Fruits of One Tree

 Mary Ellen Quinlan had a rough start in life. Not only were her parents, Jeremiah Quinlan and Mary Cusick, poor young immigrants to the U.S., but her father was killed in the Civil War when she was still a baby. Luckily, her mother had some relatives near her: her mother, an aunt, a sister, a brother, and cousins. Mary Ellen was born on 9 October 1863 on Staten Island, New York, and baptized two days later at St. Mary’s Catholic Church. Her father enlisted in the Union Army in August 1864, before she was a year old. [1] She was an only child until her mother married another Irishman, John McCormack. She had four half-sisters, Kate, Ellen Josephine, Elizabeth, and Grace McCormack, and two half-brothers, James Francis and John Patrick. [2] Mary Cusick Quinlan McCormack was illiterate, but as a city child, her daughter Mary Ellen had the opportunity to attend St. Patrick’s parochial school in Jersey City. After school let out, she no doubt helped her mother with all those babie...

  My great-grandfather was called John Kerner as a child and went by Joseph Kirner as an adult. His parents were John Joseph Kerner or Kirner and Rosanna Maguire. John was their first child, born on May 27, 1861, in New York City. [1] He had two younger brothers: William, born there on Feb. 12, 1864, and George Washington, born on July 7, 1868, probably in Jersey City. [2] They had no sisters. Unlike his father, who was a bricklayer or mason, John worked as a store clerk when he left school. When he was twenty-one, he married nineteen-year-old Mary Ellen Quinlan on February 4, 1883, at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Jersey City. [3] They had ten sons and no daughters; six sons survived childhood. That was a time of many dangers for small children, even in families with means. Mary Ellen’s half-sister Ellen McCormack lived with them and probably helped with the children, who were: George Francis (1884-1887), Joseph George (1885-1898), Edward Anthony Aloysius (1888-1974), Frank ...