Katherine Bradshaw 1869-1912

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.