Uncovering Thomas J. Mahoney: The Long Road to My 3rd Great-Grandfather

For quite awhile now, my 3rd great-grandfather Thomas J. Mahoney was little more than a handful of vague facts on my family tree. He was an Irish immigrant who showed up in Connecticut by 1860, raised a large family, worked every job he could to keep them afloat, and died in Worcester in 1920. I knew the broad strokes, but not the story. Not the man.

And definitely not the names of the parents he left behind in Ireland ... unless they came with him to the United States back in the 1850s.

Like so many Irish lines, the Mahoneys were swallowed up in the great silence left by missing parish books, burned civil records, and the chaos of the mid-19th century. I've searched on and off trying to figure out where in Ireland Thomas was born, and who his parents were. The answers always felt one document out of reach, and might be one of those things I'll have to leave to a professional genealogist in Ireland.

All the same, I keep digging.

My nights for the past few weeks have been spent buried in newspaper archives, cross-checking every mention of a Mahoney in the Norwich and Worcester areas. I flipped through U.S. Census pages line by line, zooming in on faint handwriting. I combed through street listings, vital records, burial notices — anything that might help link one stubborn Mahoney to another.

And finally, the last couple days, things began to click.

Pinning Down the Dates, the Moves, the Man

Census data had always given me the rough outline.

• Born May 1842 in Ireland.
• In the U.S. by 1855 or 1859 — census reports conflict here.
• In Norwich, Connecticut by 1860, a teenage laborer just starting his life in America.

But today, thanks to finally finding his death certificate, that vague birth month finally became a real date: May 2, 1842.

The obituary has added even more color. It describes Thomas as one of the strongest men in Norwich during his younger years, working as a steamer driver who handled the horses for the Wauregan engine company during fires. This wasn’t just a man who lived through the 19th century. This was a man who ran toward burning buildings.

From Norwich, the family probably followed work wherever the mills needed labor.

• 1870 Census – Thomas and his wife Bridget O’Sullivan are in Norwich with their early children. Thomas is a laborer; Bridget is “keeping house.”
• 1880 Census – They’ve moved to Richmond, Rhode Island, where Thomas, and sons John and William, all work in a woolen mill.
• 1900 Census – The family is now in Worcester, living at 140 Cambridge Street. This is where things get confusing, because Thomas’s son — also named Thomas — is head of household, and his own son named Thomas. But everyone fits: my 2nd great-grandfather Thomas (1871–1958), his wife Nora, their three young children, and the older generation of Mahoney brothers all working woolen-mill jobs.
• 1910 Census – Thomas, now widowed, is living with his son William at 80 Temple Street.
• 1920 Census – He appears as a patient at the Worcester State Hospital, likely during the final decline of his long illness.

On August 27, 1920, he died at the home of his son Daniel at 212 Franklin Street. His obituary said simply: after a long illness. His death certificate listed arteriosclerosis with broncho-pneumonia as a contributing factor.

After all those years in Connecticut and Massachusetts, he made one final journey back to Norwich, where he was buried beside his wife, Bridget.

Bridget O’Sullivan: A Brief, Bright Thread

Bridget was born in Ireland in 1844, the daughter of Eugene O’Sullivan. Her mother’s name remains one of the lingering mysteries. She and Thomas married sometime before 1864, most likely in Connecticut. She died of pneumonia on March 24, 1900, just 56 years old.

Her funeral notice describes a woman deeply loved. Dozens of floral tributes: “Dear Mother,” “Mother,” “Mother.” Four sons carrying her casket. Her body returned to Norwich — the place where the Mahoney's American story began.

The Breakthrough: Finding Thomas’s Parents

Today, after cross-matching death records, burial entries, and likely family clusters, I was finally able to identify the parents of Thomas J. Mahoney: 

• Father: yet another Thomas Mahoney, born in Ireland
• Mother: (first name unknown) Leonard, born in Ireland

For a line whose origins had been a black hole for so long, even these two names are monumental. And the Leonard surname, which is strongly associated with County Cork, reinforces the growing theory that Cork is the homeland of this Mahoney branch.

No townland yet. No parish. But a county and two parental surnames are more than I had even this morning.

Genealogy is often described as solving a puzzle, but it rarely feels that neat. It’s more like pulling threads out of dust, hoping one leads somewhere. Today, finally, a thread did. Now I continue digging to see where this latest thread will lead.

I’m actively researching both sides of my family tree and writing full family histories so these stories aren’t lost to time. Much of my ancestry leads back to Ireland, where records become difficult to trace without the help of professional Irish genealogists. Any contributions go directly toward funding this research, obtaining hard-to-access records, and preserving our history for future generations.

If you’d like to support the project, you can contribute via Venmo at: @ShaunMoriarty. Thank you for helping make this work possible.

The Disaster That Nearly Ended My Family Line

It's a family story I had never heard even the vaguest of references to. It's a major industrial accident in my own state that this history teacher was never aware of. It was nearly the end of my existence, some 120 years before I was born.

My second-great-grandparents, Patrick and Frances Hurley, had been married for about four years when they were both lucky to survive the collapse of a six-story textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The Hurleys were both employed at the Pemberton Mill, a large textile mill that stretched 280 feet long and 84 feet wide; one of the largest in the city. The mill itself was relatively new construction, having been built in 1853, but its owners crammed more and more machinery within to maximize profits. 

The construction had been locally decried as insufficient as the owners had cut corners to save money.

"The building had never been considered as staunch as it ought to have been," reported the Boston Evening Transcript the next day. "It was built about seven years since, and was then thought a sham; indeed, before the machinery was put in, the walls spread to such a degree that some twenty-two tons of iron stays were put in to save the building from falling by its own weight."

This proved to be disastrous late in the day of January 10, 1860. It was about 4:30pm that Tuesday afternoon when the mill workers, which included immigrants, women, and children, felt the building shift and heard the world around them suddenly come crashing down. 

The American Heritage magazine described the unfolding scene vividly: "Suddenly there was a sharp rattle, and then a prolonged, deafening crash. A section of the building's brick wall seemed to bulge out and explode, and then, literally in seconds, the Pemberton collapsed. Tons of machinery crashed down through crumpling floors, dragging trapped, screaming victims along in their downward path. At a few minutes after five, the factory was a heap of twisted iron, splintered beams, pulverized bricks, and agonized, imprisoned human flesh."

According to witnesses and survivors, the scene was unfathomable as the debris formed a pyramid of rubble in excess of 50 feet high. The Boston Globe reported: "The scene after the fall was one of indescribable horror. Hundreds of men, women, and children were buried in the ruins."

"The moans and cries for help of those in the ruins whose lives had not been immediately crushed out, mingled with an alarm rung out by the factory bells, called almost the entire community to the spot," reported The Boston Journal. "Darkness lent additional horror to the scene, for while a thousand hands were ready to rescue it was impossible to know whence the calls for assistance came."

A few hours after the initial disaster, at about 9:30pm, as search-and-rescue efforts continued in the darkness, rescuers employed oil lamps to guide their way. Unfortunately, one of those handheld oil lamps was inadvertently knocked over, leading to a massive fire that quickly spread through the textile mill.

"In a few moments the ruins were a sheet of flames," reported The Boston Globe. "Fourteen are known to have been burned to death in the sight of their loved ones, who were powerless to aid them."

The Boston Evening Transcript added: "The screams and moans of the poor, buried, burning and suffocating creatures can be distinctly heard, but no power on earth can save them."

 It is impossible to say how many additional lives were lost because of the fire, though the Boston Evening Transcript reported on one such fatality: "Those near the breaking out of the fire were almost on the point of extricating a woman not badly hurt, but the flames drove them back, and the woman is supposed to have perished in the flames, when delivery seemed so near." In An Authentic History of the Lawrence Calamity, published later that year, it was reported that one trapped man cut his own throat rather than be consumed by the approaching flames; he was rescued, but died from his other injuries.

In the end, according to The Boston Evening Transcript: "Brick, mortar and human bones are promiscuously mingled."

From across the Atlantic Ocean, the London Times compared the disaster to the devastation typically reserved for battlefields. “We doubt, indeed, whether in any age, so many human beings have ever perished so terribly by an accident of ordinary life. War may produce parallel scenes of horror, but the annals of peace may be searched in vain for any calamity so appalling as the disaster at Lawrence,” The London Times reported.

