Catherine

Few of us, I think, would know the courage and desperation involved in ripping up your roots in one country, and sailing away to another country to begin life anew, yet thousands and thousands of Irish people did so in the 1800s.  Certainly, the misery and oppression in Ireland during that time provided ample incentive to leave.  For most who came, however, they found not streets paved with gold, but gutters strewn with garbage, freedom to succeed yes, but also freedom -- and ample opportunity -- to fail.  They found that they had merely traded rural destitution for urban squalor.  One can only guess at the toll it took on individuals.

My trip to the cemetery had opened up a haunting mystery: why was my great-great grandmother Catherine buried in an unmarked grave in the same cemetery where my great grandfather Jeremiah had purchased a significant family plot with impressive headstone?  Why was Catherine living alone at the time of her death, and why was she buried seemingly with no wake and no ceremony?

The first small clue came from the 1880 federal census.  There, I located Cornelius living with two of his children -- Jeremiah and Anna -- at 98 Summit Street in Brooklyn

After the column where he is described as "Father", there is a "D" marked.  According to the key, this "D" meant that Cornelius was divorced.  One could surmise that something pretty serious happened between Catherine and Cornelius, because Irish Catholics were not prone to divorce.  One could also surmise that it was Catherine who was alienated from the family, since Cornelius was living with his children and Catherine, it seems, was on her own.  There is also the added piece of interesting information that in the 1886 City Directory, Catherine identifies herself as the widow of Cornelius.

I found some tantalizing possibilities in The Brooklyn Eagle.  The Eagle was a daily newspaper that published from 1841 to 1955.  All editions from 1841 to 1902 have been digitized here, and are searchable by keyword.  When I searched on "Catherine Mahoney", I found the following articles:

August 18, 1859

October 12, 1860:

June 10, 1862:

August 31, 1869:

Now, there is no solid evidence that any of these Catherine (or Kate) Mahoneys was my ancestor, or even if any or all of these articles are about the same woman. It is true, however, that several of the incidents are very similar, and at least two occurred in or near the Brooklyn neighborhood where my great great grandparents lived later in life.

So, if one or more of these articles is, indeed, about my great great grandmother, one could probably construct a reasonable scenario which might lead to divorce.  One might also speculate if the (in)famous Mahoney temper might have been passed down through the genes of Catherine.

It is, alas, all speculation, and the mystery of Catherine will probably remain locked away from view forever.

But how I wish I could somehow find the key.

The Cemetery

The search for ancestors can become a tedious affair, particularly when it is confined to internet searches.  There are so many rabbit-holes and dead ends, excitement and anticipation when a new path opens up, then disappointment and discouragement when it leads nowhere.  For five months after my visit to the NYC Archives, I scuffled around in an internet maze, searching and researching, stumbling blindly down virtual corridors and alleyways that only seemed to lead me back to my starting point with no new information in hand. Finally, the weekend for the rescheduled poetry reading arrived, and I headed to New York, hoping that Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn might yield more information than the digital backrooms I had been frequenting.

I had my great-great grandmother's death certificate with  me, and I went to the cemetery office, showed it to the secretary there, and she found the grave site number.  I was filled with hope as I wended my way through the gravestones that at last a breakthrough was at hand.  When I got to my great-great grandmother's grave site, this is what I found:

My great-great grandmother Catharine was buried in an unmarked grave.  Another rabbit-hole, another dead-end.  Dejected, I trudged back to the cemetery office where I had left my car.  On a whim, I went back into the office and gave the lady there the names of my great-great grandfather Cornelius and my great grandfather Jeremiah.  She checked the cemetery database and told me matter-of-factly, "oh, yes, they're buried together."

 

The pictures of the grave site speak for themselves. My great-great grandfather, my great grandfather and great grandmother, my great uncle John, and my great aunt Anna (John was only a rumor, and I had never even heard of Anna before this), are all buried at the site. The fact that there was no birth date for Cornelius did little to dampen the utter exhilaration I felt.  After so much time spent chasing my ancestors through an ephemeral digital world, here was something tangible, something REAL, to connect me to them.  I stared at the stone for endless minutes, then hugged it, then danced around it.  Luckily, there was no one else in Holy Cross Cemetery on a Friday afternoon, so my antics went unnoticed by the living.

When I was finally able to tear myself away, I drove over to Greenwood Cemetery.  Whereas Holy Cross is a Catholic cemetery, Greenwood is a secular one.  According to his death certificate, this is where my great uncle Cornelius is buried. I located his grave site where he is buried along with his wife Mary, his son Harry, and his daughter Catherine Daly.

Finally, I went to the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn where my ancestors had resided in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  I found the house at 313 Clinton Street where my great grandfather died in 1919.  

Now that I had the date of death for Cornelius from the gravestone, I was able to identify which of the death certificates I had seen in the Archives was his.  He died in 1880 at 98 Summit Street.

