Our Family Story Begins — Immigrant Secrets

Note: For the complete list of posts, go HERE.

I stare at the keyboard, not quite clear where to start this strange project.

My 9th grade English teacher Miss Porro used to say, “Just tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you told them.”

I realize in retrospect that this was hardly unique advice in high school English classes. But it struck a chord at the time, even though Miss Porro’s long-term commitment to education might be doubted by an impartial observer because she and another teacher named Miss Horton reportedly ran off to join the Country Bear Jamboree at DisneyWorld shortly after they were done with our class.

So. “Tell them what you’re going to tell them.”

Here goes. This is an “origins” story. Specifically, a story about the “origins” of our family.

I’m not sure where my sudden interest in our family Roots story came from or what brought it to top of mind, but it’s an obsession that won’t quite go away. Perhaps it was becoming a grandparent, and that realization that there is a strange and tenuous connection between generations. That there is an underlying and continuing story that is useful in understanding your own story. That there is a power in being part of a bigger story, a story connected both to what was and what will be.

It’s only with the connection to our own grandchildren -- a connection with none of those pesky parental expectations, just pure, unfiltered love -- that I realize that something was missing when we were growing up. We only had one-quarter of a full grandparent contingent of four.

My grandmother Sarah McEvoy was the only grandparent I ever knew personally, and she was quite a piece of work. I decide to dive into Ancestry.com and find out what I can add to what I already know about her story.

She was born on 4 February 1892 in a Townland called Graigueafulla in Clonaslee district in Queens County, rechristened “Laois” County after British-themed place-naming became somewhat unfashionable.

Sarah first shows up in the 1901 Census[i] in Ireland, and it’s good here to have some sort of verification of her age, because my great aunts and grandmother had a fairly notorious habit of lying about their age, which tended to have a somewhat cascading effect on everyone else’s age since they were all bunched so closely together.

And Sarah’s name is not the only one who shows up. There’s a baker’s dozen plus one of McEvoys that make their presence known in the 1901 Census — Father Martin, Mother Kate, sister of father Sarah, and kids Patrick, Martin, Joseph, Edward, Mary, Margaret, Sarah, Michael, Kate, Elizabeth, and George. One sibling, John, died at age five from “paralysis” on 2 May 1889 before she was born.

I do find myself wondering a bit about how all of these kids came to be when I look at a secondary census form. According to that form, their house had three rooms and three windows in the front of the house, so privacy for these 14 people must have been a somewhat comical concern. But I guess where there’s a will there’s a way. They also had a stable, a cow house, a “piggery” (cool name), and a chicken coop.

The house seems unnecessarily classified as a “3rd class house” on the form, but looking more closely, apparently it could have been worse — the grading scale does include an option for a “4th class house.” The walls and roof were made of mud, wood, thatch, or other perishable material. Sarah’s father owned the land upon which the house was built, which is more than some in Ireland could say, given the landowning tendencies of the dastardly British overlords.

By the time of the 1911 Census, things had changed a bit. In terms of the animals, things were looking up. There was a stable, but now there were 2 houses each for cows and calves. Three — count ’em — piggeries; I’m not sure how that breaks down into actual pigs. Plus, two chicken coops, a shed and a barn. Living high.

Looking a bit beyond the lines on the census form, you can get a sense of how tough life was. The life expectancy in Ireland in 1911 was 53.6 for men and 54.1 for women. Infant mortality was 81 deaths per 1,000 (now 3.7). 20% of all deaths occurred among those under 15 years old.

Moving on to the people in the actual house, you get a sense of how these data points reflected in the lives of real people and the sadness this must have brought with it. The number of people in the house in 1911 was down from 14 to 8: Father Martin, Mother Kate, Edward, Mary, Sarah, Michael, Kate, and Elizabeth.

What happened to the rest of them?

