Grandpa Cassidy had three sisters. Ethel Mary was two years older than he, born in 1898 in New Haven. Earlier that decade, the name Ethel was the seventh most popularly given name to baby girls. It means noble. The youngest of Ethel’s three children, Jean, wrote down the following memory: We sat on the porch on a sunny Thursday June afternoon, following the big surprise 40th Wedding Anniversary Party. It had been Anna’s idea. She said we should make hay…
Please don’t let the fancy title of this story make you nervous. Basically, epistolary apostolate means “the letter-writing apostle.” Brother Frank, I’m learning, loved to write letters. If you read The Mulligan Cousins a few weeks back, you’ve already “met” Brother Frank. He was Mom’s cousin by marriage (her aunt Marcella’s marriage, that is), as his birth mom, Mary, passed away when he was just five. Their home on Central Avenue in New Haven still looks great: Here is a…
She was just 13 years old. It must have felt like the world was exploding. Her uncles were in uniform. The radio blasted news of war. There was rationing of food and materials. Newspaper headlines were frightening. So Mom wrote poems. Some she included in letters to her aunt who lived an hour away. It wasn’t until after Sister Amabilis passed away that Mom discovered all her letters had been preserved. This poem about the USS Hornet was so long,…
Mom dearly loved her aunt Ginny. The youngest of Grandpa Cassidy‘s siblings, Ginny lived her entire life on Lombard Street in New Haven. Virginia Anne Cassidy came into this world on December 11, 1915. This was a full 22 years after her oldest brother, John, was born. Grandpa was 15 years older than Ginny. After all these years, it’s only now coming to me that Mom must have been named for her. Virginia was Mom‘s middle name. This is the…
This feels like a miracle. Or at the very least, an answer from Saint Anthony. The other morning, I woke up full of determination to look into the other side of Mom’s family. The Cassidy side. Surely there must be someone out there who was also a great-grandchild of Patrick and Annie who wants family stories preserved and shared. Right? I started with the youngest of their seven children, worked my way to Marcella, and put together a story about…
As today is the anniversary of D-Day, I went looking for a relative who served during World War II and came across Mom’s Mulligan cousins. Let’s start with John Joseph Mulligan, Jr. He was born in 1920 in New Haven, Connecticut. Here’s a photo from his high-school yearbook: Sadly, his mom – Bertha Prindle Mulligan – passed away when he was only ten. She was 31. Eighteen months later, John got a stepmom. Mom’s aunt Marcella Cassidy married John Sr….
Oh, nature. You are testing me. That fox last month was one thing. But did he have to move his whole family here? Under the front porch? And, apparently, under the back deck as a playroom for the four – count ’em four – kits? The worst part is poor Yow-Yow Kitty has taken to patrolling from up on the rooftop of our house. A close second in the worst-part category is that the cute little kits like to roll…
The month of May brought bees to our gardens and our bookshelves: Book 1: The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku This memoir doesn’t mess around, despite its title and subtitle (The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor). Eddie Jaku, survives the horrors of the Holocaust and manages to build a fulfilling life for himself and his family. Like a kindly grandpa, Jaku offers advice to his readers so that they, too, can live a beautiful life. Book 2:…
Ever since I saw this woman’s name and added her to our family tree, that song from Hamilton has haunted my brain. Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton sing this duet as a lullabye to their newborns, Theodosia and Philip: But who was our Theodocia? She was born in Brookfield, Massachusetts, just eight years after the end of the Revolutionary War. She was one of ten children born to Jacob and Lois. Her siblings carried such names as Ebenezer, Sewell, and…
Now that I’m buckling down and finally watching the tutorial videos Ancestry.com provides, I’ve learned the fancy genealogical terms “brick wall” and “breakthrough.” And so, with a bit of a blush and definite tongue-in-cheek, I must proclaim: We’ve scaled the brick wall and experienced a breakthrough! Let’s go back a week, when the luck of the Irish arrived via an email. It was Adrian (who, it turns out, is my third cousin), who had wandered across this blog post from…