As for the Hurleys, both managed to escape with their lives intact, though each was injured. Patrick was just a couple weeks shy of his 30th birthday, and had come to the United States just a decade earlier from Killarney in County Kerry, Ireland. Frances, also a native of Killarney, had just turned 21 years old weeks before. According to her obituary, after she died in 1909: "She was one of the few survivors of the Pemberton mill catastrophe of the 60's. Mrs. Hurley was taken out through one of the cellar windows. The mill, after collapsing, was burned through the carelessness of some of the rescuers. Mrs. Hurley claimed to be one of the last survivors of the collapsed mill."

The Atlas and Daily Bee of Boston published a list of the victims and survivors nearly a week later, consuming nearly one-third of the front page on January 16, 1860. My great-great-grandparents are listed among the "Saved," as are 897 other names. Among them are two other Hurleys, though whether they are related is not yet known, including a Joannah Hurley listed among those killed in the disaster. Additionally, though no known relations are included, so too are a more than a half-dozen Moriarty and Mahoney names listed among those involved in the Pemberton Mill collapse.

The Hurleys soon left Lawrence, though I am quite sure January 10, 1860 never left them. They moved some 80 miles southwest to the small town of Warren. Settling in West Warren, Patrick "was one of the chief promoters in establishing the present St Thomas Roman Catholic church," according to his obituary in 1906, almost a half-century after his life was nearly extinguished.

Patrick continued working cotton mills for a number of years as a loomfixer, before saving up enough money to buy a farm in the Thorndike section of Palmer. He retired from the farm life in his early 70s, moving back to Warren for the final few years of his life, passing away at the age of 76 on September 30, 1906. Frances survived until 1909, passing away the morning of August 10 at her Summer Street home. She was 69.

It is so very sobering to realize that my family line nearly ended that January afternoon, in a mill I never even knew existed until now.

Pemberton Mill, Lawrence, Massachusetts. Source: Library of Congress.

Murdered by witchcraft

The history of colonial New England and witchcraft is certainly not limited to the infamous Salem Witch Trials. It was an area of concern strong enough to be codified in a number of laws, based in large part in scripture. While those accused of engaging in the dark arts and consorting with the Devil could be put to death, witchcraft was blamed for the death of my 10th great-grandmother.

Roughly 30 years before the hysteria of Salem was the case of an unscrupulous couple in Saybrook, Connecticut.

Local legend apparently claimed a cave, known as Mill Rock, was inhabited by witches. "Coach drivers feared passing the cave at night, because witches might throw burning wood on the carriage roofs," according to a 2012 haunting article in The Shore Line Times. "When the drivers saw the Cedar Sentinel [one large tree in a clearing], they knew they were near the witches' cave and whipped their horses to speed on by while there was still daylight. Since the witches vanished during the day and also disappeared during the summer, none were ever caught."

Mill Rock in Saybrook, Connecticut.

Though apparently unrelated to Mill Rock, there were a couple of supposed witches caught in Saybrook. Nicholas and Margaret Jennings had come to Saybrook after having previously lived in Hartford and New Haven. Nicholas fought in the Pequot War, serving under Captain John Mason, who led a horrific raid on a Pequot fort near the Mystic River, a gruesome event that became known as the Mystic Massacre. According to Damned Connecticut, it was after the war that Nicholas first met Margaret, an indentured servant.

"The young couple were smitten and soon ran off together, but didn't get too far before being apprehended," Damned Connecticut affirms. "On March 3, 1643, Nicholas was found guilty of 'fornication' and publicly whipped; a month later Margaret stood trial and was found guilty of the same crime in addition to theft. She was flogged, and then ordered by the court to marry Nicholas."

Damned Connecticut continues to note "a modest trail of troubles" followed the newlyweds, including Nicholas being prosecuted for striking a neighbor's cow in 1647. Witchcraft Trials of Connecticut informs Nicholas was punished in some form for this act of violence against the cow, which belonged to a man named Ralph Keeler. Ultimately, they would settle in Saybrook and produce three children together.

In 1659, things took a much darker turn for the star-crossed couple. That summer, according to The Shore Line Times, Nicholas had been suspected of witchcraft, resulting in the General Court sending a Mr. Willis to the town to aid the mayor in investigating Jennings.

In 1661, a neighbor of the Jennings family was embroiled in a heated land dispute. The neighbor, George Wood, ultimately accused Margaret of being possessed by Satan. Considering their past and generally unsavory social standing, such a charge would be a damning one for Mrs. Jennings. The presumption of innocence was not exactly afforded to many alleged witches. Damned Connecticut adds that Wood also accused Martha Jennings, one of the three Jennings children, of being pregnant out of wedlock — though, according to The Shore Line Times, Martha was proven not to be pregnant whatsoever.

Additionally, the Jennings witchcraft apparently was to blame for multiple deaths in the community. One of those whose passing was attributed to their witchcraft was Marie Marvin, the wife of Reinold Marvin. I've not yet uncovered Marie's age at the time of her death in 1661, but she was presumably around 60-years-old at the time of her death as Reinold had been born in 1594. The mother of eight children, including my 9th great-grandfather Lt. Reinold Marvin, was one of two individuals specifically mentioned in an indictment against Nicholas Jennings.

According to Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth Century New England, by David D. Hall, the couple was brought to court as follows:

Nicholas Jennings thou art here indicted by the name of Nicholas Jennings of Saybrook for not having the fear of God before thine eyes, thou hast entertained familiarity with Satan, the great enemy of God and mankind, and by his help hast done works above the course of nature to the loss of the lives of several people and in particular the wife of Reinold Marvin with the child of Baalshassar de Wolfe with other sorceries for which according to the law of God and the established laws of this Commonwealth thou deservest to die.

There was a not guilty plea entered and the case was ultimately adjudicated in the fall of 1661, according to Damned Connecticut, after a jury of 10 men from neighboring colonies came back with what was essentially a hung jury.

"The major part of the jury found Nicholas guilty, but the rest only strongly suspected him, and as to Margaret, some found her guilty, and the others suspected her to be guilty," reads The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697). The Shore Line Times notes that while the jury did not convict Nicholas and Margaret, they were deemed unfit as parents and their three children were taken from them to be apprenticed to others.

Left for dead at Gaines' Mills

Your country has become embroiled in a civil war with the fate of the Union hanging in the balance. Your enlist, are mustered in as a private and your regiment goes on to fight in some pretty well known and important battles — Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville among them. A little more than one year into what was supposed to be a two-year hitch, you're part of what is, at that point, the second bloodiest battle in American history. There are roughly 15,500 casualties in the battle, including nearly 2,400 dead, and your brothers in arms leave you on the battlefield believing you're among the lives lost. You survive the war, you marry, your wife is pregnant with your first child, but before your little girl is born you're killed in a railroad accident at age 29.

This is the story of Grant S. Marvin, my 1st cousin 5x removed.

Grant is the sixth of eight children born to my 5th great-uncle Ransom Marvin and his wife Sophronia Hutchinson. He was born February 2, 1840 in New York, presumably in or near Camden, just north of Oneida Lake and some 30 miles southeast of Lake Ontario. Grant was raised in Camden and was 21-years-old when, in May 1861, he went to the nearby town of Rome and enlisted in Company G of the 14th Regiment New York Volunteer Infantry. About one year later, in May 1862, the regiment was assigned to the famed Army of the Potomac, which was commanded by General George B. McClellan. The regiment took part in a series of fights known as Seven Days Battles in the area of Hanover County, Virginia.

On June 26, 1862, the regiment took part in the Battle of Beaver Dam Creek, also known as Mechanicsville, on June 26, 1862. Slightly outnumbered, Fitz John Porter led Union troops against Confederate General Robert E. Lee and secured a Union victory, though one some concede to be a strategic victory for the South. Grant survived this first big fight, but there would be no rest for the weary.

On June 27, 1862, the regiment was right back at it in the next fight in the Seven Days Battles. This time around it was the Battle of Gaines' Mill, sometimes called the Battle of Chickahominy River. The number of combatants were nearly three times that of the prior day's battle as more than 91,000 troops — 57,000 of whom were Confederate soldiers — and there would be some 15,000 casualties by the end of the day. Grant was seriously wounded in the battle, though the nature of the wound has not yet been uncovered in my research, and left for dead on the battlefield. The Union lost the Battle of Gaines' Mill, a key early victory for Lee's time at the helm of rebellion's forces.

Though left for dead, Grant survived and was apparently able to avoid being taken prisoner. He would receive a pension for his military service, designated as an invalid as a result of the wound he suffered. The severity of the wound and its long-term impact is not currently known.

