SheehanFamily.US

The 1940 census was released on Monday, and I’ve been able to locate some of our family, including both Mom and Dad. Finding people in this census is a bit of a challenge, because it hasn’t been indexed yet. The only practical method for locating individuals is to know where they lived in 1940. You can then use maps the census bureau prepared showing the “enumeration districts” that were used to conduct the count. Then you can go to the National Archives web site and view the individual census form images for that area. That usually means your hunt is narrowed down to a few dozen pages to scan through.

I knew Mom and her family lived at 480 Sunderland Road in Worcester, so they were pretty easy to find- the Dunns are the next to the last household on the page. There aren’t any major surprises, but it’s pretty fascinating to see that Mom is 18, Uncle Bud 13, that the house is worth $5,000, and that Grandfather Dunn worked 48 hours the previous week. It doesn’t tell us how much he earned, because only wage income was listed, and Grandfather, who at the time owned a roofing business, was listed as an “employer”.

There is one item that caught my eye- both Grandfather and Nana are listed as being 43 years of age. I knew that Nana was actually older than Grandfather, so I double checked, and verified that in the 1900 census, Nana was reported as being 11, having been born in April 1889. So she would actually have been 50, and about to turn 51 at the time of the 1940 census. And who supplied this misinformation to the census taker? Based on the circled “x” next to her name, it was none other than Nana herself!

Dad’s family was slightly more difficult to track down- the Sheehans moved several times over the years. In the 1939 Worcester City Directory, the family was living on Fairview Road in Greendale, but they didn’t show up there in the census, so I tried the address Grandfather gave in 1942 when he was required to register for the “Old Man’s Draft”- 913 Main St. And that’s where they were. I almost missed them because I saw another family listed as resident there- but the Sheehans show up on the next page, at the same address. The house is a three decker, and it’s actually listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The list of family members contains some surprises, at least for me. Grandfather and grandmother are there, of course, aged 58 and 61. Aunt May is 31, and lists her occupation as “marker” in a mill. “Catherine” (Aunt Kathleen I assume) is listed as a gas station attendant, but that’s got to be an error, and must refer to Dad. Aunt Helen is also there, aged 17.

Now for the surprises- our Uncle William, the father of our cousin Rusty is there. Rusty would have been 12 at the time, but neither she nor her two siblings, Mary and Thomas, nor their mother Helen is there. William is listed as single- not married, widowed or divorced.

There are also two young children in the house- Francis, aged 6, is listed as “son”, which must be an error, given grandfather and grandmother’s ages. The Worcester City Clerk’s web site does show a Francis Edward Sheehan born on Jun 25, 1934, who would be the right age. Unfortunately the web site doesn’t provide any more details. The other child is named Ann, listed as “grand-daughter”, aged 4- and the City Clerk’s records record an Ann Rita Sheehan born in Worcester on May 28, 1936.

I haven’t been able to find any further trace of Ann, but Francis seems to be alive and well (sort of) in Florida- someone with that name and date of birth was arrested for driving with a suspended license in April of last year, according to information I found in a Google search. (As I’m writing this, copies of Francis and Ann’s birth certificates arrived in the mail, confirming that they were the children of Uncle William and Aunt Helen- the Worcester City Clerk’s office is FAST!)

When I mentioned the names to Mom, she immediately said “well those were Bill’s kids”. She said that Bill also had another child, “Jackie”. Sure enough, there is a John M. Sheehan, born on Jan 11, 1932, who might well be “Jackie”. If John M. is Bill’s son Jackie, he apparently passed away on 14 Nov 1995, according to the Social Security Death Index.

When I asked Mom where Rusty, her mother and her siblings would have been in 1940, she said they might have been living with Thomas Sheehan’s family. Thomas owned the gas station on Grafton Street where Dad worked (and where he met Mom). Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate Tom and his family in the 1940 data. That may have to wait until the data is indexed.

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of Grandfather Nicholas Sheehan’s death on March 15, 1970.  He had arrived in this country from Ireland almost exactly sixty-nine years prior, on March 16 1901.

Genealogical DNA testing is getting cheaper and more poular as tim goes by, and I’m sure that I’ll eventually have to find out what it can tell me about our family history. On Dad’s side of the family, my guess is that our ancestors are all Irish going back many generations.

Mom, on the other hand, is exactly half Irish and half English, if you measure her ancestry based on her grand-parents. Her maternal grandfather Daniel Farrar was born in England, and probably came from a line of Farrars that had lived in Yorkshire for centuries. Her paternal grandmother Mary Alice Smith was descended from the Smiths and Shippees, early English settlers of Rhode Island, as well as the Cogswells and Seavers, two of the first English families to colonize Massachusetts. Her maternal grandmother, Catherine Creegan, and her paternal grandfather, Daniel Dunn, were both the children of Irish immigrants who had fled the potato famine.

