From Wiktonary.org:

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amadán m (genitive singular amadáin, nominative plural amadáin)

1. (pejorative) fool

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A couple of times I heard my dad use the word “amadan”.   He used it in a story (of which I remember no details) describing how his father (or maybe grandfather) had used it as an insult. He pronounced it “omadon”.   Omadon sounded like a large, lumbering stupid, plant eating dinosaur, so I though he was just misremembering a dinosaur name to refer to someone who wasn’t too bright.

It turns out that Amadan is the Irish word for fool.  I don’t think dad even recognized it as a real word.  He certainly didn’t remember it as the last word of the Irish language in our family’s collective memory.

Except…

“Amadan” may not have been the only Irish word in the Bradshaw family lexicon.  There is one other word that I hesitate to mention.  My siblings and some of my cousins (I’m looking at you Deb Bryant) will remember it.

Bondoon.

There  – I said it.  Our family’s word for backside, rump, derriere, buttocks.  Usually used as a warning :  “I’m going to warm your Bondoon” or  “If you’re not careful you’ll fall right on your Bondoon”.  I remember using it at school, and getting laughed at.  No one else had heard the word.   There may have been a few Cassidys or Dwyers in town who knew the word, but as far as we knew it was just our family’s nonsense word for buttocks.

Then, one day while wasting time on the internet, I found:  THIS LINK.  It’s the only reference I have found to the word.  In particular, there’s a comment:

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“Like others, I came upon this thread after searching for the origin of “bondoon”. My family has been using this word as slang for the butt since my earliest memory. My mother said it started with my great-grandmother who emigrated from Tipperary, Ireland in the 1880’s. So I thought that was interesting because then it dates back a lot further than we thought!

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I have a completely unproven theory that this is also a fragment of Irish. About ten years ago,  I briefly took an Irish language class.  The teacher was a native speaker from the Connemara.   He taught us the Irish word for “bottom” which was “Thoin”, pronounced “toon”  which among other things can refer to a person’s behind.  It’s not too much of a stretch to theorize that it came to be pronounced “doon”.   No idea where the “Bon” part came from.  If there are any linguistic anthropologists out there who have a lead, I’d love to hear it.

So that’s all there is to this post.  People forget words, even entire languages. They stop using words because they get laughed at.  A word is spoken for the last time and no one marks the occasion.

 

 

 

 

Katherine (Katie)  Bradshaw was born on October 24th of 1869 in Chateaugay, NY.  She was first child, born barely nine months after her parents, Patrick Bradshaw and Johanna Sweeney  married on January 11th of of the same year.

The 1880 census shows her still in Chateaugay (not surpising, since she was 11 years old).  By that time, she had two brothers (Will and John) and four sisters (Bridget (Alice), Mary (Mayme), Maggie and Anna.

Her next appearance in the record is her marriage to Fred C. Hardy on August 8th, 1893, in Wentworth, NH.  The marriage lasted 10 years.

They divorced after 10 years, on June 1st, 1903 Katherine was the “libelant” or plaintiff.  The grounds for the divorce were “Habitual Drunkenness”.  I can find no evidence of any children.

Two years later, in 1905 Katherine was making her living as a shoe worker, and boarding at 114 Jewett Street in Manchester.  She had changed her name back to Bradshaw. She was living 4 miles from her sister Alice, who was working as a domestic servant on River Road.  Their names appear very close together in the 1905 city directory.

In 1907, her ex-husband, Fred Hardy died at the Hillsborough County Farm in Grasmere (Part of Goffstown).  The County Farm was the poorhouse, where those unable to support them selves were sent.   The cause of death was “Paresis”.

In 1907, Katherine was still  living in Manchester, at 970 Elm Street, working as a Laundress.

Sometime later in 1907 or perhaps 1908,  she moved back home to live on the family farm in Chateaugay.  By then all her brothers and sisters had left, with the exception of Pat,  who was running the farm.  Her mother died in 1908.

The 1910 Census shows just Katherine,  her Father (Patrick) and her brother (Patrick) living on the farm.

In 1912, after six months of failing health, she suffered “a stroke of paralysis”, as reported by the Chateaugay Record.   She died a week later.  Her funeral was held at Saint Patrick’s, and she was buried in Saint Pat’s Cemetery.  She was 43 years old.

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Those are the facts, pulled from various primary sources.   What follows is me reading between the lines, and asking some questions that will never be answered.

First – the big one.  Fred Hardy’s death was reported as Paresis.   General Paresis is a neurological malady that occurs in the late stages of syphilis.   In the pre-antibiotic 1900’s syphilis was potentially a killer.

It’s an odd coincidence then, that Katherine died of a “Stroke of Paralysis” after six months of failing health.  It’s not completely out of the question that she contracted the same malady from her husband while they were still married.  Late stage syphilis can take years, even decades to manifest itself.

Why did she wait so long to move back home?  It would have been a hard life , living alone, doing manual labor in an industrial  New England City.  Was it because she was divorced?  Or did she return home to care for her ailing mother? Or am I just overthinking this?

How much of this story did the family know? Katherine’s sister Alice lived only a few miles away from her in Manchester.  Surely, she must have had some knowledge of her sister’s troubled marriage.  The article about her death only mentioned that she returned home after the death of her husband.  My Uncle John was surprised when I told him that her last name was Hardy. He was told that Aunt Katie never married.

So there you have it.  A sad story with a lot of unanswered questions. Katherine Bradshaw has been dead for 105 years.  No one I have ever spoken to about family history (besides Uncle John) knew anything about her. We have no photographs of her.  She left no descendants.

But I still feel a personal connection to this mysterious, invisible person.  She was my dad’s aunt, only two generations removed from me.  She lived in  our town, in our house.   And so I have pulled some facts out of obscurity and strung together this sketchy narrative.

Here’s a timeline of her life.

Here’s the front page of the April 12th, 1912 edition of the Chateaugay Record . The article describing her death is in the leftmost column.