As the war raged on and 1863 was coming to a close, Grant was married on Christmas eve to Lovina D. Seymour. After several years as husband and wife, Lovina was pregnant, and the couple was apparently living in Illinois. Sadly, with Lovina several months pregnant, tragedy struck as Grant was killed in Secor, Illinois, a very small town 25-30 miles east of Peoria. Grant's death was the result of a railroad accident, though current research has not yet uncovered whether Grant was a passenger on the train, an employee of the railroad, or otherwise.

One month to the day of Grant's passing, new life was welcomed in Illinois with the birth of his daughter May L. Marvin on June 3, 1869.

I've not yet conducted much in the way of research on Grant's widow and child, though they do return to New York, settling first in Batavia and then Rochester.

America's12th President, My 5th Cousin: We're Related

Some time ago, I saw a friend on social media post about an app that indicated he was related to one historic figure or another. As a history nerd and genealogist, I was skeptical but intrigued enough to take a further look at Ancestry.com's app "We're Related."

Quite quickly, I began receiving notifications of possible relatives of note from yesterday and today. "Meghan Trainor is possibly your 9th Cousin," read one alert. "W.C. Fields is possible your 7th Cousin 4x Removed," said another. "Michael Jackson is possibly your 8th Cousin 1x Removed," suggested yet another notification. Ultimately, the list of figures potentially related to me, according to the app, included George Washington, Brad Paisley, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Kate Upton, Abraham Lincoln, Hillary Clinton, Dolly Parton, Walt Disney, Miley Cyrus, Marilyn Monroe, and both Presidents Bush — with my most closely-related possibilities being Franklin Pierce (4th Cousin 6x Removed), D. H. Lawrence (5th Cousin 4x Removed), Thomas Edison (5th Cousin 5x Removed), Edgar Allan Poe (5th Cousin 5x Removed), Johns Hopkins (5th Cousin 6x Removed), George Clinton (5th Cousin 7x Removed), Benjamin Franklin (5th Cousin 8x Removed), Thomas Jefferson (5th Cousin 8x Removed), and Jane Austen (5th Cousin 8x Removed).

The problem with these claims — which take your Ancestry.com family tree and compare it to other trees and data — is it makes links and leaps that are not easy to confirm. Each one would attempt to fill in gaps where I had not yet uncovered a direct ancestor's parents, and through those theoretical links came connections to these politicians, actors, writers, scientists, and musicians. In some cases, those efforts to fill gaps appear to be quite unlikely, sometimes with birthdates that seem to be before a mother's child-bearing age or when someone is quite elderly. All in all, I would try to investigate these leads and ultimately came up empty-handed each and every time. I was unable to independently verify with conviction that any of the data was correct.

Then, just a few days ago, came a new connection: Zachary Taylor. "We're Related" suggested Taylor, who went from hero during the Mexican-American War to President of the United States, is my 5th Cousin 7x Removed. The app laid out the connection, that we had mutual ancestors. I looked at the "Possible Common Ancestor," and I was excited to see it was someone already in my tree, my 12th great-grandmother, Mary Brewster. Mary, whose maiden name I do not currently know, was married to Mayflower passenger William Brewster. I am a direct descendant of theirs through their daughter Patience, a line I had been able to detail and verify previously.

Could it be? This app actually turned something up that is verifiable? It became time to investigate the lineage from Mary Brewster to Zachary Taylor, and I was pretty confident I'd be able to confirm or debunk the connection pretty quickly considering the amount of documentation out there for Mayflower descendants and, often times, for the genealogies surrounding our presidents.

According to "We're Related," Taylor was a descendant through William and Mary Brewster's daughter Fear, my 12th great aunt. The app said Mary's daughter Fear gave birth to Isaac Allerton in 1627, that he fathered Sarah Allerton in 1670, and she in turn gave birth to Elizabeth Lee in 1709, who then gave birth to Lt. Col. Richard Taylor, the father of Zachary Taylor.

I checked my family tree data and saw that I already had some of this information accounted for, reaching into a portion of the life of Sarah Allerton. I had an approximate date of birth for her, my 2nd Cousin 11x Removed. I also had a death date and that she married a man named Hancock Lee in 1690. I figured it wouldn't be too difficult to trace Sarah to her purported great-grandson. I was able to find two published texts that each made the first confirmations. The first was George Norbury Mackenzie's "Colonial Families of the United States of America, Volume II," published in 1907 by The Grafton Press. The second was also published by The Grafton Press in 1907, part of its family histories series, and compiled by Emma C. Brewster Jones to detail the Brewster family line from 1566 to 1907. The latter text includes numerous references and citations, which proved to be helpful in further corroborating the information contained therein.

As previously noted, what was already known was that Sarah Allerton had wed Hancock Lee in 1690. I was able to confirm the Virginian couple had four children: Elizabeth, Hancock, John, and Isaac. Elizabeth Lee, my 3rd Cousin 10x Removed, was the next person to focus on as "We're Related" claimed she was Taylor's paternal grandmother. Using the previously mentioned published genealogies, as well as marriage and burial records, I was quickly able to piece together the basics on Elizabeth. She was born in Virginia in 1709, marrying a man named Zachary Taylor on February 23, 1738 in Northumberland County, Virginia, on the banks of Chesapeake Bay and about 75 miles east of Fredericksburg. The two had at least one child, the only one that mattered to me in this research effort, Richard Taylor.

Richard Taylor, my 4th Cousin 9x Removed, was born in on April 3, 1744 in Orange County, Virginia, an area east of Shenandoah National Park and home to James Madison's Montpelier. After graduating from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, he was able to rise to the rank of Colonel during the American Revolution. During the war, in 1779, 35-year-old Richard married 19-year-old Sarah Dabney Strother. Among their children was Zachary Taylor, the man who would go on to become the 12th President of the United States.

Success! It was official. The "We're Related" app was right in suggesting Zachary Taylor was indeed my 5th Cousin 8x Removed.

I already knew a little bit about Zachary Taylor, but he was one of those many largely obscure antebellum presidents that were a hazy bridge from the more memorable Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln. There was now a good reason to take a deep dive. While there is a load of interesting factoids surrounding Taylor, which may lead to a future post on the man's history and death, one stood out and was a bit of a kick to the gut. Taylor's daughter Sarah had married Jefferson Davis, the man who would one day be the President of the Confederate States of America. I loathe everything about Jefferson Davis and continue to be bothered by the fact that his statue stands in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., when he led an insurrection against the United States. Sarah Knox Taylor and Jefferson Davis were wed in Kentucky on June 17, 1835, some 15 years before the Civil War. I learned Zachary Taylor was not happy about his daughter marrying Taylor, though this was primarily said to be a result of the military hero's first-hand knowledge of how difficult military life is for a family, and Davis was a military man who served under Taylor.

Sarah Knox Taylor

In a bittersweet twist, I was both saddened and pleased to learn Sarah was never the First Lady of the Confederacy. She died just three months after the wedding. The newlyweds had gone to Louisiana to visit his sister when both contracted malaria. Jefferson Davis would recover, but Sarah would not. The illness claimed her life on September 15, 1835, at the tender age of 21. Her parents were devastated by her loss, and reportedly became quite angry and bitter toward Davis for taking their daughter to Louisiana during "fever season."

Counterfeiting a quarter-million in Colonial Massachusetts

As I put off a final shopping trip on the eve of Christmas Eve, I think about all the money we spend on the holidays and how I wish I could borrow a little cash from my cousin Mary. Problem is Mary has been dead more than 240 years now, and the cash she had turned out to be counterfeit bills she produced.

Mary (Peck) Butterworth was a colonial era counterfeiter, the first major counterfeiter in America's history. She is my 1st cousin 9x removed — her grandfather, Nicholas Peck (1630-1710), is my 9th great-grandfather through my maternal grandmother's line.

Mary was born on July 27, 1686, in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, some 40 miles south of Boston. Her father, my 9th great-uncle, was Joseph Peck, born October 27, 1650. According to Kenneth Scott's Counterfeiting in Colonial America, Joseph was the innkeeper at the "Inn at the Sign of the Black Horse," a tavern in Rehoboth. In his book Early Rehoboth, local historian Richard LeBaron Bowen affirms that "Mary was the daughter of one of the most important and influential pioneer families in Rehoboth and was related to most of the other first families; all of the important town and colony officers were relatives." All in all, she was well-positioned to live a pretty comfortable life by colonial standards.

In 1710, 24-year-old Mary married John Butterworth, Jr., a pretty successful housewright — someone who built homes. John was well known and made good money as a housewright, resulting in the couple having "a better income than most people of the time," according to Bowen. Both Scott and Bowen note that despite his success and the societal norms of the day, John was generally known as "Mary's husband."

