William Francis Bradshaw (my great uncle) was born on the family farm in 1871, the second child of Patrick and Johanna Bradshaw. Besides showing up in state and federal census reports, he left no trace before leaving home around 1890, with his father,  Patrick to head west.  Patrick soon returned home to the family in Chateaugay , but William stayed out west.

He spent most of his short life working in the gold and silver mines of Colorado and Nevada.  He married Annie McBreen, a girl from Colorado,  and had one daughter.  The family later moved to San Francisco where he died in 1927 at the age of 56.

My dad knew that uncle Will was a miner and lived out west, but he died young, and seldom if ever returned home for a visit.  Our local paper “The Chateaugay Record and Franklin County Democrat”  devoted several pages of every issue to the minutiae of family visits, dinners and trips to the county fair.   There were lots of other records of other Bradshaw sons and daughters returning home  from New York City or New England to visit the family farm but I found no mention of William Bradshaw, (known as “Billy” to his friends in Nevada) ever returning home for a visit.

A brief obituary shows up in the November, 11 1927 issue of the Record,  It gives the basic facts, and contains the usual bland statements like  “Many old time friends will learn of his death with regret.”  Statements like that make my amateur historian/genealogist blood boil.  What the hell does that mean?  I want details, dammit.  What was he like? Why did he leave? Why Colorado?

And then I stumbled onto the January 6, 1928 Edition Of The Chateaugay Record and hit the motherlode (mining reference very much intended).  It was a re-print of an article from a newspaper in Tonopah Nevada (name unknown). It gave an account of his life that was as warm and detailed as the original obit was bland and perfunctory.

It’s a thoroughly wonderful account that tells the story of Billy Bradshaw, “The most popular foreman to ever check a shift in the mines of Nevada.”  It describes his constant smile and hearty grip, his warm personality and the fact that his men would do more for him than any other boss on the property.

The details and the genuine affection make this piece is a genealogist’s dream. It’s a welcome ray of sunshine after researching the what must have been the grim, sad life of his older sister Catherine.

I won’t list all the details here – there’s a link to a timeline at the bottom of the page – but here are a few more facts:

By 1910, the family had moved to Goldfield, NV, about 26 miles south of Tonopah, where Billy was working in the Clermont Mine.

In 1918, William was living in Tonopah,  NV, working as a mine foreman for the Tonopah Belmont Mining Company.  Two years later the Federal census of 1920 showed that the family were still in Tonopah

Billy and family left for San Francisco, CA sometime after 1920, possibly due to declining health.   The family story was that he suffered from a mining related disease.

He died in San Francisco on October 18th, 1927.  He is buried in Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma CA.

It’s interesting that his obituary in the October 20th edition of the San Francisco Examiner in the San Francisco Examiner mentions his immediate family as well as  his brother Richard, but makes no mention of any of the family Chateaugay, NY.

His only child Leona had a daughter, Patty.  She attended a family reunion in Chateaugay in 1938 or 39.  I’m still hoping to find her descendants, and I think I have found some leads on Facebook  (I guess it’s good for something).

As usual, there are inconsistencies and unanswered questions, but I think there’s enough here to go to press (or at least click the “publish’ button).

Here’s a time line of his life

P.S.  The rest of the articles in the page containing the obituary are a real treat. There’s an ad for a Hoot Gibson movie. I remember the name from the Beverly Hillbillies, but never realized  he was a real actor .  And the ads for shoes with those newfangled fasteners (zippers) are – dare I say it? – a real hoot.  (sorry).

 

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.

I have always had a fascination with my Paternal grandfathers’ family; his father and mother, brothers and sisters.  I never knew any of them. They were all gone long before I was born.  My paternal grandmother’s family was everywhere in my home town of Chateaugay, NY.  We were surrounded by first and second cousins. Cassidys, Dwyers, Mccormicks and Murnanes.  My grandmothers sisters (Aunt Clare and Aunt Leona) were our next door neighbors. But there were no other Bradshaws.  The Cassidy family history was still going on all around us, being made day by day.  The only Bradshaws in town consisted of my immediate family, and the people buried in Saint Patrick’s cemetery.  My father had Brothers and sisters living in New York, but no living Aunts or Uncles, and no regular contact with his Bradshaw cousins.

