Margaret Ann Connell 1869- 1951

   Maggie Connell was born in Lodi in 1869. I'm guessing she stayed in Lodi until at least 1885 and, at 16, was one of the two girls still at home with her widowed mom that year. She married John Michael Gorman, probably in about 1893, the year before their first daughter was born. I have lots of unanswered questions about Maggie. Why was she in the Spokane, Washington area where she appears to have started her family?  John Gorman was born in the Wyoming Territory in about 1868, making it likely that Maggie met and married him out west, but I think it unusual that a single young woman would venture so far on her own. Since John was a railroad conductor, perhaps they met far from Spokane. Their first child, Mary Elizabeth, was born in 1894 and Patrick in 1896, both in Hillyard, near Spokane. Theresa was born in April of 1898 in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, about 90 miles northeast of Spokane.  John was killed in an accident near Bonners Ferry just four months later and is buried back in Spokane. In 1892, the Great Northern Railway began service in Bonners Ferry, and John was a railroad conductor.  Also it's likely that John had a brother, Patrick, close to his age, who was an assistant roadmaster - a roadmaster having responsibility for a section of track - for the Great Northern Railway, stationed in Bonners Ferry in 1896. I believe their kids were close in age, so perhaps John had moved with his brother to that town, where Maggie would have some help with family while he was away from home on the trains.

   In about 1902, Maggie brought her family north into Canada. In 1906, 37 years old, she married John Bastian, a 34 year old immigrant from England, in Michel, British Columbia, what used to be a small coal mining town. I can't find Maggie and kids in the 1900 US census or in the 1901 British Columbia census, so I'm not sure what brought Maggie to Canada. Maggie and John (Bastian) had a daughter in 1909.  By 1911, they had moved about 200 miles east and may have been running a boarding house. Five years later, Maggie is again a widow, now living in Edmonton.  Daughter Mary, now 22 years old, is no longer at home.  I only find sporadic traces of Maggie after this. In 1924, she returned to the United States with her almost 16 year old daughter, also named Margaret Bastian. Their destination was Portage, Wisconsin. I can't find Maggie again until 1940, when 71 year old Maggie is living with her oldest daughter, Mary Gorman Gaul in the Los Angeles area.  She (Maggie) passed away and is buried in 1951 in Los Angeles county.
   In 1916, Mary was living elsewhere in Edmonton.  She was a nurse in what appears to be a Catholic institution, together with many sisters/nuns, nurses, orderlies and children (orphans?) under the age of 6. In about 1931, Mary married Fred Gaul, a retired orange grower in Los Angeles county. He was thirty years older than she. How a young nurse in Alberta, Canada meets a widower in southern California, I don't know. They lived in his San Dimas home. Fred had retired by 1920 and I see that he and Mary seemed to travel frequently - to Hawaii, Singapore and Brazil together. She made at least one trip to England after his death. Fred passed away in 1951. Mary passed away in 1988.
   Patrick married Leonora McCafferty in Alberta in 1927. Their only son, Jack, was born in 1929.  Patrick developed a brain tumor and died in 1932. Leonora remarried Dominic Meehan, a railroad conductor with the Canadian National Railway, around 1940. Their son James was born in 1942. Jack went on to become a journalist, newspaper editor and author.  An alumnus of Notre Dame College in Saskatchewan, among his books are a best selling biography of Notre Dame's founder, Pere Murray and the Hounds and an autobiographical novel, Snow in the Vineyards. Jack passed away in Calgary in 2009 at the age of 80. He married and had a family, but I have no details.
   I have found no more information on Theresa Gorman.  My last trace of her was as an 18 year old living with her mother and family in Edmonton in 1916.
   Margaret Bastian, Maggie's youngest daughter, immigrated to the US with her mom a month before her sixteenth birthday, in 1924.  They were on their way to Portage, Wisconsin, where Maggie's mom had passed away the year before, near where she had grown up in Lodi. The only record I've found of daughter Margaret is of her living in a boarding house for women in Milwaukee in 1930.  She worked as a stenographer for a printer.
   Nowadays, we think of nothing of coast-to-coast families. Maggie lived quite the adventure, from a farm in Lodi, to the railroads of the Pacific Northwest, to coal mining in British Columbia, to city life in Edmonton, back home to Wisconsin, and her remaining years in a comfortable quiet (no kids) home in southern California.

