December 22, 2023 — Family History
Happy Holidays!
The above photo is of Cruzer, and it is the only time I have seen him lay down like that. Sadly, he is slowly failing. Well, sometimes it’s slow and sometimes it seems faster. He did not want to settle yesterday evening for reasons known only to him. He had me worried but seems better today. He’s on daily pain medication now, which helps. But it’s tough, and each additional day we have him with us is something of a surprise. Maybe he will make it several more months, or not. We have no way to know. But we enjoy our remaining time with him, and forgive him for any mistakes in the hopes that someone will forgive us for ours in the future.
Sober talk before the holidays I know, but sometimes that’s the way things are. You only have to look at the state of the world to see there’s a lot wrong at the moment. I wish I could pay less attention to it all. I am far too empathetic and right now just catching up on the news hurts.
The past week wasn’t exactly huge on the productivity front. I did get all the holiday greetings sent out. If you’re reading this and you haven’t received yours yet, then either I screwed up or it’s still in the mail. We did send a few out in physical mail at the last possible moment. They’ll probably arrive late, and for that I apologize. But most everyone else got an email. If you should have received one of those and have not, please get in touch because it seems my email address for you is not correct.
The other thing I spent time on was the family history. I sometimes wonder about my interest in this task. To be honest, there is nothing particularly important or valuable that will result. And though there are probably zillions of people out there that I am distantly related to, those relationships are so tenuous they don’t really matter in my mind.
In fact, just this morning I read an article by a grouchy biologist I follow about this very topic. His point of view is interesting, and mirrors my own thoughts to some degree. What matters to me isn’t the relationships, it’s the stories, and the things behind how I wound up coming into the world where and how I did. Nothing I learn through this research is going to change anything significant, but it does somehow make me feel a tiny bit more connected to things overall.
In doing that, I spent a fair amount of time continuing to dig into Clara Stacy. She was my great great grandmother, and reflecting on her life gives me pause. I’ve mentioned her before, but now I have a few more details.
She was born in 1861. Her father died when she was about two years old. That would be Darius Stacy, who fought in the civil war, was captured at the battle of Marks Mill, and then died young of an infected bladder while in a Confederate POW camp in Texas. There’s a lot of tragedy in this family, so buckle up.
Clara married her first husband — John McCreary — in 1877, when she was only 15. The first of their four children was born a year later. John died a few years after that, but I haven’t been able to find the date he died, or the cause. That research is for a future time. I do know that his job was listed as “bridge carpenter” in the 1880 census, which means that when he died Clara was suddenly without any income and had four children to feed, the oldest of which was no more than eight. I suspect they moved in with family — this was in rural Iowa and she definitely had family in the area — to get by.
She married her second husband — Patrick Carr — in January of 1885. Patrick was — in my mind — a piece of work. He was viewed as a pioneer of some sort, and apparently was well liked in the community. There’s a story told by my grandmother, which she got from her mother, about people knocking on Patrick’s door at night. Discussion would ensue, and they would go out into the back yard where Patrick would dig something up. Then things would be exchanged. The theory was that he was the local money lender and had his money buried in the yard.
That’s all second hand (or worse) so I didn’t know how much credence to give it, but then I found a newspaper clipping, shared on Ancestry:
The Chariton Leader, Chariton, Iowa
Thursday, August 23, 1906JOHN DUGGAN resides on the PADDY CARR farm, twelve miles west of Albia.During MR. CARR’s lifetime he amassed a large amount of money. He was a peculiar man, and finally went insane and died in the hospital. His estate is now all settled up and the heirs have received what was due them.
It was always thought the old man had more money than the estate invoiced,but no person knew where it was. The other day MR. DUGGAN was watching an old hen as she was scratching around the garden, and when a shining piece of metal was unearthed his curiosity led him to see what it was. His surprisec an be imagined when he found it was a twenty-dollar gold piece. Later the old hen continued her operations for grub worms and dug up $280 more, or a total of $300 that the bird has brought to light. It is claimed that there was between $10,000 and $12,000 of old PADDY CARR’s money that was unaccounted for when he died, and it may be that the old farm is a perfect gold mine. It is safe to say the farm will now be given a thorough going over. The money will, of course, belong to the present occupant of the farm
I need to get the original of that, just to confirm it, but it definitely supports the family story about Patrick “Paddy” Carr.
Getting back to Clara, her first child with Patrick was born about 12 months after they married, near the end of 1885. That was Dolly, my great grandmother. Clara and Patrick had eight children together between 1885 and 1900. And then it gets complicated.
Patrick was declared incompetent in September 1898, and in the US Federal Census of 1900 he was listed as an “inmate” at a hospital in Council Bluffs Iowa. He died there in February 1901.
Clara and Patrick’s last two children were twins, born in January of 1900.
So much like with her first husband, Clara once again found herself taking care of babies without her husband. At that time all eight of her children with Patrick were 15 or younger. Thankfully the children from her first marriage were old enough to be out on their own, or at least they don’t show up in census data as living with Clara.
And it gets worse.
In 1905 her second child with Patrick — a son named Harry Patrick Carr — died at the age of 15.
And in 1907 Clara’s mother died at the age of 76.
There’s another family story that I have not been able to confirm. It’s said that Patrick had promised to pay for the coal for the church the year that he died (or was committed), but hadn’t done so yet. And it seems the church — needing the money — threw Clara and her children out so they could sell the house and take the proceeds. Clara is said to have told her children never to set foot in a Catholic church again as a result.
I can’t say for certain if that is true. I really need to dig into the newspapers in the area at the time to see if there is anything about what happened to Clara and her children printed up. Most likely not, but you never know.
What I have found is this obituary for Patrick:
As you can see, it makes almost no mention of Clara and no mention at all of their children. Patrick was apparently widely respected, but his wife, not so much.
Given all this hardship, it’s no surprise that Clara turns up as an inmate of the Iowa Lunatic Asylum in the 1910 census. She spent the rest of her life there — another 33 years — and it appears no one in my branch of the family knew this until I found the census record.
When Clara died, the asylum was called the Mount Pleasant State Hospital, having gone through several name changes over the years. Judging by my internet search results, that facility may have had a rather ugly reputation for warehousing patients rather than treating them at times, so I cannot speak to the quality of any care she might have received.
What was she suffering from? Clara’s death certificate says senility (for “several years”) and an accidental fall which fractured her femur were the immediate causes of her death, but it also states she had “dementia precox” — an early term for schizophrenia — for 35 years. I find it amusing to note that the staff misspelled “praecox” as “precox”. If their Latin was as good as their medicine… sigh.
In any case, Clara died in January 1943. If you subtract 35 years you get 1908, which is right in the middle of just about everything going wrong in her life. How sick was she really? Perhaps she really did break down, but it’s also possible she wasn’t mentally ill at all. Maybe she was distraught beyond all ability to deal with it.
Still, she endured something like 35 years in a state asylum after giving birth to 12 children and losing two husbands. I can only hope to be that strong.
So that’s what I have been up to the week before Christmas. It makes me think about just how lucky I am, and how easy I have it. That’s a nice change of pace from the news.
In the process of doing all that research I may also have found some rather striking news about one of Clara’s sisters, but that’s a story for a future post.
Go forth and enjoy the holidays!