So what led Mary, who was quite financially secure and well-connected to the movers and shakers of the area, to the crime of counterfeiting as early as the summer of 1716? Her exact motivation is unknown, but it would seem that it was a matter of greed and convenience. "Mary was an ambitious and aggressive business woman, ruling her house and apparently everyone she met. She was passionately fond of money," Bowen notes in Early Rehoboth. "The taverns seemed to be easy places for passing counterfeit bills."

According to Scott, Mary "made and sold more than £1,000 of forged bills over a period of seven years." Accounting for inflation, that's in the neighborhood of $250,000 today. Bowen notes that she "was probably the biggest single counterfeiter in New England."

She didn't do this all on her own, however. Mary employed her brothers and a sister-in-law in the production of these phony bills. "Besides being an inventor, a skillfull workwoman and a clever saleswoman, she was also a superior organizer, developing a tight little kitchen printery employing her three brothers Nicholas, Israel, and Stephen, and the wife of Nicholas, Hannah Peck, who was also a cousin, all strictly a family affair ... over which Mary, the master craftswoman, ruled supreme," Bowen affirms. There is further evidence that Daniel Smith, Rehoboth's town clerk and a justice of the Bristol County Court of General Sessions, aided in disseminating the counterfeit bills. Smith's involvement ceased when a sheriff searched his home after tips from suspicious colleagues.

Many colonial era counterfeiters would be done in by their own operations as the copper printing plates commonly used were often the chief piece of evidence to arrest and punish these deviants. Mary's counterfeiting kitchen-based operation was simple and did not rely on the copper plates, thus different and more difficult to trace and prove. According to Scott's Counterfeiting in Colonial America, Mary's process began by "placing a damp starched muslin on top of the bill she intended to imitate and then lightly ran a hot flatiron over the cloth, causing the material to pick up the printing from the money; next she would iron the muslin hard to transfer the pattern to a blank piece of paper which was to be the counterfeit bill. The cloth, having served its purpose, was immediately thrown into the fireplace and consumed to ashes, so that no plate was left to be seized and used in court as damaging evidence ... As her next step, she would with a fine crow quill pen trace over the impression on her new bill and after that go over letters to reproduce the exact thickness of the letters on the true bill." 

The counterfeit bills produced, Scott writes, included Rhode Island bills of £5, £3, 20s., and 10s., Connecticut bills of £5, and Massachusetts bills of £5, £3, and 40s. Mary personally never passed the counterfeits, instead she used her familial network to do the dirty work, selling the fake money at half their face value.

The counterfeiting scheme began to unravel in 1722, about six years after it began. Bowen claims authorities became suspicious after Mary and John "purchased a large, expensive new home for the family." The following year, in Newport, Rhode Island, the first of Mary's associates was pinched by authorities. Arthur Noble was at an event in Newport when he came upon three young women from Rehoboth, and he wished to treat them for the evening. He passed along one of the counterfeit £5 bills, but it was quickly identified as suspect and Noble was arrested. Nicholas Peck, one of Mary's brothers and conspirators, would be arrested that summer, also in Newport, for passing a counterfeit £5 bill, and Nicholas Campe confessed what he knew to authorities. Campe's exact role in the operation isn't clear to this author, though he was likely among those used to simply pass along the counterfeit bills.

On August 15, 1723, a trio of deputy sheriffs came with warrants to apprehend John Butterworth, Jr., Mary (Peck) Butterworth, Israel Peck, Nicholas Peck, Hannah Peck, and two others. The suspects were placed in jail to await their day in court, but each was soon acquitted and released due to a lack of evidence — though a brother and Hannah did testify against Mary in court. Mary was fortunate to escape conviction, as punishment for counterfeiting could be quite severe. According to Rhode Island Historical Tracts, Rhode Island state law called for a counterfeiter to have their ears cropped (cut off), to be whipped, or fined, while being imprisoned "as the nature of the offense requires," and to also "pay double damage to the persons defrauded." If a counterfeiter could not uphold the fiscal reparations, Rhode Island law demanded "he should be set to work, or sold for any term of years which the discretion of the judges considered satisfactory."

Once acquitted of her crimes, all records and accounts suggest she gave up her counterfeiting ring and became a housewife, living the norms of a married woman in the colonial period. She and John would raise even children together before each died in old age. Mary was 88-years-old when she died in Bristol County on February 7, 1775.

The one killed in Oxford, painful to relate, was your sister Beulah.

This weekend featured many genealogical discoveries, several of which I plan to write about in due time. One bit of information uncovered this evening, however, left me feeling a need to share quickly.

While working on the Ellis family line of my tree, I finally found a missing piece that unlocked an entire other surname branch that I never knew as a connection. The Freeman family of Sturbridge, Massachusetts. The family is one I had some very cursory knowledge of as it is represented at one of my favorite haunts, Old Sturbridge Village — home of the Freeman Farm.

I reached out to a friend at OSV about my newly-uncovered connection to the Freeman family, and he in turn put me in touch with an OSV historian. In less than four hours on a Sunday afternoon, my initial e-mail to my contact resulted in a good deal of information from Tom Kelleher, whose official title is Historian and Curator of Mechanical Arts. Following up on Tom's information, tips, and leads, I came across a letter from Pliny Freeman — my 1st cousin 6x removed — to his son, Pliny Freeman Jr., dated 12 July 1835. The elder Pliny was still residing at his farm in Sturbridge, while his son had settled in Ohio. This letter carried with it the devestating news that Beulah, Pliny Jr.'s younger sister, had been tragically killed during a thunderstorm.

An excerpt from that letter:

On Sunday last, 5th instant, there were two deaths in Sutton and one in Oxford. Those in Sutton were Mr. and Mrs. King, ages 63 and 57. They were both killed at one flash and in the same room. The one killed in Oxford, painful to relate, was your sister Beulah. She went upstairs to shut the windows, as was supposed, and a flash of lightening struck the chimney and threw the top mostly off. Lyman was not at the house. One of the neighbors saw the lightning strike the chimney [and] saw the bricks falling. He with one other of his neighbors immediately repaired to the house. On entering they found her [in the] up chamber dead on the floor, lying on her face and her clothes on fire. The skin on her neck and shoulders was some torn and her clothes behind were very much shattered. (If you have the opportunity you may communicate this sad intelligence to your Uncle Samuel. It seems he and family have been afflicted with a great deal of sickness but not to them like this.)

It seems the lightening passed from the top of the chimney to the bottom of the cellar. The body of the chimney is so badly shattered that it cannot be used until it repaired and every room in the house injured. Tore off plastering, chimney pieces, ceiling broke a hole through the chamber floor, shivered one cross-sill in the cellar, and shivered some posts. It shivered a board of the floor directly under the foot of the cradle that the baby was sleeping in. The scene throughout looks gloomy. Both cases occurred about four afternoon, both houses on high land and in sight of each other and about one-and-a-half miles apart. The news came to us about eight that night. The funerals at four the next day. The funerals were attended in a meetinghouse in the village nearby. Mr. Gray of Sutton and Mr. Clark of Sturbridge attended the funerals. It was a melancholy and heart-rending sight to see three coffins in the meetinghouse at the same time. There was a large collection of people. Our family and several of Lyman's cousins from Holland attended the funerals.

Grandma's final days in the almshouse

It's amazing what genealogical research can do to you. Individuals you never met, whose lives ended long before yours began, yet sometimes there can be an emotional connection or reaction to a nugget of information uncovered.

This was the case as I began looking into one of my great-great-great-grandparents recently. The end of her life was a sad time, residing in an almshouse, possibly suffering from significantly impaired cognitive abilities, and dying in a state hospital.

When it comes to the Ellis line of my maternal family tree, I've struggled to get too much definitive information beyond my 3rd great-grandfather George Ellis, and I've never delved into his wife, my 3rd great-grandmother, Caroline. All I ever knew about her was that George had married a woman named Caroline, and together they had several kids.

Turns out that she's really a Susan — Susan Caroline Marvin. Caroline, as she used her middle name throughout her life, was born on August, 19, 1830, to Seth and Susan Marvin in Alstead, New Hampshire, a very small town near the Vermont border. At this point, I know nothing of her parents, nor any siblings she may have had. Much of her youth remains an enigma for me, with no real records uncovered until 1855, when she was 25-years-old.