There were few photographs of relatives on the wall at our house, not even recent ones.  My dad had few memories of his aunts and uncles, and it seemed that his father hadn’t shared much of the family’s past.

Like the fact that Aunt Anna had died in Providence, Rhode Island of a gunshot wound to the head, inflicted by a resident of her boarding house (with whom the newspapers suggested she was INVOLVED).  And that her sister (Aunt Margaret) and young nephew (Thomas Shea) were present when it happened.  My dad remembered hearing something about someone who had died from a gunshot wound, but never heard a lot of details. Wouldn’t you think such a terrible family tragedy would be remembered vividly for at least a couple of generations?

And then there was Aunt Katie who moved to Manchester to marry a man, and then divorce him on grounds of habitual drunkenness.  She moved back home,  and died in her early forties.  She’s buried in Saint Patrick’s cemetery.  My uncle John was told that she had never married.

Aunt Alice moved to Manchester, NH at the age of 16 (around 1890),  went to work for the Rowell family on River Road as a domestic servant,  and lived in Manchester for the rest of her life, eventually inheriting their house and fortune when the last of them died without children.

Will left to go out west, and never came back as far as my dad knew.

Richard moved to California.

John lived in the area for a while, working as a Pharmacist in Malone and Lake Placid,  before moving to the New York City

Mayme moved to Manchester,  got married and lived the rest of her life there.  I walk by the brownstone she lived in (1480 Elm) at least once a week on my way to pick up my lunch at Pappy’s Pizza.

Matt fought in world war I and survived being gassed.

Agnes moved to Manchester at some point to live with Aunt Alice.

Pat was the only one to stay.

The contrast with my grandmothers family (the Cassidys) is striking.  There were lots of them, and I’m sure a lot of them left Chateaugay in the mid to late 1800s never to return, but  there were still a lot of them left.   I had second cousins and second cousins once removed everywhere.

So why did the Bradshaws all leave?  Well,  we know for sure that my great grandfather drank a lot. We know that some of children left quite young.  Alice left at 16.    Maybe that was common at the time, but I have dark suspicions that maybe there was a reason they all left.

On the other hand, I have a vivid imagination.  Also I’m an engineer.  I’m paid to sit around and think of absolute worst case scenarios.

So.

I’ve got this burning curiosity to learn more about these people.  I’ve got access to the internet, and a membership in Ancestry.com.

I’ll keep you posted

Why “The Other Place?”

Well…

I grew up on a small dairy farm in Chateaugay, New York.  The house and barns were located on a long thin parcel that started at the intersection of Route 374 and the Mcormick Road. The other half of the farm consisted of another lot about a quarter of a mile away.  There were no buildings on that lot, just pastures, fields, and woods demarcated by barbed wire fence.    There was a cement bridge over the brook that ran through it.  My grandfather had  inscribed his name:  “P.J. Bradshaw” in the cement before it dried.  An old horse-drawn dump rake sat rusting at the edge of a small hay field that bordered on the brook.  My father called  that field  “The Glen”.   Just across the brook, in the field on the left was an indentation that dad told me was the cellar hole of a long gone house.   I trapped muskrat and mink in the brook, and attempted to hunt rabbits in the woodlot ( I never got one).  My dad tapped the trees there and made maple syrup.

It was just a plot of land where we bailed hay and let the cows graze, but it was ours.  We walked through it aware that we were wading through history, aware that our grandparents and great grand parents had worked the fields, and that someone had made their home there once.  They were there right next to us, separated by a few inches and a few years.

We called it “The Other Place”.

So what does that have to do with this website?  Well, first it’s an inside reference that only my siblings and possibly a few cousins will understand.  Also, the domain name was available from GoDaddy.  But mostly its because this will be where I post the OTHER stuff that I don’t post on Facebook or Instagram:  Fragments of fiction I’m writing, opinions, musings, family history,  linux-geek commentary, genealogy, eastern philosophy, and old guy get-off-my-lawn commentary.

I don’t expect a lot of traffic to this site,  but I welcome comments.

Here we go…