Mary Lang

Here is an example of how much work can be spent chasing down a relative that turns out to be unrelated.

While browsing through census records for information about my Donnelly (and related) family, I found a Mary Lang living with John and Catherine Gorman Murphy. Catherine is a granddaughter of my great great great grandparents, Patrick and Nancy Larkin Donley. Mary Lang is described as a niece. So I embarked on a search for the relationship between the Langs and the Gorman or Murphy family.

A search of historic newspapers revealed that Mary Lang was also a niece of the Murphys' next door neighbors, Alexander and Elizabeth Creighton, and that Mary was from Minnesota or Wisconsin. I'll skip all of the convoluted search details, but it included searches through newspapers, census records and cemetery records. After assembling a tree of over 100 people, I was finally able to find a distant link between families.

Mary G Lang was the daughter of Nicholas Lang and Mary Ann Dinnenny, born in 1885, probably in Waddington, New York.  In 1890, Mrs. Lang moved the family to Felton, Minnesota. I have not found any news of Nicholas, so am not sure whether he died or whether they split up. Living in Felton was Christopher Dinnenny and family, whom I believe to be Mary Ann's brother, and probably the reason for moving there. Mary Ann married Albert Fox in 1895. In 1908, Mary G returned to Waddington and spent the next four years with her aunt, Elizabeth Dinnenny Creighton. I'm not sure why she was living next door at the Murphys' in 1910.  Perhaps she was renting a room at their house. I'm guessing she was described as a niece of the Murphys because the true relationship was too complicated.

Mrs. Catherine Gorman Murphy's much younger first cousin on her father's side, John Augustus Gorman, was married to Anna Fay.  Anna's first cousin on her father's side, James Fay, was married to Mary Creighton, daughter of Mary Lang's aunt Elizabeth Dinnenny Creighton. Said another way, Mary Lang's first cousin's husband's first cousin's husband's first cousin is Mrs. Murphy. Or Mrs. Murphy is the first cousin of the husband of the first cousin of the husband of Mary Lang's first cousin. Mrs. Murphy is not Mary Lang's aunt, but the term was used to describe a generation difference in age and some not-simple relationship.

Even though all this work did not lead to Mary Lang being related, it did allow me to answer another difficult question in my family tree. Bridget Donley and Thomas Gorman's daughters, Catherine and Mary Ann, both married Murphys, John and Michael, respectively.  I was able to establish that John and Michael Murphy were brothers, sons of Elizabeth Stafford and Moses Murphy. While many of the individuals in this research are not related to me, I have added them to my family tree in order to show the string of relationships between the Murphys and their "niece", Mary Lang.

Keeping Them Straight: Madrid, Potsdam and Waddington

Just for your general information:

Madrid was formed in 1803 and included the current towns of Potsdam and Waddington.

The town of Potsdam was formed from the south east part of Madrid in 1806.

Following that event, the two main hamlets in Madrid were Columbia and Hamilton. In 1859 Columbia became the hamlet of Madrid which exists today. Hamilton was renamed in 1818 to Waddington. There were two Hamiltons in NYS at that time and the Postmaster
 General required that one name be changed. Incidentally, Joshua Waddington, for whom the hamlet was named, was land agent for David Ogden who was the oeiginal land owner as well as being his brother-in-law.

The hamlet of Waddington continued to grow and became an incorporated village in 1839. Town offices remained in the hamlet of Columbia (Madrid) about nine miles away which made transacting legal business difficult for Waddington residents. In 1859 the town of Madrid was divided in half to form the current towns of Madrid and of Waddington with Waddington being the north west half. Of the three towns, Potsdam is by far the largest in population and probably has been for 150 years. Potsdam had excellent water power from the Raquette River, was a center for sawing logs from the Adirondacks and offered higher education in the 19th century. Today Potsdam's major industry is education with SUNY Potsdam and Clarkson University located there. I do not know why Potsdam was listed as the birthplace of two Donnlleys unless Patrick was working in a saw mill or one of the small water powered industries there,
perhaps as a seasonal laborer.

Regards,

Fred from cold and snowy Waddington

The Other Gormans

[A warning:  I'm new to this, and now I see that this is way to long to be interesting.  I'll try to keep future posts small and easy to read.]

