Fruits of One Tree

  My grandfather’s mother was born Laura Eloise Ludlow in Rahway, New Jersey, on November 18. There is conflicting information regarding whether that was in 1871 or 1872. Her parents were William Todd Ludlow and Sarah E. Laing. We have a photo of them. Laura is on the left and her little sister Ida Victoria is next to their mother. Laura’s older brothers Matthias and Lewis are not in the photo. Ida was born in 1877, so this photo was taken in the early mid-1880s. In 1889, Laura met her future husband, Eugene Loomis Downs, when her brother Matthias married Eugene’s sister Lizzie. [1] Laura married Eugene on July 24, 1891, in Brooklyn, New York, where the family had moved. [2] She was still living with her parents in February 1892 in Brooklyn, when New York did a census enumeration. [3] That year, Eugene was listed as the owner of a restaurant at 23 Center St. in Orange, New Jersey. Our family Bible shows Laura ...

 I posted about this great-grandfather on September 11 and September 17, 2024. 

 My great grandmother was Mary Kinane. My Aunt Mary told me the name is pronounced Kin-ANN. Kinane is not a common Irish name, so the spelling varied in the records. Mary Kinane was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on 16 June 1866. She married a younger man and seemed self-conscious about that; every record I found for her made her younger and younger over the years. It wasn’t until I found her baptism record that I discovered when she was really born. Her parents were William Kinane and Bridget Rourke or O’Rourke; her last name varied with the Irish political climate. Unlike the stereotypical large Irish Catholic family, this one was small. Mary grew up with only one younger brother, John. She did not attend school when she was thirteen and didn’t marry until she was twenty-nine years old. [1] For a while she worked as a clerk, probably in retail since she had so little education. In those days an unmarried twenty-nine woman was considered an “old maid” and looked down upon...

 I posted about my great-grandfather, John James Fennessey, on June 4, 2023. To learn more about him, go to the archived posts from that month.