Happy Century, Jeannette

Today would have been the hundredth birthday of my maternal grandmother, Jeannette. She died in 1993 when I was seventeen years old.

Her stories about her family inspired my interest in genealogy.

Her secrets became the focus of my searches.

Jeannette Elizabeth ODonnell was born on July 30, 1920 in Bayonne, Hudson County, New Jersey. She was the fifth and final child of Frank ODonnell and Anna Preston. Anna became ill shortly after the birth and died the following year. Jeannette lived with her paternal grandparents, Patrick ODonnell and Delia Joyce. Jeannette told us about Delia's blindness. Jeannette was very fond of her Aunt Kitty. Many relatives were killed in train accidents. She didn't get along with her siblings because they were raised apart.

Her best friend was her cousin, Edna. Jeannette said that they used to pay one nickel each to get a pack of cigarettes to share.

Edna told my mother and me that she promised to take Jeannette's secrets to her grave. She did. She died four days ago at the age of 98.

My mother, Judith, was born in 1950 when Jeannette was thirty years old. As a child, I didn't notice that Jeannette's stories left out the time period of her young adulthood, from the late 1930s and through the 1940s. All I remember is that she said she was a switchboard operator for the phone company. She had a switchboard plug that she said was used to connect calls.

When I began requesting family documents and photos, my mother told me that I would find discrepancies in Jeannette's story of her life and that if I ever found the truth, she wanted to know.

Jeannette may have discarded her copies of official records of births and marriages, but the State of New Jersey preserved their copies. So did newspapers. DNA testing was unfathomable until recently. That was the key to unlocking more secrets.

As I find out more about the events in Jeannette's life, I can't help wondering how she felt. She hid tragedies. I try to remember her stories for hints or clues, but I come up with no indications of what transpired in her young adulthood.

Happy 100th Birthday in Heaven, Grammy.

Additional Details for a Family Story

One of the family stories of my maternal grandmother was that her grandmother, Delia Joyce (1862-1929), was a baby when her mother threw her to safety just as she was dragged to her death by a train.

The 1870 federal census has an accompanying mortality schedule that listed people who died in the year 1870 before the census commenced on June 1st.  Mary Joyce was on this mortality schedule in Pawling, Dutchess County, New York, as being killed by "cars" in May of 1870.  Her widower, Patrick Joyce, and four children, Mary, Adelia (Delia), John, and James were enumerated on the actual census.

Absent a death certificate, additional information was sought from newspapers.  The accident was in Katonah, south of Pawling in Westchester County, New York.  One article did not mention a child and another mentioned an infant child.  Delia was about seven years old at the time of the accident, so the focus was on one of her younger brothers as the baby who was saved.

I just found some more newspaper articles about this tragedy that clarify that the child was female, though she is not named and could have been Delia or her older sister Mary.  The articles appeared June 21st in the New York Herald and June 22nd in the Rochester Daily Union and Advertiser.

The key to finding these articles was by not using Mary's name as a search term.  Instead, I looked for articles containing Katonah (where the accident occurred) and Pawling (where Mary lived) with the narrow date of May or June of 1870.

Two newspapers carried the article about "a respectable married woman" from Pawling, not named, whose leg was "almost sever[ed]" by the train as she attempted to disembark when the train started to depart so that she did not leave her daughter who was already safely on the platform.

According to another article, Mary lived a few hours.

Mary (who was born as Mary or Margaret Campbell in Ireland, according to the records of her children), should not have been on the 1870 mortality schedule if she died after June 1st.  Perhaps her husband could not recall the exact date of death and the census recorder noted her information for the month of May.  Good thing this rule was bent because I may have never found any information on this sad story if Mary had not appeared on that mortality schedule.

Did they move the bodies?

Autumn is my favorite season for photographing gravestones because of the lush colors.

(For neglected cemeteries, the opportune season is at the end of winter, after the snow has melted, and before new growth has started.)

Today I visited a cemetery that I first read about years ago in an issue of Weird NJ: Your travel guide to New Jersey's local legends and best kept secrets.  The cemetery is unique enough for mention in the magazine (now online) because a parking lot was built around the burial site.

Now that I found this cemetery, I have more questions.

I didn't want to post about a cemetery on Halloween (October 31), even though cemeteries are my thing year-round.

"Mary Ellis Burial Site" is the name of this family cemetery on Find A Grave.  It is located near the Raritan River off US Route 1 in New Brunswick, Middlesex County, New Jersey.  Apparently the people who owned the land in the 1800s used this parcel for burials.  The owners and purpose of the land changed over the years, but the burials were preserved.  As the area became more commercially developed, the land was regraded, so the cemetery now sits above the parking lot.  Or at least a gravestone sits atop this pile of dirt, neatly encased in stone.

The story is that Mary Ellis, unmarried, purchased this piece of elevated land overlooking the Raritan River to pine away for a lost love, a sea captain who promised to sail back to her.  Mary died in 1828 according to the the photograph of the gravestone in the Weird NJ article.  New Jersey does not have death certificates from that time period.  Some New Brunswick newspapers are digitized online.  Mary's death appears in the Fredonian from January 14, 1829 on a list of people who died the prior year.  Mary Ellis died February 17, 1828, aged 77 years.  This is consistent with the Mary Ellis from the gravestone, born 1750.

Seven people appear on the list of those buried in this family plot.  You can read their names on the Find A Grave page for the cemetery or on the Wikipedia page.  I'm not a fan of regurgitating online lists.  I could only see the name Mildred Moody (1746-1816) on the one visible stone.