This should be my last Gorman post for a while.  About two years ago, I received some information about a Gorman family that had passed through Madrid, New York.  I'm not a Gorman, but two of my Donnelly relatives married Gormans in the Madrid area, so we have lots of Gorman cousins.  (In theory.  I've only been in touch with one.)  The Gormans interest me for two reasons.  One is because some of us share a common Donnelly ancestry.  Another is because it's been a great puzzle trying to sort out all the Gormans in that area and trying to figure out what the relationship is between the two Gormans that married the Donnelly sisters.    We're fairly certain that Thomas and Christie were first cousins, but have no proof, yet.  So in that context ...

The posted information said that a widowed William Gorman come from Ireland to Madrid, New York in about 1834, bringing his six children (Patrick, Michael, Christopher, John, Bryan, and Catherine), and accompanied by two or more brothers or cousins and their families.  Their years of birth ranged from about 1814 to 1828.  According to the family history, they stayed in the Madrid area until William passed away in 1847, then moved on to Columbia Co., Wisconsin, and some moved on to other locations.  William was buried in Madrid.  I've skipped some of the detail, and reported the rest fairly loosely.

Now come back to Madrid and compare what we know from there.  I find Gormans in the Madrid area in the census beginning in 1840.  The two large families are those of Michael and William.  We know from alien reports and the birth places of Michael's children, that he came to the US in about 1818, when he was about 26 years old.  He married Catherine in about 1819, and all of their kids were born in New York.  Catherine Donnelly married their oldest son, Christie.  I don't know where Michael's family lived prior to 1840. William had seven kids with him in 1840, five boys and two girls, one more girl than in the Wisconsin family history.  We know from alien reports from some of his kids (at least Patrick and Michael) that they immigrated in 1834.  Bridget Donnelly married a Thomas Gorman in the early 1840s.  His death certificate says his father was William Gorman, we assumed the same William buried in Madrid/Waddington.  His alien report also says he immigrated in 1834, the same year as William's Wisconsin family members.  I cannot find a Thomas in 1840, and assume he was among William's children.  The other Gorman family in Madrid was that of 26 year old Connor Gorman.  He reportedly immigrated in 1833, a year earlier than William's family.  My guess would have been that he was another son, the first to marry, and so was living in his own home in 1840.  Connor was not made a citizen with Michael and Patrick in 1844, and I have not been able to find him in other census records.  Perhaps he moved to Canada, or passed away, or used a different given name in subsequent censuses.  I would assume all of these Gormans were one family. There was also a thirty-something Bridget Gorman living in nearby Oswegatchie with three kids.  Other Gormans popped up in subsequent censuses.

Based on all this information, my story would be ...  Michael Gorman came to the US in 1818, married Catherine and they settled in Oswegatchie, New York. [I'm not quite sure about this one, but a John and (possibly) Bridget Gorman came to the US and were in Oswegatchie in 1838.  This family may have moved to Racine co., Wisconsin, near the other closely related Gorman families in Wisconsin.] In 1833, Connor Gorman came to this area, possibly married with an infant daughter.  The following year, his father, William, brought the rest of the family, including Thomas, Patrick, Michael, Christopher, John, Bryan, and Catherine.  Michael relocated from Oswegatchie to Madrid, where William and Connor had settled, in about 1838.  I suspect that Michael and William were brothers.  Upon Williams's death in 1847, most of the family moved on to Racine, Wisconsin, then on to other locations. Thomas had married Bridget Donnelly, whose family still lived in the area.  There's a Pat Gorman in Madrid in 1850, married with children, and I suspect that Thomas and Patrick elected to stay with their young families.  Patrick's wife, Jane, died in 1854, after which, I'm guessing, he elected to rejoin his family in Wisconsin.

My next step would be to try to reconcile this story with that of the Wisconsin Gormans, especially addressing the questions "Were Michael and William brothers?", "Were Thomas and Connor also sons of the William Gorman buried in Madrid/Waddington, whose other children moved on to Wisconsin after his death?", and "Were the John (alien reports) and Bridget (census) in Oswegatchie related?".  Some of this is of interest because I usually include in-laws (Thomas) and their immediate families into my tree, and I would like to know how Thomas and Christie ( the other Donnelly in-law) were related.  The Gorman descendants of the Wisconsin families, and the search for more generations of Gormans in Ireland I'll leave to others, as they are not related to me.  By the way, the Wisconsin genealogy says that William and family came from Ardbraccan Parish, Co. Meath, Ireland.

