One of the joys of genealogy is the possibility of piecing together lost family stories. My great-grandmother Kittie Gallagher lived in bustling Hartford, Connecticut in the 1880s. Her future husband, the elusive Frank Mather, came from New Britain, Conn., where his branch of the Mathers had lived for over a century.
So how did this small town boy and my astounding great-grandmother meet? We may have solved that mystery when we found Kittie in the 1880 census, and much to our surprise, found Frank’s family living in Hartford just a few houses away. Having seen pictures of a saucy teenaged Kittie it is easy to imagine this hardworking Irish girl catching the fancy of the neighborhood boys.
This is one example of how hard cold records which give only the bare facts can help fill out your family history. When we found Frank and Kittie in 1880, we also found that he had a younger sister we didn’t know about; and Kittie had no fewer than three siblings of whom we had never heard.
According to the census, Kittie was already working (at 16) as a photographic retoucher. From city directories we can watch the Gallaghers and Mathers move about the city of Hartford over the next 30 years. Vital records reveal that Frank died young, but he and Kittie had three children who lived. Kittie’s second husband died from “tuberculosis of the knee” which we now know as polio. My grandmother Irene was a young child at the time, and the same polio which stole her beloved step-father also left my grandmother with a damaged foot, and lucky herself, to be alive.
Newspapers show more bits and pieces of the families’ lives and help to add depth to their story. Apparently Kittie’s sister, Mary and her sister’s young husband lived very troubled lives which sometimes spilled into the rest of the family. Life was clearly difficult for the young, twice widowed Kittie, but her probate record shows that by the end of her life, Kittie had come to own a couple of pieces of land in the city and, no longer a photo retoucher, she had become a professional photographer. The pictures we have left show clear skill at evoking the inner spirit of the person she photographed. I think spirit must have been very important to this woman, something she clearly passed on to my passionate and volatile grandmother and mother.
I was reflecting the other night just how odd it was that several of my sisters and I got the “genealogy bug” about the same time. It was just a few years after the death of my mother, and I now realize that we had gotten to the point where the wounds of her death were not quite so tender, so that we could begin to tentatively explore her past as a way of keeping her close to us. And in bringing Mom closer, we have also found a rich family background which brings much into perspective about her and ourselves. It has been, and continues to be, a revealing and enticing journey.
Editor’s note: This regular column is sponsored by the Aroostook County Genealogical Society. The group meets the fourth Monday of the month except in July and December at the Cary Medical Center’s Chan Education Center, 163 Van Buren Road, Caribou, at 6:30 p.m. Guests and prospective members are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501. Columnist Nina Brawn of Dover-Foxcroft, who has been doing genealogy for over 30 years, is a freelance genealogy researcher, speaker and teacher. Reader e-mails are welcome at ninabrawn@gmail.com.