And that’s what’s a bit peculiar about DNA. The two methods used to trace DNA back through the generations are mitochondrial, tracing DNA which passes from mother to child, and the Y-chromosome, which is passed from father to son. In Mom’s case, although her ancestry is split 50-50 between Irish and English, her DNA , at least in the way it is usually examined, would be exclusively Irish!

Her genetic makeup, of course, is still a mix of Irish and English- it’s just that the tests commonly used to trace the heritage of that makeup would ignore the contributions of her English grandparents, simply because they are not part of her direct maternal female line, or her direct paternal male line.

When I located Bridget Sheehan’s grave at St. John’s, it provided some important information- the death dates of her sons, and the surprising fact that Michael and Bridget had had a daughter Mary, who had died in infancy. It was the discovery of Mary that got me thinking about another possibility.

I’d noticed that Bridget’s daughters were named after her sisters- Margaret after Maggie Sheehan of Mechanicville, Julia and Nellie after the two sisters who remained in Ireland. If Bridget another, earlier daughter named Mary, did that mean she had yet another sister named Mary?

I confirmed that possibility last night from information in the International Genealogical Index maintained by the Mormon’s Family History Library. That database has a record of the birth on 16 October 1875 for a Mary Sheehan, parents Patrick Sheehan and Bridget Doody. The same database also has records for Maggie and Uncle Ned, but not, unfortunately, the other siblings.

The dates are not exact matches for the existing information I had for Ned and Maggie, especially in the case of Maggie, who would be 4 or 5 years older than some of the census records show.  The census records aren’t consistent with each other, however- in 1900 Maggie is said to be 20, in 1910 she’s 27, in 1920 she’s 36, and 47 in 1930. The 1900 record would place her birth in about 1880, the  last three in about 1883. The birthdate given in the IGI for Maggie is 9 Mar 1878, which isn’t inconceivable (no pun intended) based on her children’s birth dates. She would have had her first child at 26, her second at 34.

I haven’t had any luck yet in tracking down what became of Mary- did she emigrate, or stay behind?

Mary Greene was the first daughter of Michael and Bridget (Sheehan) Greene. Born in Worcester on 8 May, 1896, she died just a little over a year later, on 7 August, 1897. According to the Worcester death registry, the cause of death was “Cholera Infantum”. You might think that Cholera Infantum is just plain cholera when it infects a child, but in fact it was a specific disease, also called “Summer Complaint”, that could reach epidemic proportions among babies and very young children, especially in the overcrowded tenements of the late 19th century.

If you Google “Cholera Infantum”, you will eventually come across references to Pepto-Bismol. That’s because Pepto-Bismol was originally a concoction called “Bismosal Mixture Cholera Infantum”, which was specifically aimed at treating this disease.

This is from the Pepto-Bismol History Page:

Today, we think of how Pepto-Bismol soothes the digestive system after we’ve overindulged at a meal or eaten unfamiliar foods while traveling. But in its early days, Pepto-Bismol did more than comfort; it actually helped treat a very serious illness.

The medicine we now call Pepto-Bismol was originally developed at the start of the 20th century, when high standards of hygiene and sanitation weren’t as widespread as today. Looking to cure a frightening disease called “cholera infantum,” which struck infants suddenly, causing severe diarrhea, vomiting, and sometimes death, a doctor concocted a formula in his home that proved effective against these symptoms. The formula was made from pepsin, bismuth salicylate, zinc salts, salol, and oil of wintergreen, along with a colorant to make it pink, and he called it Mixture Cholera Infantum. (Researchers would later learn that cholera infantum was caused by a bacterial infection, treatable with antibiotics.)

Little Mary succumbed to the disease before Pepto-Bismol, and long before antibiotics. And she wasn’t the only one- of the twenty or so names on the same page of the death register, four were infants who died from Cholera Infantum.

In my last post I mentioned that St. John’s Cemetery had no record of Bridget (Sheehan) Greene, Grandfather Sheehan’s eldest sister, being buried there. This despite the fact that the Telegram death notices for Bridget and her husband Michael, both said that they were interred there.

I decided to give it another try last week, checking on the sons and daughters’ names as well, and guess what? The person I spoke to on the phone found Bridget right away!

Better still, she told me that there were a number of people buried in the plot- in addition to Bridget and Michael were their sons Harold and James, and daughters Nellie and Julia and their husbands. There was also an additional daughter- Mary, born in 1896, and died the following year. I visited the grave Saturday, and it occurred to me looking at the stone that Julia, who died in 1999, was buried there 102 years after her sister.