Sarah’s aunt, for whom she must have been named, died sometime between the 1901 Census and 1911 Census.
Sarah’s little brother George (1 year old at the time of the previous census) died on 6 August 1902 at 3 years old from “probably spinal disease and secondary paralysis.”
Patrick, the oldest in the family, died on 13 November 1905 at 24 from asthma complications.
Her older sister Margaret left for America on 4 June 1908 from Queenstown (a seaport town on the south coast of County Cork aboard the S.S. Umbria).
Her brother Joseph left a year later on 26 August 1909 aboard the S.S. Teutonic.
Still to come, her brother Martin will die in 1913 at age 30.

Yikes.

I will fast forward through the Easter Rising and World War 1, because the family background during this period is sketchy. By the end of 1921, a Treaty had been reached with Great Britain that created the Irish Free State. However, many Irish Republicans and nationalists, apparently including Sarah McEvoy and some of my relatives, viewed this as a step backward. And this precipitated a Civil War that would last until March 1924.

There is a family story that my Uncle Michael (Sarah’s brother) and Uncle Martin Hennessy (eventual husband of my Aunt Elizabeth) were involved with Sarah in various plots to blow up police stations during this period. Of course, we knew none of this while they were all alive — no one talked about any of this — it only surfaced many years later at funerals and wakes.

As the story goes, Martin and Michael were warned by a priest during Mass that they were about to be arrested and ought to leave Mass out the back door and hide out for a bit “in the bogs.” They eventually shipped off to Canada, supposedly to work in the wheat fields of Alberta, only to abandon this plan during a train stop somewhere halfway across Canada and slip into the United States.

I thought this was perhaps a bit of romantic hyperbole until I found a record of my Aunt Elizabeth’s petition for naturalization, which shows some of the background of her husband. And sure enough, there’s Uncle Martin entering the U.S. on 7 June 1924, at Detroit — right across the border from Windsor, Ontario.

There were attacks on the RIC barracks (Royal Irish Constabulary, the policy force in Ireland from the early 18th century until 1922) in both 1920 and 1922 in Clonaslee, which likely could have precipitated the rapid departure of Sarah, Michael and Martin to North America after the end of the Civil War in 1924 — and likely the rounding up of the usual suspects who were on the losing side.

Sooooooo….. I think that’s how Sarah wound up on the deck of the S.S. Adriatic in 1924 headed for America. Sarah arrived in the U.S. on November 17, 1924, travelling with her sister Elizabeth. Somewhere along the way in the late 1920s — after arriving in the United States in November 1924 — my grandmother Sarah found herself in Florida. I’m kind of amazed at this degree of mobility for a newly arrived immigrant in 1920s America.

Sarah and John Oliver Manson were married at St. Anthony’s Church in Ft. Lauderdale on 13 November 1929. Astute examiners of the marriage license application will note three things: 1) My grandmother’s occupation is listed as nurse, the only time any of us ever heard of that; 2) The application notes that neither of them had ever been married before. This was perhaps to expedite the marriage by a Catholic priest, since I don’t think the whole divorce thing was in play at that point; and 3) The apparently variable spelling of both her first name (listed here as Sara) and last name (listed as McAvoy, which some of the relatives continue to go by).

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Fast forward a few years, and my mother grew up in what would today be called a single-parent household, but back then they probably had some sort of other label that was not terribly attractive. I am not sure where everyone thought her father -- my grandfather John -- actually was, but he sure wasn’t where the rest of the family was.

My grandfather John was born in Sweden -- he evidently lived there through his early teenage years -- but inexplicably seems to have always claimed Melbourne, Australia as his birthplace on official documents once he got to the United States. Family lore has it that he sailed around the world seven times. His mother died when he was two. He seems to have had three sisters who all died before him. He somehow wound up in Rio at the age of 17, where he contracted yellow fever. He was accidentally shot in the left side in South Africa in 1898, perhaps in the Boer War (the Australians fought on the side of the English).

At one point he was fairly well known in Florida as a sea captain. He was the winner of a famous Miami to Key West boat race, a race that his own son (my Uncle Jack) would also win years later. He was actually the captain of the Presidential Yacht of Warren G. Harding. To put Warren G. Harding into context for those without a background in history, Donald Trump is the modern version of Warren G. Harding, except not as smart, nor as ethical. My grandfather was married to someone other than my grandmother during this period.

