A Pioneer Remembered

 

Montgomery Street, San Francisco, 1850

This year, 1850, was about the time that Michael Stinson Cooke arrived in the United States from Ireland. He spent some brief time in New York and then traveled west. What strikes me about this image is what is missing. You see some concentrated building in the foreground and the hills we know well, bare, in the background. Now imagine far beyond those hills, in the area we now call "the avenues" at the far west end of present-day San Francisco.  That was where Michael and his family settled. Imagine how far that was by wagon from Montgomery Street and what passed for "civilization".  

left: Alene Murphy Solari, top: Eva Piratsky Murphy, bottom: Ann Cooke, right: Mary Anne Cooke
Piratsky

 These are the women of the Cooke family sometime just before 1905 when Mary Ann's mother died. Mary Ann died in 1932, and in October the Oakland Tribune published a remembrance of her remarkable life and memories. Possibly it was largely penned by her husband James. I'm going to transcribe it here because it lends great color to the story of her life.

Oakland Tribune, Sunday, Oct. 2 1932

Of the Old San Francisco

"Of the old San Francisco was Mrs. Mary Ann Piratsky, born here seventy-seven years ago. Her death at Watsonville, where her husband James G Piratsky has been a newspaper publisher for some years, has brought out reviews of an eventful and inspiring life. Daughter of San Francisco pioneers, Michael and Ann Cook, Mrs. Piratsky always claimed the distinction of being the first white child born in that metropolitan area now embraced between Larkin Street, the Golden Gate, Seal Rocks, and Twin Peaks. She often related how the shack in which she was born was built with lumber that, painstakingly, was transported a couple of pieces at a time on the back of a mule over the only trail out to where her father settled. The trail started at the corner of Bush Street and Grant Avenue (just blocks from where the photo was taken) (at that time know at Dupont Street, one of the principal streets of San Francisco) and wound its way over the sand dunes out to the Odd Fellow Cemetery,  which property was then known as "Cook's Milk Ranch". Cook took up considerable land thereabouts, and in partnership with a man named Williams owned all of Lone Mountain, which mountain was sold by Cook to Archbishop Alemany for $150, in later years because a movement was on foot to take over the mountain and on its top bury David Broderick (who had been killed in a duel...), Cook said he did not want the grave to overlook his holdings, and strenuously objected to the proposal. Fearing that the people of San Francisco would take the land away from him, he arranged the sale of the mountain to the bishop, and thus stopped the movement. Archbishop Alemany, in after years, sold off from the base of Lone Mountain over $50,000 worth of lots, and still had the mountain, which the church is now grading off to erect thereon an educational institution.

On the Peralta Rancho

The Cook family, when Mrs. Piratsky was about four years old, moved across the bay and took a lease on a large tract of the Peralta Rancho, about where Berkeley is now located. Cook raise grain on this tract and did so well that he was enabled to return to San Francisco in a year or so, and erect a two-story residence on P. Lobos Avenue (then known as Geary Street) which he occupied until his death, some fifty years afterwards. Thus it will be seen that Mrs. Piratsky lived in a pioneer age. One of her prized possessions was a book "Annals of San Francisco", which was awarded to her as a prize at the Denman Girls' High School, then located at Bush and Mason streets. Especially interesting was the account of the escape of the Irish patriot, Terence Bellew Mc Manus, from Sydney, Australia, where he had been transported by the British Government. McManus was a prominent Irishman, and the British Government was extremely glad when he made his escape in a vessel sent to Australia by the Irish revolutionists. In fact, England didn't care if he never came back. Mc Manus made his escape to San Francisco and was given refuge by Cook, who was also one of the revolutionists. McManus took up and settled upon, as a ranch, the greater portion of what now comprises Golden Gate Park. He died from the hardship incurred in Australia and was taken back in great state to Ireland where he was given an immense funeral. His sister, Isabel McManus, was swindled out of the property by squatters instigated by some of McManus' professed friends. The Cooks befriended Miss McManus until her death. Mrs. Piratsky was at her best describing the McManus affair. Her first school was the Sisters' School, connected with an orphanage attached to St. Patrick's Church, which church was then located on the site now occupied by the Palace Hotel. Across the street, where the Crocker bank now stands was an immense sand-hill. The corner was once offered to Cook for a couple of hundred dollars. The offer was turned down. Also turned down was an offer made Cook that if he would clear off the sand-hill on the corner of Bush and Montgomery (on the same street as the photo) streets, he would be given one of the corner lots. The site was afterwards occupied by the Occidental Hotel.

