Alice Bradshaw’s Inheritance

I’m collecting data on my Dad’s Aunt Alice, who moved to Manchester NH in the late 1800’s at the age of 16.  She spent decades working as a domestic servant for the Rowell family.  When Charles Rowell, the last of the family died without Children, they left her their $200,000 fortune.  Google tells me that’s $2.7 million in today’s dollars.

I found this article from the Ogdensburg Republican-Journal 01-06-1927 that includes some details, and even a brief interview with Alice.

The article starts in the third column, below the opening panel of the Mutt and Jeff comic strip (what is it with these old comic strips and heavy objects being thrown at someone’s noggin?).

I found it on the New York Historic Newspapers Website.  The search is kind of clunky and random, but you can really go down the rabbit hole with it.  You’ve been warned.

Anyway – I hope to do a more thorough biographical sketch, but this article was too good not to share.

Windows

Old pictures of my family or of my home town are like small, clouded windows into the past.  I want to wipe away the fog that has turned the picture black and white.  I want to peer at them from a sharp angle in the hopes of seeing something that’s just out of the frame.  I want to squeeze through and walk past my stiffly posed ancestors and into the house that I was born in as it was a hundred years ago or more.  There is a picture of my hometown, Chateaugay New York, looking North out of the center of town.  It is the 1870s.  My family’s farm is straight down the road that leads North out of town, or up to the top of the picture.  I know they’re there, frozen in their tracks, caught in one moment of their day, but they’re three miles away.  But it’s so close.  I know that intersection. I know that road.  Why can’t I just break the glass and crawl through the window into that sepia tinted world, and walk North on that muddy road to meet my great-great grandparents?

 

Bradshaws in the Mist

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

Welcome to The Other Place

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…