My grandfather also ran booze from the Bahamas to Miami during Prohibition with my 7-year-old Uncle Jack in tow, sitting on the bow of the ship as a decoy and pretending to fish. They made about 25 of these runs, until one night during a delivery he sensed a setup, threw a suitcase of booze out the window, and abruptly ended his career as a rumrunner.

There was also some degree of additional tension in this family because my Uncle Jack was reported kidnapped in 1925. The story ran like this and must have made the wire services because versions of it appeared in most of the major newspapers in the Southwest over a period of two or three days:

Police Ask Help in Finding Youth
Miami, July 10. Miami police today issued a country-wide appeal for Jack Manson, son of Mr. and Mrs. John O. Manson, missing since Wednesday morning. Jack is believed to have been kidnapped. A woman’s voice over the telephone invited Jack to attend a party to be given by one of his school chums. Later that night Mrs. Manson learned that the telephone call had been faked.

A few days later, there was another round of headlines, thereby establishing a hint of some of the family chaos to follow.

Missing Boy Safe with Dad -- Mrs. Manson believes lost lad “Jack” is with Parent “Somewhere in Florida”

There is some degree of family rumor that the paperwork wasn’t quite right when my grandfather married my grandmother in 1929, who at the time was just five years off the boat from Ireland. Hopefully she was not the “fake woman” in the phone call about Uncle Jack’s kidnapping.

Prior to the Depression, my grandfather had done fairly well for himself, so perhaps a sea captain represented something of a catch for my grandmother. Unfortunately for my grandmother, their wedding date corresponds almost to the day with Black Tuesday (beginning the stock market crash and the Depression). My grandfather lost everything during the Crash, except his wandering spirit. My mom tells stories of her father selling pencils door-to-door.

There was a gold stake in Nevada somewhere along the story in the 1930s. I have an old picture of my mother, her brother, and my grandparents John and Sarah panning for gold. It looks like something out of the Grapes of Wrath, shifting the scene from agriculture to the mining of precious metals. My grandfather died in 1945 in Reno, Nevada (a good place for a risk taker) and was living at the time with a non-existent “sister.”

My grandmother Sarah found out that he died by writing to the VA and inquiring as to his whereabouts.

Years later, my mother discovered that he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound when she conducted her own genealogy quest and requested his military records. The first in what will prove to be a long tail of family history secrets.

My grandmother never went back to Ireland, although she did regularly buy a ticket to the Irish Sweepstakes. I grew up hearing about the Irish Sweepstakes and sometimes seeing tickets for it. I often wondered exactly how you would collect on a winner, and when exactly the drawings were. I read now that a network of old IRA men sold the tickets and collected the proceeds. This makes sense as a place where my grandmother would invest her limited funds because “attempting to blow up police stations back in Ireland” thing and leaving the country under some duress.

I remember going to my grandmother’s apartment in the Bronx where she lived until she died. She worked as a maid at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel in New York City for years and years. The Barbizon Plaza hotel was located south of Columbus Circle and the property was purchased a few years ago by Donald Trump. As Billy Pilgrim might say, “So it goes.”

My grandmother was not a wealthy person, but she bought the clarinet that would set me on the path of a lifetime of music loving. She took my brother and me to Florida when I was 12, knowing deep down that she was already suffering from the brain cancer that would kill her.

After she died, I found a copy of the New York Daily News from August 16, 1948 in her apartment, kept because it was the day that Babe Ruth died. I wonder what that was about. We had her dresser in our basement for a long time after she died. Every time you opened a drawer in that old dresser for years afterwards, you would get a vague scent of her perfume.

As I tell this elaborate origins story about my mother’s side, I realize with rising trepidation that I am perhaps dodging the real “origins” story I want to tell, the real origins story that is at the center of a void in my life.

And that is this: What does it mean to know nothing -- absolutely nothing -- about my father’s parents?

Growing up, here is the sum total of what we knew about our paternal grandparents — and for that matter, my father’s entire side of the family.