I love the sleight-of-hand pulled by Michael on the city of San Francisco. They were looking, at the time, for a place to have large cemeteries. Michael foresaw seizure by eminent domain and sold to the bishop for a Catholic cemetery. Later all the cemeteries moved down to Colma. University of San Francisco, a Jesuit college, was built on the spot and remains there to this day.

As to his revolutionary leanings, it would certainly explain his very early exit from Ireland in 1850. He was eldest and would have inherited the lease on the land in Clooningan. That passed to his brother. I don't doubt that he had revolutionary sympathies, but it also wouldn't surprise me to find out that the McManus clan were cousins of some sort. I haven't found any McManus names yet in my tree, but the records may not be there. This was very early.

Mary Ann Cook Piratsky had a remarkable pioneer life in San Francisco. It's always so rewarding to find first-hand accounts in your family history.

Throwback Thursday

This is Ann Cooke, the widow of Michael Stinson Cooke in front of her home at the corner of Geary and Cooke St.. (San Francisco) I don't know the year, but Michael died in 1897 and she died in 1905 so my guess is somewhere in that time period.

This is that same corner today. Based on a previous much older photo, the house actually faced what is now Geary and sat where the tire store is located at about the spot you see the small tree.

A Sticky Disaster in the North End

Clarke at Hanover St. in Boston's North End about 1893-courtesy of the photo archives Boston Public Library

This is Boston's famous North End neighborhood, just before the turn of the century. My Cooke relatives weren't living here at this time; they were living in Dorchester near Michael's workplace in the stoneyard. It gives you some idea, however, of what the neighborhood looked like. There were the famous buildings, the home of Paul Revere and the Old North Church, and then there were squalid tenements. The neighborhood was teeming with Irish immigrants. Indeed, the Cookes moved to 164 Endicott Street and were shown there on the 1900 census.

They didn't live there long. Michael moved the family across the Charles River to Charlestown and died in 1913. By the time our story takes place in 1919 the neighborhood was largely Italian immigrants. Michael's widow was in Everett with her daughter and my grandmother, grandfather and their family were living in Charlestown. But I tell this story as an illustration of what happened in immigrant neighborhoods in many cities at this time where there were industries side-by-side with poor housing and little regulation to protect the residents.

The story actually began before the first World War when the U.S. Industrial Alcohol Company began work on a very large tank on the waterfront on Commercial Street in the North End. The company planned to house large amounts of imported molasses awaiting shipment to its distillery to be turned into explosives. Right from the beginning, the enormous tank was cursed. It was put up quickly, with substandard sheet metal, it was never properly tested and when problems became evident, the company covered them up. Molasses ran down the sides of the tank inviting the poor neighborhood children to collect it in buckets. The company painted the tank rust brown to disguise the leaks. Workers heard shrieks and moans coming from inside the tank. People standing near the tank reported feeling the sides of the tank pulsing with the fermentation and gases inside. It was a disaster waiting to happen. 

On January 15, 1919, disaster happened. The tank failed in a spectacular way and all at once. Rivets shot like artillery fire, metal panels buckled and an explosion of 2.3 million gallons of molasses created a 15 foot tidal wave on Commercial Street. It slammed into buildings, cellars, people and animals burying everything in its path. A section of the sheet metal sliced through the supports of the elevated train track, collapsing it. Only quick thinking saved two operating trains from coming down with it.

