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.

 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 ...