Margaret Ellis (1767-1850), wife of General Anthony Walton White (1750-1803), may have been a sister of Mary Ellis.  Or daughter, but this ruins the love story.

The horse of the sea captain is also buried in this plot, according to the story.

I found notices in newspapers from 1822, six years before Mary Ellis died.  Mary Ellis and Margaret White, likely the people buried in this family cemetery, lost their land to auction "at the suits of John Clark, Thomas Clark, William Clark, Peter Overt, Sarah Voorhees, and others."  I don't know the nature of these suits, or where these parcels of land were, other than in New Brunswick and adjoining the land of Abraham Potts.

Does this preserved mound of dirt actually contain the coffins and the horse?  Or was the remaining stone moved and future generations assumed the bodies were below?

If anyone has done research into this family and their land, please let us know.

Finding the Baby

Another component of a family story mentioned in a newspaper!

A few years back, I wrote of a family story:  Delia Joyce's mother's skirts were caught by a passing train; as she was dragged to her death, she threw the infant Delia safely to a man on the platform.

When I uncovered Delia's hometown as Pawling in Dutchess County, New York, I was able to locate the family in the census starting in 1860.  Delia's parents were Patrick Joyce and Margaret or Mary Campbell.  The train accident happened in 1870.  Delia was born around 1862, making her too old and big to have been the baby in her mother's arms when she died.  Delia's younger brothers, John and James, were more likely candidates.

I located one newspaper article about the accident, which happened in Katonah Station, Westchester County, New York.  The accounting took up all but four lines of the paper.  No mention of a baby.

Well, I found another newspaper article that mentioned the baby.  (Thank you FultonHistory.com again!)  The search terms I used included "cars," not "train" or "railroad," as this is more consistent with terminology in use at the time.  Margaret's first name is not in this article.  The mention of the baby is consistent with the family story.

"Her infant child, which she was carrying in her arms, she had previously passed off the car."

We cannot tell from this account if the train had already started to move, so she handed off the baby first and then tried to jump by herself.  Maybe the train was stopped when she got the baby off first, but then started to move, so she jumped so as to not be separated from the baby.

1870 United States Federal Census: Pawling, Dutchess County, New York
Ancestry.com
The newly widowed Patrick Joyce and his four children.  Mary Joyce appears on the Mortality Schedule.

In the 1870 census, James Joyce's age is listed as one year.  His entry at FindAGrave shows a gravestone with a date of birth May 20, 1870.  He qualifies as an infant for this train accident in June of 1870.  He may have been only a few weeks old.

Finding a Hometown in Ireland

My grandmother's grandfather was Patrick O'Donnell.  He was from "Ireland," which is not surprising or helpful with such a name.  Without a town, it is impossible to locate with any certainty the correct Patrick O'Donnell in Ireland.  He died in Bayonne, Hudson County, New Jersey- United States- in 1931.  His records on this side of the pond do not specify a place of origin in Ireland.  I found a sister of Patrick named Rose, who married James Kenny in Bayonne in 1883.  Rose provided me with more opportunities to uncover the hometown of her and her brother, but Rose's records also would not give up a location more specific than Ireland.

Enter the family stories.  My grandmother told me that she had a cousin who was a priest.  Not surprising in an Irish Catholic family.  My grandmother's cousin told me that they had a cousin who was a priest at Notre Dame.  This is more helpful, but there is no lack of Irish priests and churches called Notre Dame.  I did take note of two men named O'Donnell who served as president of Notre Dame University in Indiana.

I was at the Bayonne Library yesterday and found an obituary for Patrick O'Donnell in the Bayonne Times using his date of death.  In the obituary, his hometown in Ireland was not revealed, but I discovered two more siblings in the United States.

Patrick O'Donnell was the uncle of a priest, Charles Leo O'Donnell 1884-1934, who was a president of the University of Notre Dame.  Patrick's sister, Rose, was listed, and so was a previously unknown sister- Mrs Kathryn Mason Kennedy of Stockton, California.  A nephew with the last name O'Donnell indicates that Patrick had a brother for me to find and that I should start at Notre Dame University.

Having a priest in your family is great for genealogy.  Reverend Charles is especially wonderful because he was a president of a well-known university and he was a published author of poems.  People have researched Charles and cite his parents as Cornelius (or Neil) O'Donnell and Mary Gallagher.  This O'Donnell branch lived in Indiana, which is why I never found them in New Jersey.  The burial places of Neil and Mary and their children are on FindAGrave with references to hometowns in Ireland:  Ardara for Neil O'Donnell and Killybegs for Mary Gallagher, which are in County Donegal.  In his poem, "A Road of Ireland," Charles wrote:

     "When she came up from Killybegs and he from Ardara
     My father met my mother on the road, in Donegal."

It looks as if Charles' father, Cornelius/Neil O'Donnell was a brother to my ancestor, Patrick O'Donnell; and their sisters were Rose and Kathryn.  From the records I have compiled for Patrick and Rose, the parents of these four siblings were Peter O'Donnell and Margaret Gallagher.  It is interesting that Cornelius O'Donnell may have married a Gallagher; I wonder if there was a relation.  At this point, I do not know if Peter and Margaret came to the United States.

MapQuest.com
Ardara is few than ten miles north of Killybegs in County Donegal, Ireland.

wikipedia.org

I now have specific location to look for records on my O'Donnell and Gallagher ancestors.

This story illustrates why you must follow your lines up and then across and back down through siblings and cousins.