The arrows point to the tank and the former Cooke home. the dots outline the extent of the molasses flood

Buildings were inundated or destroyed completely. Horses could not escape the sticky mess and had to be shot. Twenty-one people died either immediately or within the week. Many more were injured. A firehouse immediately next to the tank was lifted from its foundation and moved trapping several firefighters inside. Some people were swept into the frigid Charles River and not found for weeks. One child, who had been collecting firewood from the train track, was crushed by a train car and drowned in molasses.

These pictures are from the archives of the Boston Public Library. They tell the story best.

An overview of the area immediately after the disaster

Fireman attempting to rescue people- the Cloughty house, in the background was directly across the street from the tank. Maria Cloughty was crushed instantly

the collapsed train track with a combination of molasses and sea water underneath

My father would have been a baby at the time, but his twelve-year-old cousin Catherine, who was living with them on Mount Vernon Street would certainly have been aware.  I can't even imagine what that would have been like.

It took weeks of cleanup with salt water and fire hoses. That part of the North End was never the same. Today, the land is a park and ball field.  They say that even today, on a warm summer day, you can smell molasses on Commercial Street. A lawsuit ensued, of course, and the company tried to pin the incident on dynamite planted by anarchists. They were not successful and damages were awarded. Cold comfort to those who lost their means of support or lived in pain the rest of their lives.

The Great Molasses Flood has become a piece of Boston history, albeit a rather bizarre one. It was well documented in Dark Tide by Stephen Puleo. Laws were eventually strengthened to protect the public, but it was the court case that had the most lasting effect as Puleo points out in this video.

What brought this topic to mind was an explosion at an industrial plant in the middle of a residential neighborhood- right here in Houston. Some things just don't change.

Charming Old Photos Tell Us the Family Story

Eugene H Rogers- Sign painter by trade, fine art painter by avocation

When I look at the old photos that people add to their trees, I can often tell so much about the person by looking at the expression or the body language. But what fascinates me are the really old photos where the pose is not a formal portrait in a studio, but something that shows a bit about a person's profession or home life or surroundings. 

Eugene didn't make his living as a fine art painter, but there's no doubt from this photo what his hobby was. Aside from the paintings, I can look at his clothing, the chair, the brocade wallpaper and the bare wood floor and tell something about the studio where he worked. I can also date this from 1880-1890 based more or less on the things I see.

Daisy Tapply Schaefer and her husband George

This picture show my grandmother's elder sister Daisy with her husband in a very early model of some sort of car. The very early Henry Ford Quadricycle was similar. From the clothes, I would say after 1900 but before 1910. She married George in 1902. 

Clyde Merton Keene- grocer

This is Clyde Merton Keene, whose grandmother was one of my Farrar relatives. I like that he is pictured in his grocer's apron complete with stains. I didn't notice until looking more closely, that he is in a wheelchair. Probably a story there.

Sidney Douglas Farrar

Sidney Douglas Farrar, another of my Farrar relatives,  played first base for the eight seasons for the Philadelphia Quakers and later for the Philadelphia Athletics. The left one is a studio shot, but the right photo is a real gem complete with a player in motion in the background.

Violet Louise Baldry

Violet Baldry was the half sister of some of my English Tapply relatives. My guess is this nurse's uniform dates from some time in the 1920's.

Helen F Harrod practices what she teaches

This photo obviously came from a newspaper article about Helen F Harrod. She was a music instructor at DePauw University.

Isaac Estill Harrod

Isaac Harrod lived and worked for the railroad in rural Kansas. This was a studio shot, but he's wearing his everyday clothes and I just love the dog in the picture. You get a real sense of him as a character in this photo.

Marie Tapply with Warren on her lap

This is my Aunt Marie, Bob Tapply's wife. I'm told this was taken in the old Tapply home at the top of  Pearl Hill Road. Again, look at the old stove, the china breakfront and the clothes. It gives this informal photo real character.

Francis Braedreck Rogers family

Here's the Francis B Rogers family in front of their home. Not only do you get a good look at the house, but each person in the picture is doing something a little different. You have the two children in front of the fence with their toys, the man by the steps reading, the couple posed by the hammock. I count no fewer than thirteen people in this clever photo. Rogers was my cousin through the Aaron Rogers line.