The stone also disproved one thought I’d entertained- that one or both of Bridget’s sons had died in World War I. I’d been unable to find either Harold or James in the 1930 census. I eventually found Harold in the 1920 census, living with his parents, but not James.

The cemetery records revealed that Harold had in fact died in 1930. I found his obituary in the Telegram, and learned that he died at the Rutland Heights Hospital, which was a veterans’ facility at the time. The newspaper story didn’t specify the cause of death, saying only that there had been a long illness. It did confirm that Harold had fought in “the Great War”, and that he had also seen action on the Mexican border in the hostilities that preceded that war.

The big surprise was James.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in April I came across an old Rootsweb posting that led me to Grandmother Sheehan’s parents. I later found an earlier posting by the same individual that showed three marriages that had taken place between the Casey and Powers families in Stradbally. In addition to those marriages, one of the Powers siblings, Patrick, married Maggie Sheehan, and one of the Casey daughters, Mary, went on to marry Grandfather Nicholas Sheehan.

I’ve confirmed much of the information in the rootsweb postings, but discovered an apparent error when it came to Maggie Sheehan’s husband, Patrick Powers. Patrick died in 1962, and his obituary gives his parents’ names as Maurice and Margaret Scanlon Powers. The rootsweb post has Catherine McGrath as Patrick’s mother. I haven’t come up with a definite solution to the discrepancy- it’s possible that Catherine McGrath is an error, or that there were actually two Powers families involved. The person who posted the original messages told me by email that he no longer had any of the information he relied on for the posts.

I decided to try working backwards in time from the earliest record I had found of Patrick and Maggie, the 1910 census record. I eventually came across a 1900 census form that showed Patrick living with Maurice (Frank) Casey, and his wife Nora (Powers) Casey. Although the census form gives Patrick’s relationship to the head of household as “boarder”, I’m pretty sure he was Frank’s brother-in-law, and Nora’s brother.

Scanning up a few rows from Patrick I found none other than his future wife, Maggie Sheehan. And Maggie is said to be living in the household of a Michael J. Green and his wife Bridget. Maggie’s relationship to Michael? Sister-in-law! Which means that Bridget is Maggie’s (and Grandfather Sheehan’s) sister! The census gives Bridget’s birth date as July, 1872, which would make her, so far, the eldest of Grandfather’s siblings.

Needless to say, that changed the course of my research- I headed off in search of what happened to Bridget after 1900. I found her and Michael in 1910, not in Mechanicville, but, where else, Worcester. The 1911 Worcester City Directory lists a Michael J. Green living at 75 East Worcester St. Working back through the earlier directories, though, I came up with a Michael J. Green, wireworker, living at 2 Milton Place in 1905, the same address Nicholas F. Sheehan had occupied the year before!

Bridget and her husband Michael Green(e) had actually lived in Worcester prior to that date, and were married in Worcester in 1893. The two sons shown on the 1900 census were both born in Worcester, and the family was back in Worcester within a couple of years of 1900. So far, it looks like Bridget was probably the first Sheehan to settle in Worcester, followed by “Uncle Ned”, and then Grandfather Nicholas and his brother Michael.

Bridget Sheehan Greene obituary, 3 April, 1936 (Click on image to view full size)

Michael and Bridget Greene died in 1936, just a few months apart from each other. Bridget’s obituary in the Telegram says that she was very active in the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party, and had been a member of the Worcester Democratic City Committee. Mom has said that Grandfather had a sister that was very active in politics, and I had assumed that she was talking about Maggie in Mechanicville. After reading Bridget’s obituary, it seems more likely that she was the politically active sister Mom had heard about.

The obituary also added two more sisters for Grandfather- it says that among Bridget’s survivors were her sisters “the Misses Nellie and Julia Sheehan of Ireland”. Bridget’s two sons aren’t mentioned in the
obituary. At least one of Bridget’s sons served in the military in World War I (one of the organizations she belonged to was the “War Mothers”, which was formed during that war), so it’s possible that one
or both may have died in the war.

Bridget’s daughter Julia became a kindergarten teacher, and taught in the Worcester schools for 40 years. She died in 1999 at the age of 92. Daughter Nellie worked for the telephone company, and died in 1991.
Neither Julia or Nellie had any children. There was also a daughter named Margaret, born in 1901. She married Timothy Hally, but I haven’t found any information on her after the 1920 census.

One mystery is that while both Bridget and Michael’s obituaries say they were to be buried in St. John’s Cemetery, when I called the cemetery office to check the location, they said there was no record of either of them being interred there. Bridget’s obituary also says that she left three grand-children, so there may be some of her descendants around still, descended from Margaret, or one of the sons. Bridget’s obituary and marriage record both give her mother’s maiden name as Bridget Doody, which sounds more likely than the Marguerite Doody given in Uncle Ned’s obituary in 1960.

