a provision that Cyrus' niece should receive the estate should Foster not survive to claim it, probably in the belief that she would filter the money to the grandson without any getting passed onto the child's mother.  While the will was being contested, the niece died suddenly (obstruction of the bowels) while in her 30's, and the whole estate passed to her husband's family, who apparently weren't of the mind to share it.  Cyrus' grandchild, who Cyrus may have believed would be taken care of by his niece, received nothing of the family estate.

UPDATE:  Ahab, here.  Progress made, updates coming.....

The Munitions Worker

My great grandfather Joseph D. was born in Massachusetts in 1879 to the DesJardin family.  His parents and sister went by the DesJardin name, as they came from French Canada, but Joseph was the first who regularly went by the anglicized name Gardner. Although he never bothered to change it officially, he was known in all city directories as Gardner once he was out on his own.  The first time the DesJardin family appears in the Lowell City Directory is 1889.  They lived in 51 Rock Street, and Joseph's parents would continue to live there for some time to come.

At the age of 21 he married 23 year old  Annie Smith in Lowell, MA.  The new century had just begun.

The next directory he appeared in was 1909.  This time he was listed as Gardner, and he and his young family had moved to 168 Hale Street in Lowell.

He worked as a machinist for U.S. Cartridge Company which produced a newly patented metal cartridge for firearms developed to counteract the accidental explosions which were an issue at that time. The company also produced paper-shot-shells, primers, and for a time manufactured Lowell's answer to the Gatling gun, the “Lowell Battery Gun”.

As might be expected, the conditions could be hazardous:

"Workers at the cartridge company faced not only the common perils of injury from machinery and the belt-driven power system on the shop floor, but also from the dangerous nature of producing ammunition.

 This photograph was taken immediately after the U.S. Cartridge explosion that 

destroyed numerous houses and killed 22 people

The most horrific of these dangers struck in late July 1903 when an explosion, sparked by the ignition of gunpowder in one of the company’s powder magazines that was located just over the Lowell city limits in Tewksbury, killed 22 employees and nearby residents, while injuring more than 70.

The massive blast destroyed or severely damaged about 70 houses in Tewksbury’s Wigginville neighborhood and the shock was felt as far away as Haverhill, where windows broke and doors of homes “swung open with a crash as if by a gust of wind.”

 More on the explosion here.

By 1917, U.S. Cartridge, inundated with orders for munitions from the United States military and its allies in World War I, was the largest employer in Lowell. With over 8,000 employees, nearly half of whom were females.

Joseph with his first wife Annie sometime before 1917

In 1917 his wife of 17 years Ann died, leaving him with 3 children aged 16, 13 and 8.   The next year he was drafted into WWI at age 39 just 3 months before Armistice day. 

After he was discharged he remarried another Ann (Holland) in 1919.  His eldest daughter (my grandmother) Corinne did not approve. Apparently she did not get along with her new stepmother, and she left her father's house to move in with her maternal grandparents, the Smiths.

In 1919, one of Joseph's  co-workers at the Cartridge factory was netted in a massive anti-terror raid conducted by the Feds. The Palmer Raids were an anti-radical initiative that saw the arrests of suspected terrorists in 30 cities and towns in over 23 states.  The terrorist of the day were the anarchists and communists, many of whom were immigrants from Russia or Europe who brought their "Red" ideologies with them to the U.S.  This was back in the day of Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists who would figure very prominently in the news in the days ahead.  Joseph Nadwarny was a Russian immigrant who lived on High Street in Lowell, worked at the Cartridge factory, and who was arrested at the Socialist club in town during one of the Palmer Raids.  It's impossible to know whether my great grandfather knew the man personally.  But it's likely that he heard the news with more than the average amount of interest.  

By this time Joseph D. was an Inspector for the Cartridge company.  But by 1926 U.S. Cartridge moved most of the manufacturing operations out of Lowell to New Haven, CT.  It's unclear whether Joseph continued employment there.  The last census that I found Joseph D. on was the 1930 census.  He lived at 18 Pine View Ave in Lowell which is still standing today.

The only death certificate that I could find on a Joseph D. Gardner/DesJardin  was 1939.  I'm still trying to verify that is his death certificate, since it was issued under "Gardner" and I would have expected it to be "DesJardins" as he never officially changed it to my knowledge.  There is also information on it which I know to be incorrect (his father's name and father's birthplace for example) but that may have been information supplied to the coroner by his second wife, who would have had no personal knowledge of his father.

In any event, the trail ends in the 1930's, and since my mom has no memories of her grandfather, it was likely in that time frame.