Belinda Cooke aka Sr. Mary Columbia

I have fewer photos from the Cooke side, but these two are gems. First my cousin the nun. A formal photo but in her full habit with what looks like a wreath of flowers circling her head.

Cooke home in Clooningan, Sligo, Ireland

This is the Cooke homestead. My guess would be in the 1920's. Again you get a sense of the place. Look at the thatched roof, the whitewashed walls, the bicycle propped by the gate. It's a little slice of a moment in time.

When we share our family histories with people who aren't passionate about genealogy, I think photos like these bring history alive- especially for the very young. I can think of a million questions a young person might ask when looking at these photos. What a teachable moment! And don't forget to document anything you might know or might have heard about the photos in the family album.  

If this topic interests you, check out Maureen Taylor's website here.

A New Resource for Irish Genealogy

Church of the Immaculate Conception, Curry village, Sligo, Ireland

This picture of a church sets the scene for a fabulous new resource I found this month. Lisa Louise Cooke, of Genealogy Gems, published a Facebook link to new records that went online at the
Irish National Library. You can get to them here.

I was very lucky. I knew enough information to make a smart guess at exactly where to look and within half an hour I had baptismal records for three people in my dad's family: his mother Catherine Marie Cooke, his aunt Mary Ann Cooke (called Mamie by the family) and his uncle John J Cooke (called Jack). My very fanciful (she once announced that we were really Italian and related to the Gherhardinis.  Eeek!) Cousin Katherine had recalled that Jack said the family was from "Curry village". I popped "Curry" into the parish terms and there were the records. I was lucky.

The geopolitical divisions of Ireland are a bit hard to get used to. For example, technically this family lived in the following: Province of Connaught, County Sligo, Barrony of Leyny, Civil Parish: Achonry, Poor Law Union of Tobercurry, Townland of Cloonigan. Where's Curry in all this mess? Well that's the Roman Catholic parish as well as a totally separate townland. There were also Church of Ireland parishes. What a mess!

The dates in the records are all over the place. The "official records" say, for example, that Mary Ann
Cooke was born on the 17 December 1874. Here is her baptism record:

Cloonigan is waaaaay out in the country. Even today on Google street view you get a few houses, a narrow two-lane road and lots of brushy open land. So I'm guessing she was born closer to the 12th and they didn't make the official record until closer to the 17th. The interesting thing in all these records are the "patrons" or  godparents. I don't know yet who these people are, but it is something more to go on. In this case we have Mary Ann Cooke and Michael Feehely. One person from dad's family and one from mom's I'm guessing.

Next we have John J Cooke born 19 April 1876.

Again this is almost a month earlier. His godparents are John Cooke and Mary Cooke. I know that Michael's father was named John, but the Griffith's Valuation shows a John and a John Jr., so maybe this is Michael's brother.

And lastly we have my grandmother, Catherine Marie Cooke, born 4 March 1878.

This time the baptism is a little bit later. The godparents in this case are James Cooke and Ann Feehily. Again I'm thinking uncles, aunts or cousins. Cloonigan was so tiny it didn't even have a town center, so the nearest church would probably have been the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Curry. My best guess is that my photo is the scene of the baptisms.

No wonder none of these three relatives were really certain of their actual birthdate! At any rate, this is a wonderful new resource for those trying to unravel an Irish family.  The serendipity of having a record pop up so quickly has encouraged me a bit. Persistence really does pay off.

FINDAGRAVE

Early in my research I read that graveyards can be a fine source of information for your family tree.
Because I knew so little about my father's family, I went back to the one document I had that might
be of some use. It was an old envelope that once held a deed to a cemetery plot at Holy Cross Cemetery in Malden, Massachusetts and on the front was the address of the plot. Most cemeteries are very cooperative, and for a small fee will send you particulars about a cemetery plot. What I got back from Holy Cross was a list of the Cook relatives buried there and the ages at death and internment dates. This gave me some great clues to go on to solve the mystery of Mary Feely, my great grandmother who seemed to vanish after the 1930 census. Eventually, when the 1940 census was released I found her in a rest home in Roxbury. From there it was a matter of sending for a death certificate and THAT gave me the names of two great-great grandparents in Ireland.