Mom came up with our cousin Rusty’s married name- Brunt. Rusty was born Eleanor Sheehan, daughter of our Uncle William and Aunt Helen in 1928. She married George A. Brunt in about 1946. They moved to Florida, eventually settling in Sunrise, a planned town that started out as Sunrise Golf Village. They had two children, a son named Patrick, born in 1959, and a daughter, Janet, born in 1946. Janet married Jerry Matthew Frederick in 1988.

George Brunt died in 1992, at the age of 70. He was buried in the Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell. A Memorial Day story on the cemetery in the Orlando Sentinel in 1998 was accompanied by a photograph, which I haven’t found a copy of yet, whose caption reads: “Eleanor Brunt (right) of Ocala contemplates red flowers she put on her husband’s burial site.”

Rusty passed away on September 30, 2004. She is buried next to George, in Section 112 Site 2294 in the Florida National Cemetery.

I couldn’t find an Annie Sheehan in the 1910 census to match the Annie who emigrated with her brother Michael in 1902, but I did find an “Anna”- and then the pieces started falling into place pretty quickly!

Anna Sheehan is listed as the sister in law of the head of household, Patrick Powers, residing at 237 South Main St., Mechanicville NY. Since Anna is single, and she and Patrick have different surnames, it’s safe to assume that Anna is the sister of Patrick’s wife rather than the wife of one of Patrick’s brothers. Which leads to the assumption that Patrick’s wife, Margaret, is none other than “Maggie Sheehan”, the “sister in Mechanicville” listed on the immigration records of Grandfather Sheehan, and his brother Michael and sister Anna.

Margaret and Patrick are said to have been married for nine years at the time of the 1910 census, and have one child, a daughter named Katherine. Patrick is, what else? a fireman, like his brothers Nicholas and Edward in Worcester. Patrick works at the local power station. Anna, now 23, is a shirt maker at a local factory.

The family also appears on the 1920 census, still on South Main St. Anna is no longer with them, but they now have a son, Patrick Jr., born in about 1913. In 1930 they are still on South Main St. (And still no sign of Anna!)

With that information, I was able to track down obituaries for Patrick and Margaret. Margaret’s confirms her relationship to our family- it says she was the “sister of Nicholas Sheehan of Jacksonville, Fla., and Edmund Sheehan of Worcester, Mass.” The Edmund Sheehan must refer to Edward (Uncle Ned) Sheehan. There’s no mention of Anna or Michael, so they’ve probably pre-deceased Margaret.

Patrick Powers lived another ten years, and passed away on December 21, 1962. Patrick’s obituary says he leaves a son, Patrick J. Powers of Cohoes, three grand-children, and three great-grandchildren. His daughter, Katherine Powers Flynn, had died in 1955.

The other day I was trying out the pilot site for FamilySearch.org’s record search web site. It has been there for a while now, but new features and databases are periodically being added, so I figured I’d give it another try. I’m glad I did!

I used one of my “brick wall” names- Michael F. Sheehan. I believe Michael was Grandfather Sheehan’s brother, based on the fact that a Michael F. Sheehan lived in Mechanicville at the same time as our Grandfather, and, much more convincingly, the fact that a Michael Sheehan lived in the same (or possibly adjacent) house as Grandfather in Worcester in 1904. The two facts are certainly suggestive, but by no means conclusive.

I wasn’t expecting to find definitive proof of Michael’s relationship to Grandfather, but I just might have- and that’s not all.

One very handy feature of the FamilySearch pilot site is a mouseover function. After you’ve entered your search terms, FamilySearch displays a list of records it thinks match your search. Mousing over an entry displays additional details of the record, which makes it easy to scan a list without opening all of the actual records. This led me to an Ellis Island immigration record dated June 1, 1902, for a “Michl Sheehan”, last residence “Waterford”. And just like Grandfather Sheehan’s immigration record, Michael’s indicates that he is going to Mechanicville in Saratoga County, to his sister Maggie!

But it gets better- Michael, 22 years old, is not alone- he’s accompanied by his 14 year old sister, Annie. Michael and Annie had embarked at Queenstown (Cobh) on May 24, on board RMS Celtic, at the time the largest passenger vessel ever built, which could hold almost three thousand passengers.

Also similar to Grandfather’s record from the year before, the form indicates that Michael and Annie’s passage was paid for by their sister. While I found a Michael F. Sheehan listed in the 1903 Mechanicville directory as a knitting mill worker, I haven’t located any further information about Annie. As a minor, she probably wouldn’t have been listed in the 1903 directory, and by the time of the next census, in 1910, she would have been 22, and likely to have married. There are no “Annie’s” born in Ireland listed in 1910 as living in Saratoga County (although there are hundreds in New York City), so it’s going to take some research to track her down.