The Donnelly Exodus from Waddington

The mid-1870s were hard on the Donnellys.  They had been in the Potsdam/Waddington area since the late '20s, and the 9 kids were raised there.  Patrick (father) died in 1854; Michael headed for the California gold country in the 1850s; Edward left to fight in the War in 1861; James moved to nearby Vermont in the late '60s; and Margaret seems to have left as well, by 1870, though I don't know where.  Five children remained in Waddington, as did mother Nancy in the 1870s: Ann lived in town with her grocer husband, James Graham; Bridget was building her dream home with farmer husband, Thomas; Catherine was married to Christie Gorman, probably a cousin to Thomas, and lived on their farm; and John and Mary lived with their mother on the family farm.  Then 1873 happened.  Jim Graham got in a fight.  The following are excerpts taken from an article that appeared in the Potsdam, NY Courier Freeman in February 1874.:

Mr. Graham was indicted and arraigned in October last for manslaughter in the 3d degree. The killing occurred in the Blacksmith shop of Hughes & Rollin, in the village of Waddington, on the 28th day of August 1873. Mr. Hughes was a young man of limited means and his wife and small child, born since his death, were present in the court room the last day of the trial. Mr. Graham is a fine looking and appearing man, fifty years of age, with hair as white as the driven snow, and wears a care-worn and haggard look, caused we are told by those who are personally acquainted with him, by the anguish and grief which he has suffered since this sad misfortune befell him. Graham & Hughes had not been on friendly terms for several weeks before the encounter.  Their enmity arose from a difference in opinion in regard to a buggy waggon, which Hughes had made or ironed for Graham in the summer of 1873. Upon taking the wagon home, Mr. Graham was so dissatisfied with the looks of the dash, that he determined to have it fixed; instead of going to Hughes to get it fixed, he went to another man.

TESTIMONY OF THE PROSECUTION.
Henry Rollins sworn: Reside in Waddington; was a partner of John Hughes, deceased, in the blacksmith business; have known James Graham five or six years; was present at blacksmith shop, Aug. 28th, 1873, when Graham came into the shop and asked me if his oarlock was done; I told him no, but to sit down a few minutes and I would do it for him; Graham took a seat near the door; in a few minutes, Hughes, who was at work at another forge in the shop, spoke to Graham, and asked him if he'd seen Dalton's new buggy, that it was done and he'd better go down and look at it, and see if he couldn't find some fault with it, or with the dash; Graham replied that he had nothing to do with Dalton's business, but had all he could do to attend to his own; Hughes then called Graham a liar; Graham in reply called Hughes a liar; Hughes then called Graham a G-- d--n liar; Graham called Hughes a G-- d-- liar; Hughes called Graham a G-- d--m lying son of a bitch; Graham called Hughes a d-- lying son of a bitch; Hughes then called Graham a d--n lying thief; Graham got up then and said, Hughes, you must take that back. I am no thief; Hughes and Graham advanced towards each other; Hughes had his hammer drawn as if to strike; I stepped in between them, and tried to keep them from quarreling; Hughes said, keep the son of a bitch away, or I'll kill him. Graham pushed me aside and caught Hughes' hammer from his hand, and threw it under the desk; They then clinched, two or three times and let go; upon letting go the last time, Hughes picked up a buggy reach and struck Graham a full blow on the left hip; the blow staggered Graham, and turned him partly around; then Graham caught a sledge, standing near by and drew it up and threw it at Hughes, who was 9 or 10 feet distant; the sledge hit Hughes behind the left ear; Hughes fell unconscious; I went to Hughes, and said "Graham you have killed him;" he said I know it, and am sorry for it.

On the convening of the court Thursday morning, the case for the defence, was opened in a very able manner, by D. Magone Jr.  The defence was, that Graham when he threw the sledge had reasonable ground to fear that a felony would be committed upon him, or that great bodily injury would be inflicted upon him by Hughes, and that hence it was clearly a case of justifiable homicide, and Mr. Graham was legally justified in what he had done.