After I'd been doing this a while, I discovered FindaGrave. This is an effort to catalog online all the cemeteries and the folks buried there. If you have a city or better yet the name of a graveyard, a volunteer may have made an entry for your family member or may have taken a photograph of a gravestone. I found LOTS of my Rogers relatives this way. I joined and made a few entries of my own. Through the kindness of a member of the local historical society, I now have this photo for my Civil War ancestor, Winslow Brainard Rogers.

This is the memorial stone put up for him by the Civil War Veterans society. Another kind person went to the town hall and added a photo of the inscription there which includes his name.

You can also put in a photo request. The chances of getting to Malden anytime soon are slim so when I got to the Fitzgerald side of the tree I turned to this service. I knew my grandmother, grandfather and probably my great grandparents were also in Holy Cross. I put in a photo request and crossed my fingers... I had to go back and give the volunteer a little more information, but an 800 number call to Holy Cross gave up the Avenue and Plot. And now I have this memorial at FindaGrave.

Turns out that family finances were tight in 1896/97, so the grandparents and great grandparents are apparently under one stone. 

The blue links are a way to link one family member to another. So once you find one relation, you can often get information for an entire family. Be careful however, I have frequently found that these entries have differences in dates and other information from the official records. The cemetery often got information from family members and the FindaGrave entries are done by volunteers or family members as well. The happy news is  finding an entry with lots of biographical information: what he did for a living, who he married and in what order, military service, etc.

There is another somewhat newer site called BillionGraves. I haven't explored their site extensively, but it seems to work in very much the same way. Both places rely on volunteers to put up memorials and take photographs that have been requested. The polite thing to do would be to fill a request with a trip to the local cemetery. When it gets a little cooler, I'll go over to Hollywood Cemetery and see what I can do to pay it forward.

Tubbercurry or Tobercurry - the Cooke and Feely clans

Working on the Irish side of my tree was something I'd always hoped I could do while my dad was still alive. Sadly that was not to be. He wasn't able to be very helpful with information about his family-from what he said they could be close-mouthed and secretive. As a young boy in a working-class household where the adults had other worries,  I'm sure he was more interested in swimming at the Boy's Club and playing kick-the-can. I pried as much as I could get from him while he was alive and he surprised me by showing a bit of curiousity about my searches for his extended family.

 I found some American census records and a few death records. Focusing on Boston, there were a few more hints. Dad said there were some Feely cousins he remembered from his childhood. He thought the Feelys had a car dealership in Roslindale. So far, that search hasn't yielded much.  I also found a Maurice Feely living with the family on an early census. If anyone out there thinks this rings a bell, I'd love to hear from you.

Experienced genealogists tell you to "go with what you know" and re-examine every document. Now it was time to try to "jump the pond". So I went back to my grandmother's Irish birth certificate. Sure enough, right across the top was the first piece of the puzzle.

Someone, maybe my dad, had mentioned Roscommon in connection with the family. Clearly I was looking in the wrong county. So now I had county of Sligo, Aclare district, town of Tobercurry. Exceeepppt..well look at the photo and then look at the certificate..yup..is it Tobercurry or Tubbercurry? Apparently, even the Irish don't agree as a Google search will tell you. And the Irish changed and simplified a lot of names at one point.  But I had a place to start.

Irish records are challenging. Many weren't kept, some were burned and some have been destroyed by time. The Catholic church has some parish records and in those the names are often in Latin. Yet another challenge. Luckily both Ancestry and FamilySearch had this record:

Comparing the two, you can see my great grandmother Mary Feehily (Americanized to Feely) and Michael Cooke (Cook) marrying in Tobercurry just before the birth of their oldest child. At some point soon I will go off the the local Family History Center and order this record. Hopefully, it will have a little more information to help me along the way. Further searches in the Irish records have shown me that there are and were a LOT of Cooks, Cookes, Feehilys and Feelys in and around Tobercurry. I'll need a few more clues.