Caroline and George had already married, presumably before she turned 20-years-old, when she gave birth to their first child, Julia A. Ellis, in October 1850. The family would grow to eight known children born over a 15-year-period, 1850 to 1865. At least three of those eight would die young — George Henry Ellis of typhoid fever at age 21 in 1875, Willie M. Ellis of tuberculosis at age 19 in 1885, and Charles Albert Ellis at age 33 in 1884.

The Ellis family shows up as residents of Worcester, Massachusetts, in both the State and Federal Census. Caroline typically does not have an occupation listed on the Census forms, though she does appear as a dressmaker in the Massachusetts Census of 1865.

The big question marks begin as middle-age hits in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. In the 1870 Census, the entire Ellis family (other than eldest child Julia, then 20-years-old) is residing in Worcester. However, by June 1880 it appears by Census data that George and Caroline have called it quits. George, who is identified as a married man, is residing on Pink Street in Worcester with the family of his son Frank. Caroline is identified as "widowed/divorced" and residing with the family of daughter Julia on Cambridge Street in Worcester.

It appears that Caroline likely remarried as death records for her son Charles shows his parents as Caroline and "George Smith." It is possible, however, that Smith was erroneously written in place of Ellis.

George Ellis would pass away in Worcester on January 1, 1892, at the age of 66. His cause of death is "Bronchitis La Grippe," indicating he suffered from both bronchitis and the flu.

In the 1910 Census, Caroline Ellis appears as a 79-year-old widow listed as an "inmate" at an almhouse known as the Worcester Home Farm. An almhouse is a poorhouse, typically a home for a city's poor to stay. In the case of the Worcester Home Farm, as noted in a 2014 Worcester Telegram & Gazette feature, "life was difficult." The article notes the almhouse's residents, or inmates, "were not permitted to be idle; or talk without permission; nor leave. It was considered shameful to be considered a pauper, and the location of the Poor Farm enabled the city to provide for their needs while ostricizing them from the community." Similarly, Michael D. Kane wrote about the property for MassLive in 2016, explaining it had been "Worcester's first foray into curing social ills ... It had been the place where Worcester housed its extremely poor, mentally ill and those suffering from communicable diseases."

A portion of the Worcester Home Farm properties.

The Worcester Home Farm is reported to have been a 599-acre farm, that featured a hospital, farming, animals raised for slaughter, and even for a hog-fueled garbage disposal system. From 1872 to 1932, which includes Caroline's time at the Worcester Home Farm, the city of Worcester employed a "piggery" to tackle local trash. Pigs would devour the trash while, the Telegram & Gazette reports, "helping to line the city's coffers." The smell from the piggery is said to have traveled for miles and was most certainly a problem for Shrewsbury residents next door.

Caroline spent the final years of her life at the Worcester Home Farm, passing away at the State Hospital on March 22, 1912, at the age of 81. The cause of death was cellulitis of the leg, a bacterial skin infection that is quite painful. Left untreated it can become lethal when it spreads to lymph nodes and the bloodstream. Caroline's death certificate notes she had been treated medically for the condition for just more than six weeks before her death.

In addition to the cellulitis, Dr. George A. McIver reports on Caroline's death certificate that she had been suffering from a "Senile paranoid condition" for 10 years.

How long Caroline had resided in Worcester's Home Farm is not yet clear, nor whether she was there as a destitute woman estranged from or widowed by her late husband, abandoned by her children, or housed on some sort of mental diagnosis. What is known, or at least pretty safely assumed, is that she had a pretty rough second half of her life — burying at least three of her children by the time she was 61-years-old, 10 years with a "Senile paranoid condition," and presumably a decade or more within the cold, restrictive, and uncaring walls of the Worcester Home Farm.

The Bloody Lane, Eye Patch, and a Medal of Honor

In my old history classroom, there once hung a meme that declared: “You may be cool, but you’ll never be Teddy Roosevelt riding a moose across a river cool.”

As it turns out, Samuel C. Wright might actually be that cool.

In recent weeks I was the beneficiary of a great deal of research and work done by a somewhat distant relative of my wife. This woman self-published a long family history of the Wright family, the maiden name of my wife's maternal grandmother. I've been working to independently confirm and verify the information provided in the couple hundred pages of names and dates, and it is certainly a long process.

Among those dryly entered into those pages, with little more than his vital information of birth, marriage, and death, was Samuel Cole Wright. He and my wife share a common ancestor, Adam Wright, who had been born in Plympton, Massachusetts, circa 1645. Adam is my wife’s 8^th great-grandfather, following along through Adam’s son Moses, all the way down to her maternal grandmother. Samuel was Adam’s 4^th great-grandson, through a line headed by Adam’s son John. In all, this makes Samuel her 5^th cousin 4x removed.

While the family history lists him the same as any other Tom, Dick, or Harry, Samuel was much more than that, as made evident by his valiant service to the Union during the American Civil War. While fighting with the 29^th Massachusetts Regiment, he was in more than two dozen battles, wounded numerous times, lost an eye and kept the bullet that claimed it as charm, was reported dead multiple times, and received the Medal of Honor.

Before we get to his Civil War service, however, we ought to start at the beginning. Samuel was born September 29, 1842 in Plympton, Massachusetts — a town that appears frequently in the first 200 or so years of Wrights after coming to Plymouth. Samuel was the eighth of ten born to Winslow Wright and Mary Cole, with Winslow being the great-grandson of Ezekiel Loring, a lieutenant during the American Revolution.

Samuel was raised in Plympton, working along with older brother William Henry Harrison Wright as a shoemaker, according to the 1860 U.S. Census. A couple months after the Census taker visited the Wright family, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States, setting off a series of events that culminated in the Civil War beginning in April 1861. On May 18, 1861, 18-year-old Samuel decided to do his part to preserve the Union, formally enlisting as a private with the 29^th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Little did Samuel know that he would spend the next four years in bitter battles waged in 15 states while traveling more than 4,200 miles, as reported by William Osborne’s 1877 The History of the Twenty-ninth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, in the Late War of the Rebellion. He is said to have participated in 30 battles, wounded five times, and twice reported dead, according to U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861-1865. He would twice be promoted for gallantry in action.

About one year into his service came a head wound as he was struck by a fragment of shell during the Battle of White Oak Swamp in Virginia on June 30, 1862.

About 16 months after enlisting, one of Samuel’s most harrowing experiences came about near Sharpsburg, Maryland, along Antietam Creek. The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, nearly proved to be the end of Samuel’s story — and as the fog of war raged on that day, some reported it had been his end. As Union General George B. McClellan sat poised for battle on September 16, only to, as he’s become infamous for, hedge his bets and delay to the next day. The day before the actual battle itself began, rounds of artillery between the two sides provided an ominous beginning, according to Samuel’s own recollections. “The shot from the first piece of artillery fired took off the leg of the color-bearer of my regiment,” he reported in U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861-1865. The ensuing volley of artillery fire “was at times very lively,” he added.

As dawn broke on September 17, so too did the camps as “troops were sent out to engage the enemy in our front. The roar of cannon and small arms was deafening.” While Samuel could certainly hear the enemy, he was unable to see them as the battle began. “From where we lay we could only hear the cannonading, we could not see the enemy, as a growth of woods impaired our view. It was, perhaps, as well, that we could not see the carnage wrought.”

When Samuel and his compatriots, including the famed Irish Brigade, were dispatched to support other Union troops in the thick of battle, they “hurriedly” made their way to Antietam Creek and forded across it. “The stream was so deep, that in crossing, we only had to remove the stoppers of our canteens and they would fill themselves,” he recalled. “We held rifles and ammunition above our heads.”

Once they successfully crossed the creek — and “removed our shoes, wrung out our stockings” — the regiment was ordered forward, directly toward the Sunken Road. Prior to the war, the Sunken Road was a dirt farm lane used as a shortcut by locals and farmers. After the Battle of Antietam it had infamously earned the macabre nickname of the Bloody Lane.

“Going up the hill we could see the cause of our sudden call,” Samuel recalled. “The hill was strewn with dead and dying; yes, and with those unhurt, for to stand was to be instantly killed by the sharpshooters who filled the ‘Sunken Road.’”

As the bodies continued to pile up, historians estimate 5,600 from both sides, Union troops planned to tackle a fence along the Sunken Road. The initial attempts were disastrous, and now Samuel likely faced a similar fate.

An Alex Gardner photo taken of part of the Sunken Road, or the Bloody Lane, in the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam.

“Some 200 yards in advance of our position, which we were holding at a terrible cost, was a fence built high and strong. The troops in advance had tried to scale the fence and reform under that hell of fire. They were actually torn to shreds and wedged into the fence,” Samuel vividly recalled.

