No Father for Rita

   This sounds like a title for an afterschool TV special.  Rita was my grandmother and she was illegitimate.  As in many cases, her McCarthy grandparents adopted her and raised her as their daughter.  I can imagine that her life was in some ways like those old afterschool specials.

   By the time Rita was 5, both of her ‘parents’ were dead and she was now being raised by her ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’.  I’m relying on anecdotal evidence from my cousins that ‘sister’Helen is really Rita’s mother.   The task of raising Rita fell to Helen’s sister Mary.  Everyone else in the family was out working jobs like – electrician, carpenter, machinist or telephone operator.  The bond between Rita and Mary was tight and lasted until their deaths.  Perhaps I just didn’t see other tight family bonds because the rest of her side of the family passed away before I was born.

Rita (McCarthy) Maglio & Mary (McCarthy) Murphy

   One by one, the McCarthy siblings married and moved away.  By 1930, Rita was living with her mother, Helen, and her new family.  Helen’s husband John listed Rita as a boarder on the census.  As a minimum, Rita should have been listed as a sister-in-law.  My interpretation of this is that John knew exactly who and what Rita was and wanted to distance himself from the fact.  He had no intention of being a father figure.

   Rita was shuffled around to two other families before she married my grandfather in 1938.  Yet, through all that turmoil in her life, she turned out to be the sweetest and most caring of women.

   Whether you are a genealogist or not, you have to wonder who Rita’s real father was.  I do.

   Autosomal testing is one way of determining who he was.  Now I could rely on matching someone randomly in the databases or I could shift the odds in my favor.  I started researching every male in a two-block radius from where Helen was living in 1913.  The research turned up a number of good suspects.  Autosomal testing is not inexpensive.  I needed narrow my field by using any additional evidence I could find no matter how circumstantial.

   One of the single men (not that it had to be an unmarried individual) that I found was just a bit older than Helen was.  Based on my evidence, they probably grew up together and had known each other since they were kids.  When Ed did get married, he named his daughter Rita.  As far as I can tell, Rita was not a common name at the time.  Other folks who were researching Ed posted his photo in their tree.  I thought that there was a bit a family resemblance there.

   I contacted Ed’s descendants and explained what I was trying to do.  They agreed to the testing and then the waiting began.  I expected at least a two-month wait for the results.

   When the results came in, first mine then theirs, I was disappointed to see that against the database I only had potential fourth and fifth cousin matches.  Considering that most folks that are getting an autosomal test are doing it because they are missing big chunks of their genealogy makes finding a common ancestor with a fifth cousin a daunting task.

   Also disappointing was the lack of a match with Ed’s family.  The matching is all done automatically and the results will only show for the close matches.  I even contacted the testing company and asked them to intentionally run a comparison and send me the results.  They did and still no go.  Not even close.

   Still no father for Rita.

   All is not lost.   I have my autosomal results and I have sent out my introductions to all my fourth and fifth cousins looking for a very narrow set of conditions.  They had to have had family at one time in Dorchester.

   The hunt continues.

For more on this family see my posts here & here.

Those Places Thursday: They Came From Neponset

   For those of you who may not be familiar with Neponset, it is a neighborhood in the southeast portion of Dorchester bounded by Tenean Beach, Port Norfolk and the Neponset River.  It is in Dorchester that my Italian grandfather met my Irish grandmother and the rest is history.

Vincent Maglio & Rita McCarthy

   Let's go back two generations to my gg-grandfather Florence McCarthy and yes, Florence was a fairly common man's name back then. In fact the last Irish Prince was a Florence McCarthy (1560–1640). My Florence emigrated from County Cork in 1887 with his wife Catherine Sweeney. By the 1900 Census Florence owned his own home. That's not bad for someone just off the boat 13 years earlier.

   On that census Florence is listed as an RR Laborer. My guess, considering that he lived 50 feet from the Old Colony railroad line, is that RR stood for railroad. Now I have the tune for "I've been working on the railroad" stuck in my head. When I think of a "laborer" at the turn of that century I think of someone digging ditches or shoveling coal and "no Irish need apply". I can't imagine that it would be easy to buy a house on a laborer's wage.

   I poured through the records to see if I could get a better understanding of Florence the laborer. On the 1910 Census he is also listed as a laborer, this time for the city. He died in 1915 at the age of 59, so, I won't find him in any other census. City Directories are a great resource. I've been able to figure out family units, find occupations, track movement year after year and sometimes get a death date. I started working back through time. In the 1899 City Directory he is listed as a "nailer". This information combined with the railroad laborer job conjures up images of sledgehammers and railroad spikes. No wonder Florence died young, his heart gave out just like John Henry. Exaggeration aside, Florence did die of acute endocarditis, an inflammation of the heart.

   I found a great series of maps at the Dorchester Antheneum. On the 1894 map for Neponset, Florence is shown owning land on Norwood St. By 1899 there is a two family house built on the property. I have one answer - Florence was making an extra income being a landlord.

   While on the Dorchester Antheneum site I stumbled upon a record for the S. S. Putnam Nail Company.

   The nail factory at Neponset manufactured horseshoe nails.  In the 1890's it produced 10 tons of nails per day and employed 400 workers.  This gives a whole new definition to the occupation of "nailer".  Work at the nail factory must have been good.  I was able to trace Florence and some his coworkers through the city directories as they moved from homes a few blocks from the factory to better neighborhoods and eventually their own homes.

   Somewhere between 1904 and 1910 the Putnam Nail Factory had gone out of business.  Could it have been that the introduction of the automobile in 1908 caused a decline in the need for horseshoe nails?  (Henry Ford installed his first assembly line on this day {Dec 1st} in 1913)

   In the 28 years that Florence McCarthy lived in the United States he became a citizen, raised 8 children, and built a great foundation for his family.