The house where Cornelius Jr had died -- 296 Sackett Street -- had been torn down and replaced by modern condominiums.  The house where my great-great grandmother Catharine died -- 66 Warren Street -- also no longer exists, having been removed to make way for the Brookly-Queens Expressway which now cuts through the old neighborhood.

Not bad for a day's work.  I didn't get any closer to to the information leading me back to Ireland, but I now had a real connection to all the generations that had lived here.  

There was one mystery I had uncovered.  Why was my great-great grandmother buried in an unmarked grave in the same cemetery where such a grand family gravestone was also located?

My Trip to NYC

I used to be a New Yawka through and through.  Lived for years in Park Slope in Brooklyn, then years more in a loft in SoHo.  That was back when I knew I was gonna be famous, when I knew it was only a matter of time before all the world was gonna recognize my genius.  You live in New York and you're brushing shoulders with greatness every day, and you wait for your time to come.  For most, like me, it never comes, other than brief Warholian fame that vanishes in an instant.  When I left New York, I went to Moscow, Russia, and lived there for nine years,  I never looked back.

Now my ancestral search was leading me back to The City.  The old death certificates I was now looking for were only viewable on microfilm in the New York City Archives.  Since I live up in the Boston area now, I needed to manufacture an excuse for a visit to NYC, because I couldn't justify a trip just for a visit to the Archives.  Then, out of the blue, two things happened to make the trip a reality.

I have a little game I play at work when I get bored.  I think of a name of someone from my past that I haven't seen or heard from for a long time, then I Google the name to see if I can find any recent information.  I've done this with childhood friends, high school buddies, even adulthood friends that I had lost contact with.  I've actually located a few people this way.  I remembered the name of a guy I met in the Army.  We were in the same Officer Candidate School company down at Fort Benning, Georgia.  A couple of the guys in the company, including me, decided to publish a company newsletter.  In one of the issues I published a poem (an embarrassing piece of work when I read it today), and shortly thereafter, another guy in the company came up to me, told me he enjoyed my poem, said he wrote poetry too, and showed me some of his stuff.  It was an immediate and solid connection between the two of us, an intertwining of spirits that I had seldom felt before or since, two aspiring poets caught up in the macho militarized swirl of the Vietnamized sixties.  We hung out a bit, then he dropped out of OCS, and got assigned to dog handler school.  I went on to graduate as an infantry second lieutenant, and we lost contact after that brief intense connection.  I decided to Google his name to see if there was anything there.  I figured I had a decent shot at finding something, since he had a rather distinctive name -- Lamont B Steptoe.  This is what I found:

Lamont Steptoe is a poet, photographer, journalist, and activist based in Philadelphia, PA. His most recent collection of poems, A Long Movie of Shadows, was just awarded a 2005 American Book Award.

Lamont is the founder/publisher of Whirlwind Press. He was a Combat Army Sergeant in Vietnam and was decorated with the Bronze Star. Among other awards and grants, Lamont has won:

• The 1999 Literary Fellow for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts
• The 2002 Kuntu Writers Workshop Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry from founders Rob Penny and August Wilson
• Discipline Winner in the Literature Category of the Pen Fellowship Program in Philadelphia
• Twice nominated for the Pushcart Award.

He has read his poetry in Paris, France, Den Haag, Holland, Managua, and Nicaragua. In the United States he has read at the Etheridge Knight Festival, the Library of Congress in Washington DC, the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival, the Schomburg Center for Black Literature, and the Annual Black Writers Conferences in Philadelphia, PA.

Of his many, many books and other works, the most well known are Mad Minute, In the Kitchens of Masters, Catfish and Neckbone Jazz. Lamont Steptoe is widely considered to be one of the most accomplished and important poets in the U.S.

Whoa! My Army buddy from 43 years ago actually BECAME a poet, as opposed to me who only aspired.

Now, I don't consider myself a poet.  I've written some inconsequential bits of rhyme over the years, but nothing there to brag about.  I did have one brief poetic outburst in the middle seventies, which serendipitously coincided with the publication of an anthology of poetry called "Demilitarized Zones: Veterans After Vietnam", so I actually got a couple of my poems published. I wrote seven poems in a matter of  about three weeks.  I just went out into the woods with a pencil and notebook, smoked a J, contemplated the trees, and the poems just arrived.  It was like the poems existed outside of me, and I was merely a conduit rather than a creator.  I've never had that feeling before or since.  I've never written any real poetry since that outburst.  For those of you interested in The Complete Poetic Works of Peter P. Mahoney (all seven of them) you can find them here.

What all this has to do with my trip to NYC is that one of the editors of that poetry anthology was organizing a forty year anniversary reading in New Jersey to benefit an organization called Warrior Writers, and I was invited to participate in the reading.  Boom! I now had my excuse to visit NYC.  I found Lamont on Facebook, and made contact with him, and he agreed to come up to NYC from Philly to meet me.  I met him outside of Penn Station, and the old connection was as immediate and as intense as it had been forty-three years ago.  We are both inveterate storytellers, and we each now had a rapt audience who had never heard any of our oft-repeated yarns and was eager to hear them all.  We spent a magical afternoon together. We sat for about six hours in Fanelli's Cafe in SoHo, totally oblivious to the artsy crowd around us.  We made sure to tip the waitress well, since we monopolized one of her tables for her entire shift.  My sense was she didn't seem to mind, and enjoyed overhearing bits and pieces of our conversation.