Brigadier General Thomas Francis Meagher, an Irish immigrant whose own personal history is quite fascinating, called for this fence to be removed. Samuel was among those who volunteered to risk it all to do so.

“The cry came to us for volunteers to pull down the fence. Instantly there sprang from the long line, fast being shortened as the ranks closed up over the dead, seventy-six volunteers. We ran straight for the fence amid a hail of iron and lead, the dead falling all about us, but to reach the fence was our only thought. A part of the force reached it, and, as one would grasp a rail it would be sent flying out of his hands by rifle-shots. The fence leveled, we made the attempt to return, and it was as hot for us on the retreat, as it had been on the advance. Few escaped death or wounds. I had almost regained my regiment, when I was hit.”

Samuel was hit in the left knee but refused to heed the calls of officers to retreat to the rear, instead receiving treatment by the regimental surgeon where he had been wounded.

Ultimately, his actions at Antietam would result in being awarded the Medal of Honor — the highest and most prestigious recognition a member of the military can receive in the United States.

The following year was a difficult one for Samuel. In June 1863, Samuel contracted typhus, a disease that was among the more lethal ailments Civil War soldiers faced. He would be hospitalized and treated for typhus in Tennessee, laid up for three-to-four months. An Army wagon being pulled by a team of six mules would run over Samuel in October 1863, crushing his foot and causing unspecified internal injuries, according to Congressional records.

The summer of 1864 saw even more damage done in battle, including the loss of his eye. On June 2, 1864, during the Battle of Cold Harbor near Mechanicsville, Virginia, Samuel was wounded by a gunshot to his left arm. He was fortunate in this instance as no amputation was necessary, and he not only survived but was able to return to the battlefield after some recuperation before what would prove to be his final battlefield action the ensuing month.

It was on July 30, 1864, at the Battle of the Crater, part of the Union Army’s siege on Petersburg, Virginia, when it appeared Samuel was surely dead. During the battle, a bullet took out his right eye upon striking his head. In U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861-1865, it is asserted that Samuel “was shot directly in the right eye,” while Congressional records explain he had been hit by a “rifle ball, which destroyed his right eye, the ball passing to the back of his head, was left for dead, and was so reported.” His July 7, 1906 obituary in the pages of The Boston Evening Transcript reads “his head was penetrated by a bullet which entered at the back and put out one of his eyes; contrary to all expectations he recovered from the wounds, the bullet in his head was extracted, and he had carried it as a watch-charm ever since.” His retention of the unusual battle memento is reaffirmed in U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861-1865, which notes Samuel “still keeps the bullet as an awful souvenir of his closeness to death.”

After the Battle of the Crater, Samuel was sent home and spent 18 months recovering from what had been assumed to be a mortal wound. He was mustered out of the Army as a sergeant on February 3, 1865, just a couple months before Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. He would live on another 42 years after his final fight for the Union.

In his post-war life, Samuel remained primarily in Plympton, working as a farmer and then a trader or running a storefront, while also joining the Masons. He would later land a job in Boston at the Customs House, a position he would hold until the day he died. According to the Boston Evening Transcript, Samuel was “popular” among his co-workers and “his service was highly appreciated by the Government.”

On January 3, 1870, 27-year-old Samuel married Mary E. Nickerson, the 27-year-old daughter of William and Betsey Nickerson of Plymouth. Samuel and Mary had just one child, a daughter named Mary Dresser Wright, born on May 21, 1875 in Boston. Young Mary would go on to marry Augustus C. Sproul, a native of Bristol, Maine.

Samuel and Mary would split their time seasonally between Boston in the winter and Plympton in the summer. Records indicate his time as a resident of Boston was largely, if not entirely, in South Boston, first on K Street and, later on, Sixth Street.

As for his death, it was the old ticker that did him in unexpectedly. He had been recovering for several weeks from a bout of pneumonia, but had returned to work at the Customs House. In fact, Samuel was at work and “seemed in good health” when he left for home the evening of his death. According to The Boston Evening Transcript, upon arriving home, Samuel “ate a hearty dinner,” and then “started out from the house with a pail of ashes to dump behind the barn and his failure to return within a reasonable time caused the family members some apprehension.” Various relatives in the immediate area began searching for Samuel, ultimately finding his body just beyond the barn around 8 p.m. He was 63-years-old.

Newlywed taken by appendicitis

One branch of the family tree rarely tended to in my research is that of the Beaudry family, Canadian immigrants who settled in the Massachusetts communities in and around Sutton and Uxbridge.

The patriarch of this particular group was Gilbert Beaudry, who had been born in Canada in July 1836. Gilbert made his way south to the United States as a 20-year-old single man in 1856, and by 1865 was residing on Lynde Street (today Converse Street) in Worcester, Massachusetts. That year's city directory shows Gilbert employed as a "wire roller," while that year's State Census records him working as a "wire drawer." By the summer of 1868, 32-year-old Gilbert was living in Douglas, Massachusetts, working as a carpenter. That August he married Selina Bibeau, a 25-year-old Canadian who was then residing in Sutton. Gilbert and Selina had at least 10 children together, though by 1900 half of their children had died. Louis Beaudry was one of those who had passed.

Louis Beaudry, my 3rd great-uncle, had been born circa 1875 in Uxbridge's north end, a village known as North Uxbridge. Soon after his birth came that of Louise Sanders in Worcester, the daughter of Clarence and Ella (Davis) Sanders. Louis and Louise would marry in Worcester on Monday, December 23, 1895.

Little did the couple know that Christmas, just two days later, would be their one and only Christmas together as husband and wife. The 1895 city directory shows Louis residing in Worcester at 62 Foster Street, a property since absorbed by the Worcester Regional Transit Authority. The city directory shows he worked as a box maker, while the marriage records assert he was a woodworker.

While the Worcester-based newlyweds surely had talked about plans for their future together, perhaps how many children they might raise, where they might ultimately settle, their time together would be a paltry 231 days, fewer than eight months in total. On Monday, August 10, 1896, the 21-year-old box maker's life was cut short by appendicitis. There is no information as to how long Louis had suffered, but surely it was a painful ending. He was buried in the nearby community of Millbury, as were several other family members over the years.

Widowed at age 19, Louise initially remained in Worcester. A few years later, she would remarry and have three children. It was on Tuesday, June 6, 1899 — nearly 33 months after Louis had passed away — that Louise wed a British-born wireworker named Thomas Birkitt Hudson. They moved around a little bit, living on Upsala Street in Worcester as of 1900, then on Oxford Street in nearby Auburn in 1910, before returning to Worcester, living on Allen Street in 1920. By 1930, the couple had settled in Providence, Rhode Island. Together, they had three known children: Edith (circa 1901), Ella (circa 1903), and later a son, Robert (March 31, 1920).

No exact date of death has been uncovered for Louise, or her second husband, Thomas. She is last seen in Providence's 1931 city directory, while Thomas is found in East Providence in 1944. Regardless of when either passed, it is interesting to not that their son Bob was raised not by the couple, but rather by sister Ella, and her husband, Kenneth Warren, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

Great-Great-Grandfather Timothy P. Moriarty

For me, my genealogical research is a matter of two pursuits that are really the same in many ways: Who were my ancestors?

In the basic sense, that means their names, where they were from, the dates of the births and deaths, their spouses, and their children, and their parents. However, this is simply not enough. I also want to know WHO my ancestors were. What did they do for a living? What did they look like? How did they die?

We are, after all, not simply abstract numbers. We're people with all kinds of emotions, interests, flaws, skills and abilities, personality traits, and so much more. This is why one of my favorite primary source records is the obituary. Often, they prove to be a treasure trove of little details and tidbits that help to paint a picture of who these people were.

Though not a recent find, one of my favorite records is an obituary of my great-great-grandfather, Timothy P. Moriarty. The basic version of who he was is the son of Patrick & Mary (Sullivan) Moriarty, born in the village of Alohart in Beautfort, County Kerry, Ireland, on Wednesday, February 11, 1824. He married Catherine Murphy in 1857 or 1858, in Ireland, came to the United States in 1884, and passed away in Southbridge, Massachusetts on Friday, May 13, 1892. However, that doesn't tell me WHO he was.

He was born the day after Simon Bolivar was proclaimed dictator of Peru, several weeks before Tallahassee, Florida, was settled and constructed, and several months before John Quincy Adams defeated Andrew Jackson in the U.S. Presidential election, with a little help from Henry Clay's "Corrupt Bargain." He was born a few days before Civil War Union General Winfield Scott Hancock.