TESTIMONY FOR DEFENCE.
Thomas Myers sworn. Reside in Waddington; am a blacksmith; was at work for Rollin and Hughes in August last, was present during the affray... A few nights before the affray, Hughes and witness were passing Graham's store and Graham said "Good evening," after going by a little ways, Hughes said to me, "He need'nt say good evening to me, I'll fix him; I have been told to take a hammer, tongs or any thing else and beat his brains out."  James J. Myers sworn: Reside in Waddington; know John Hughes; had a conversation with him about Graham, in which Hughes said, "He wasn't afraid of Graham anywhere, and if ever he got into a row with him he would kill the d--m son of a bitch". This conversation was on the same day Hughes was killed.

Defence rests.

Leslie W. Russell then presented the case to the jury in behalf of the prisoner. His argument was able, complete and was attentively listened to by the jury, bar and the spectators who thronged the court room. At the reassembling of the court at 2 p. m. District Attorney Brinckerhoff presented the case to the jury in behalf of the people... It was of the best "jury efforts" we have ever had the pleasure of hearing in the St. Lawrence Circuit.

The jury took the case at 4 p. m. and went out. In thirty minutes they returned with a verdict of "not guilty," which was received with applause.

 So in August of 1873, Jim Graham killed John Hughes.  He was jailed until his trial in February of 1874, when he was acquitted.  In August of the following year, Nancy Donley (mom) passed away.  In October of that year, Jim Graham was back in court, being sued by the widow John Hughes for damages caused by killing her husband.  She was awarded $1,000, a huge some of money at that time.  The newspaper article reporting this civil trial recapped the original crime in a completely different light than the article above, painting Jim Graham as the irrational aggressor.  I would guess that many in the town had taken sides over the trial and the killing/murder.  In many ways similar to the the infamous OJ trial that most of us are familiar with.  It wouldn't surprise me if Jim Graham's grocery business was suffering by the time he was sued in 1875.  Shortly after the trial, Ann's closest sister, Bridget, passed away.  Around this time, Mary left the farm and moved to Chicago where Margaret was living.  John married, but within a couple of years sold the family farm and moved to Canada, where his wife was from.  Ann and Jim Graham left town, moving to Memphis, Michigan, where they took up farming.  All of a sudden, only Catherine Donnelly Gorman remained of the original Donnelly family.  Margaret and James did come back briefly to Waddington shortly before their deaths, and both passed away there in the 1900s.  And the Donnelly Gorman descendants remained, some of whom are there today.

James H. Gorman and family

The relative I came across in a rootsweb tree was in the Donnelly-Gorman branch from upstate (Waddington) New York.  After comparing my tree with this new one, I found one branch that was not in my tree.  The others were all cut short, so this one branch must be that of the cousin who posted the information.  The branch I found was that of James H. Gorman, born in Waddington in 1867, fifth child of Christy Gorman and Kate Donnelly.  (We actually have two Donnelly-Gorman branches.  The Donnellys are sisters, but we haven't figured out the relationship between their spouses, Thomas and Christy.)  The new information showed two marriages.  So I dug into the Family Search databases (need I say they are located at http://familysearch.org/ ?) and the great archive of Northern New York Historical Newspapers .   It turns out that James' married life was somewhat tragic.  He married Margaret McCall in Madrid, NY in 1900, and they lived in Somerville, Massachusetts, near Boston.  Margaret apparently became very sick with a flu shortly before the birth of their third son in 1905.  The boy was born dead and Margaret succumbed one week later.

I don't know what happened in the intervening years, but 5 years later James was living and working in New York City while his two boys, Fred and Charles, just seven and eight years old, were living with a family in Boston.  James married Nora Lynch that year.  I'm guessing the boys came back to live with them, but I do know that James and Nora had a son in 1911 in New York.  At some point the family moved to Fitchburg, Nora's home town, where James (dad) died of pneumonia in 1918.  Sons James and Charles were living with  Nora in Fitchburg in 1920, I found some articles and a great photo of Charles playing football for the Normal School in Fitchburg.  I couldn't find any trace of Fred after his father's funeral.  I'm wondering if he passed away at a young age.  Charles passed away in 1965.

James married Dorothea Cunningham, probably in Massachusetts in 1938.  They lived in Fitchburg and had two daughters (I won't mention any more names, because they may be living).  I think the cousin that posted the tree on Rootsweb that started me on this search lives near me.  I'll contact her.  When I find the time.  And I should update my own rootsweb tree with all this information.  When I find the time.