The next day, I was off to the archives.  It took a little while for me familiarize myself with the search setup there.  They had a computer search engine where you could search for names, but once you found a name and a reference number, you had to go to the microfim library to locate the actual documents.  I plugged away at it, and soon found what I was looking for:  the death certificate of my great-grandfather Jeremiah J. Mahoney:

And there it was. Jeremiah J. Mahoney, living at 313 Clinton Street, died on September 24 1919.  Jeremiah J. Mahoney, son of Cornelius Mahoney and Catherine Dugan, both born in Ireland.  I had found the names of my ancestors who had actually left Ireland to resettle in the US.  It was all I could do to keep from shouting out in exhilaration in the staid halls of the NYC Archives.  I didn't want to stop there.  Now, if I could only find a death certificate for my great great grandfather Cornelius, it should give me the names of his parents and I would have the information to take my search to Ireland.

I found several possible Cornelius Mahoneys who died between 1880 and 1900, but I didn't have enough data to determine which one was my relative.  I did find the death certificate for a Cornelius Mahoney who died in 1908:

So, this was Cornelius Junior, a brother of Jeremiah.  Then, I found the death certificate for Catharine (Dugan) Mahoney, who died in 1888:

Alas, the older death certificates didn't list the parents' names.  Still, there was some interesting information to be gleaned from the document.  It said that Catherine had been in the US for fifty years, and resident in NYC for forty years.  That would put her crossing in 1838, much earlier than I had thought.  I had always assumed that my ancestors came over during the time of the Great Potato Famine in the late 1840s.  Now the fact that these were two round numbers not from Catharine herself would lead me to believe that they are estimates, but I figured they were probably in the ballpark.  There was also information on the back of the death certificate:

Catharine was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn. If I could find her gravesite, then chances were Cornelius should be close by.  If the gravestones had birth dates on them, then I would have the data to continue the search in Ireland.

There was one small piece of curious information that I noticed.  Catharine died on the evening of 16 August, and was buried on 18 August.  Wasn't there a wake or a funeral mass?  Seemed rather quick.  I would learn later the significance of that information.

For now, I was ecstatic at all the information I had uncovered, and at the reunion I had with Lamont.  The only downer from the trip was that a big snowstorm came up and the poetry reading was postponed.  Actually, it wasn't a downer at all.  It meant that I now had an excuse to return to NY and find what Holy Cross Cemetery might have in store for me.

The First Clues

So, I had made my vow to answer my children's question about where our ancestors were from in Ireland, but I didn't have any idea of how to go about finding the answer.  My father knew almost nothing about the Mahoney family ancestry, and he had no historical family documents.

My first break came when my father's sister, Virginia, died, and one of my cousins found a shoebox of family memorabilia among her belongings.  It wasn't much:  a few old photos, a few newspaper death notices, some holy cards from funerals, and some old letters.  My cousin, bless his soul, digitized the whole collection and made it available to other family members.  I eagerly requested my copy.

The pictures mostly of my Father's and Grandfather's generation. Several of them were of my Uncle Pete, who was killed during WW2:

There was one picture of my Grandfather's unit from WW1 (Grandpa is fifth from the left in the back row):

There was one picture, however, older than the rest, with two people I had never seen before:

These were my great-grandparents.  Also among the documents in this cache was a duplicate copy of the baptismal certificate for my Grandfather:

Peter Mahoney, child of Jeremiah Mahoney and Mary A Lanigan.  I now had the names of the two people in that old photograph, my great-grandparents.

I tried googling both of the names,  to no real avail.  This did lead me to the website Ancestry.com, which promised me access to all kinds of historical data if I were willing to pay their fees.  I was willing.

I started searching through census data from the late 1800s and early 1900s for any evidence of my family.  I found plenty.  From the 1892 NY State Census, I got ages for Jeremiah and Mary, as well as brothers and sisters for my Grandfather, Peter.  I got that Jeremiah was a police officer.  I got what was probably a brother for Mary, Lawrence. There was also a mystery woman, Ellen Cronin, who was also living with them:

The 1915 NY State Census shows that two sisters were born after Peter, that Jeremiah was now working in the surrogate courts, and that Mary's brother, Lawrence, was still living with them.  It also shows that the family lived at 315 Clinton Street in Brooklyn:

The 1920 US Census shows all but two of the children have moved out, that Mary's brother Lawrence had been joined in the household by Mary's sister Margaret, and that the family had moved to 312 Clinton Street.  Most importantly, it shows Mary as the head of the household, meaning that Jeremiah had probably died between 1915 and 1920:

The next step in my search would need to be a trip to the New York City Archives, to try to locate the death certificate for Jeremiah.