Timothy was raised about 25 miles northeast of Cahersiveen, the hometown of famed Irish freedom fighter Daniel O'Connell. It was in Timothy's youth that O'Connell took his fight to Parliament after moving to Dublin. At the time, rural farmers — such as the Moriarty family — were quite dependent on the potato. With grain costly and Catholic Ireland struggling under punitive actions of the British, many rural Irish would have potato as a major part of two or three meals each and every day.

Thus far in my research, Timothy was the first-born, with six siblings born over the next 18 years. In his pre-teen years, southern Ireland struggles under laws that require the poor to pay noticeably more, leading to what became known as a Tithe War. When Timothy is 14, the British Poor Law is enacted in Ireland, installing Dickensian workhouses that essentially took the poor from their land and split up families.

As Timothy reached adulthood, many of the more revolutionary Irish began to view O'Connell — the famed emancipator and liberator — as a sell-out who had become part of the machinery. As the Young Ireland movement took hold, soon something far more dramatic also took hold — phytophthora infestans, the mold that led to a potato blight and, ultimately, the Great Hunger or Potato Famine. County Kerry was among the hardest hit during the potato famine, so presumably Timothy experienced some dire times.

During the famine, an estimated 1 million Irish died, while another million boarded ships heading to the golden shores of the United States. In all, as much as one-quarter of Ireland's population was gone — either due to death or migration. Timothy survived and remained.

In his early 30s, Timothy married Catherine Murphy, 16 years his junior. She had been born in Ireland in 1840 to John & Julia (McGillicuddy) Murphy. Together, they would have eight children from 1859 through 1880. The children were all born in County Kerry, with some listed as coming into the world in Alohart, and others in Killorglin. Alohart and Killorglin are less than 10 miles apart, with the latter being home to the famed Puck Festival. That, perhaps, is a story for another day.

The Moriarty family remained on their farm in Alohart until 1884, when they boarded the S.S. Cephalonia to come to America. It was Saturday, June 21, 1884, that the ship — including the entire Moriarty family — arrived in the Port of Boston. They came to a country that wouldn't so much as see the cornerstone of the Statue of Liberty being laid until later that summer, and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer had yet to be published.

Arriving in Boston, the family settled in the town of Southbridge, just about 60 miles southwest of the city. There were already a small Moriarty presence in town. Now, 134 years later, a number of descendants still call Southbridge home.

Timothy called Southbridge home for just eight years, though he has been buried here for more than 125 years. He died on Friday, May 13, 1892, at the age of 68. An anonymous relative penned an obituary that survives to this day.

"Timothy Moriarty, who died at his home on Pleasant Street on Friday of last week, had been a resident of Southbridge eight years. During that time he cultivated a wide acquaintance and made a host of friends. His sickness dates from April 1, when he had an attack of the grip, which finally developed into pneumonia, from which he died. He was born in Kerry, Ireland, in 1822, and spent his life, until coming to Southbridge in his native place. He was married 34 years ago. He reared a family of seven sons and two daughters, all of whom are living, and who are highly respected members of the community. Mr. Moriarty was a thrifty and industrious man who, as the head of a dutiful and respectful household, surrounded himself with the comforts of a prosperous home. He bought the William Boak place on Pleasant street soon after coming home, and immediately proceeded to improve and beautify it, laying out several hundred dollars for that purpose. By the united assistance of his family, he accumulated other valuable property. He took an interest in the welfare of the town and was always pleased to see improvements going on. The large number of people who attended his funeral, which was held at 2:30 p.m. on last Sunday, attested the high regard in which he was held. Six sons acted as pall bearers. Among those who were present from out of town were: Jeremiah Gallivan and Misses Mary, Nellie and Honora Gallivan, John Sullivan, James Grady, Mr. and Mrs. Michael Sweeney, Daniel Sweeney and Miss Kate Sweeney, all of Holyoke; Daniel Fogarty and Miss Kate Fogarty, James Hartnett and Miss Nellie Hartnett, of Three Rivers; Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lyons and Miss Nellie Coffey of Thorndike; the Misses Sullivan of Northampton; Timothy Sullivan and Miss Bridget Sullivan of Boston; Philip Scully of Worcester."

Timothy's widow, Catherine, survived another quarter-century, passing in Southbridge on April 19, 1916 — just less than one week before the famed Easter Rising back in her native country of Ireland.

Great-Uncle Philip unlocked by AncestryDNA connection

AncestryDNA rest results have paid some dividends pretty quickly after enabling me to contact a previously unknown second cousin, and learn of the man she only knew as "Grandpa Far Away."

My grandfather, James Mahoney, was one of five children born and raised by Thomas Mahoney Jr., and Agnes St. John in Worcester. All five were born during the Roaring 20s and raised in the Great Depression. My grandfather was the youngest of the litter, born 25 June 1929 — some four months before the Wall Street Crash that officially began the Great Depression. I've had some information regarding some of his siblings, but two have largely remained enigmas: Thomas (born 1924) and Philip (born 1926). All I had for either of these guys was their dates of birth, first name of their spouses, and when they died. No maiden names for their wives, no idea on who their children were, no idea where they passed away, what they did for a living, or anything else.

Through one particular AncestryDNA match, I was able to connect with Jennifer, my great-uncle Philip's granddaughter. She has been able to fill me in a bit with the maiden name of Philip's wife, Pauline, and the dates of her birth and death. From there, I quickly found her obituary, which gave me a good deal of brand new information. Through this cousin, I was also able to learn of Philip and Pauline's four children, further confirmed through Pauline's obituary.

In Pauline's obituary, Philip is not mentioned whatsoever. Instead, it mentions a second husband who had passed in 1997. Turns out that soon after their fourth and final child was born, Philip had decided he was not happy with the family he had carved out for himself. He drained the family bank accounts, took up with a neighbor, and left the family flat. He moved to Arizona at some point, probably as part of this seemingly abrupt abandonment of his wife and kids, and, my newfound cousin asserts, was later known only through cards as "Grandpa Far Away." Through the U.S. Public Records Index, I was able to confirm Philip living in three different cities in Arizona. In 1978, he's in Phoenix, and then he's in Glendale and Peoria in the 1990s. I was also able to confirm what was assumed, that he died while in Arizona.

In the early 1980s, Pauline would marry a man who had seven children through a previous marriage. Between them, that would be 11 children, and eventually many grandchildren. Pauline passed away in 2012, at the age of 82.

Buoyed by this wave of new information, I spent a little more time with public records searches and city directories, and so forth. I found that in the 1950s, Philip was working at Wyman-Gordon in Worcester, residing with Pauline on Tower Street. I uncovered his social security number.

Most exciting of all, I found his school yearbook photo from 1944. Beneath Philip's name is open white space, which seems quite vacuous when compared to the classmate next to him, who was a multi-sport athlete, a member of the Student Council, Chairman of the Ring & Pin Committee, and a member of the group U.S.N.R.

The AncestryDNA results are in...

This morning, I opened up my e-mail inbox and was pleased to see an e-mail from Ancestry.com: "Your AncestryDNA results are in!"

I write this as I begin to explore the results and data, and have not previewed the information. This posting is sort of a real-time cursory exploration. I will take a deep dive after this is published, with no idea how soon I'll be coming up for air in the process. There's a good chance I become entirely immersed in the information and data.

I was not exactly surprised by the first thing I saw, which is my "DNA Story," which provides an "ethnicity estimate." According to AncestryDNA, I am 81% Irish/Scottish/Welsh, 7% British, with "low confidence" results showing 6% Eastern European, 3% Scandinavian, 2% from the Iberian Peninsula, and less than 1% Central Asian. More specifically, the results suggest County Kerry, Ireland to be first among specific regions where my family might have lived. This is not news as I've long-known the Moriarty family to have originated in County Kerry, more specifically the village of Alohart.

Within the "Ethnicity Estimate" is that ancestors, in the first half of the 18th century, were among the "Lonely Settlers in New France" that were the Saint Lawrence River French Settlers. This, presumably, has its origins in my maternal lines that include my maternal grandmother's family having roots in that part of Canada.

After the cursory look at the "Ethnicity Estimate," I turned to the DNA matches, of which there are apparently 362 people who are listed as 4th cousins or closer.

In viewing the matches, I come across my half-brother Jeff, who has previously done the AncestryDNA test. They mark him down as "Close Family" with "extremely high" confidence in the match. They're correct there.

It offers one first cousin, a Sullivan that I do not currently know. There are a number of Sullivans within my family tree, so this makes sense. There's a second cousin with the surname Greene, who appears to be related on my mother's side as my brother Jeff is listed as a shared match with Ms. Greene.

There are 13 third cousins matched, including my late cousin Barb Jones. Each of these matches are listed as "extremely high" confidence level matches, by AncestryDNA. There seems to be a slight edge in matches on my paternal side over my maternal side here, but not by much.

The balance of the matches are fourth cousins, more than 300 of them. Certainly this will take a good deal of time to go through all of them.

Time to get to work...

Great-Great-Grandmother's line in Lancashire

In Lancashire, England, sits the town of Accrington, about 20 miles north of Manchester. According to the 2011 United Kingdom Census, "Accy" is home to 35,456 Brits — and the hometown of musician Andy Kanavan, formerly of the Dire Straits. Accrington is also, as it turns out, the home of my great-great-grandmother.

Elizabeth Ann Hodgson was born in Accrington on 12 July 1862 to Adam Hodgson and his wife. Mrs. Hodgson is still a bit of a enigma for me at this point, having seen her listed as being named Ann and as Elizabeth. I assume, like her daughter, she is probably bearing both names. There are Ancestry.com family trees that assert one name or another, but I have not yet independently verified this information.

The Hodgson line was not something I had previously been aware of in my initial genealogical work on the maternal side of my family. That original work, conducted years ago and much more reliant on the trees created by other amateur genealogists, proved to be plagued with errors and has been part of a targeted overhaul and correction on my part. It was through that overhaul that I came across my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth.

She came to the United States in 1869, aged 7, according to the 1900 U.S. Census. At some point, she met Frank M. Ellis, my great-great-grandfather. Frank had been born in central Massachusetts, in the town of Oxford, in November 1852. Current research indicates he was one of eight children bore to George and Caroline Ellis between 1849 and 1865.

Elizabeth and Frank were married in Worcester, Massachusetts, 11 December 1883. She was 21-years-old while he was 31. Together, they had six children in the 1880s and 1890s, raising them in Worcester. Their first-born was Frank Lucy Ellis, born 21 November 1884. He was followed by Frederick W. (1888), William H. (1890), Charles Cleveland (1891), Elizabeth (1893), and Esther (date of birth currently unknown).

In the 1900 U.S. Census, the family was residing at 106 Lafayette Street, Worcester, just a few blocks north of Crompton Park. It wasn't long before they moved about a half-mile north to Beacon Street, where my grandfather, Charles Cleveland Ellis, and his lineage lived for several decades.

Elizabeth was just 45-years-old when she passed away at the Worcester City Hospital, due to pulmonary tuberculosis. She died on 24 January 1908, leaving behind teenage children and some who were in their early 20's. Currently, Frank's date of death has not yet been uncovered. He was still alive when Elizabeth passed away, but has not yet been positively identified in the 1910 U.S. Census or beyond.

Finding my 3rd great grandfather in an insane asylum?

Is it true? Is this Thomas Mahoney in the looney bin the same Thomas Mahoney that is my 3rd great grandfather?

While doing some cleaning up of my family tree, I was going through U.S. Census data to confirm city residences and add in the street addresses, when available. The street addresses were not something I had bothered much with in the past, but with my recent genealogical reboot, it has become a tool I've incorporated to both help corroborate other sources and data, but also to give me a better idea of the world these ancestors lived in, and how that world looks today.

This evening, I was cleaning up my 3rd great grandfather, Thomas J. Mahoney. Born in May 1842 in Ireland, Census data indicates he came to the United States in 1855. He married a Bridget Sullivan, born 1844 in Ireland, and together they had five sons. Each of these boys were born in Connecticut, presumably in Norwich or its surrounding area. Just a few years after Patrick, the youngest child of the family, is born in Connecticut, the family is listed in the 1880 U.S. Census as residents of Richmond, Rhode Island, a town just more than 25 miles east of Norwich. By 1900, however, the family is about 70 miles north, living on Cambridge Street in Worcester, Massachusetts. Worcester is the city my grandfather's family, the Mahoney clan, called home for multiple generations.

While I have a decent amount of data on Thomas Mahoney's children living in Worcester, his time in the city is not terribly well documented thus far. In 1900, at age 58, he is widowed and living on Cambridge Street with the family of his son, Thomas. He is working as a day laborer.

I have no date of death for Thomas, so I began to look for him in the U.S. Census after 1900. I found a Thomas Mahoney in the 1920 Census, but I was immediately curious upon seeing the hand-written Census form: "Mahoney, Thomas. Patient."

Patient? Where? What happened?

Before I bothered going down this rabbit hole, I decided to seek confirmation this was the right guy.

Age? 78. That would put him as born circa 1842. That's a match.

Birthplace? Ireland. That's a match.

Birthplace of parents? Ireland. That's a match.

Marital status? Widowed. That's a match.

Everything appeared to be a match, leading me operate on the assumption that there is a very strong likelihood that this is my Thomas Mahoney.

He was listed as being on Belmont Street, so I began flipping back through the earlier pages looking for more information. After a few additional pages, I finally looked at the top of the page. "Name of Institution: Worcester State Hospital."

I had an inkling, but wanted to confirm that it perhaps wasn't just another name for one of the several hospitals in Worcester. A quick Google search confirmed what I already believed to be the case: Worcester State Hospital, sometimes known as the Worcester Insane Asylum, was a mental institution that closed its doors in 1991, more than 150 years after it first opened its doors.

In the end, operating under the belief this is the right man, I'm left wondering what happened.

Was he legitimately insane? Was it an issue of a 78-year-old man battling dementia or Alzheimer's Disease? Perhaps he was just viewed as a burden to his kids, who shuffled him off to the mental institution. Any of the above are viable possibilities.

I'm skeptical I will ever be able to learn what happened and why Thomas was placed into Worcester State Hospital. Any surviving records are surely not public. Barring it stemming from some sort of major incident that would've been found newsworthy, his admission to the asylum is not likely to be recorded in the newspapers. To my knowledge, there are no Mahoney family papers or diaries whatsoever. All the same, I will continue to dig in hopes of uncovering the circumstances.

Further Corroboration

The next step was to begin trying to see if I could find Thomas in either the 1910 or 1930 U.S. Census data.

I was immediately skeptical that he would be found in the 1930 Census after being found in the asylum in 1920. He'd be 88 by 1930, which was another factor making it increasingly unlikely he'd be found. Ultimately, no luck finding him in the 1930 Census.

As for the 1910 Census, there was no reason to believe he wouldn't be uncovered. I did find a Thomas Mahoney that seems to be a fit. Widowed, born in Ireland, and aged 68. Check, check, and check. Immigration year is listed as 1859, four years after what was listed in a prior Census report, but that doesn't seem to be terribly uncommon a discrepancy. This Census entry shows Thomas living with a son, William A. Mahoney, at 80 Temple Street in Worcester. Thomas does indeed have a son named William, and certainly the Worcester residency makes perfect sense. Furthermore, Cambridge Street and Temple Street are just about two miles apart, so this seems to work. The problem, however, comes with the rest of the Census data in comparison to what I previously had on file on William.

William, according to the original genealogical information, was born in Connecticut in May 1867. The 1900 Census data in Worcester clearly shows William as being born in Connecticut in May 1867, and that he's 33-years-old as of the Census recording in June 1900. However, the 1880 U.S. Census in Rhode Island, shows William as Connecticut-born, but aged 15 in June 1880 — that would put him as a newborn around 1865. This sort of discrepancy in Census data is not all that uncommon.

Regardless of whether William is born in 1865 or May 1867, the William A. Mahoney found in the 1910 U.S. Census is aged 37 — which means he would have been born circa 1863. Additionally, he's reported as having been born in Massachusetts, whereas the other Census data is clear that he should be listed as Connecticut-born. This William is married to a woman named Catherine, and is reported as having been married to her for nine years. Together, they have a son, Arthur, born about 1901. Also living with them is William's father, Thomas, as previously mentioned. Additionally, William's brother Daniel is living with the family on Temple Street. This seems to be a match to my previously existing data, though the birth year is slightly different. In this Census data, Daniel Mahoney is also born in Massachusetts, and is listed as 29-years-old, putting him as being born about 1881. In the previously uncovered Census data, Daniel was born in Connecticut in June 1875 (per the 1900 Census). The 1880 Census shows him as aged 6 and born in Connecticut; further corroborating the 1900 data.

Ultimately, this William and Daniel living with their father Thomas could be my 3rd great grandfather Thomas and two of his sons. It may very well not be them either, however. To find out, I will have to take a fresh look at William and Daniel to see what can be further confirmed and what seems to be erroneous information from data collection years ago.