
When I first started researching my family history way back in the late 1980s there was no internet and it was mighty expensive to find things out. So when my grandmother and her sister (my great aunt Marion) asked me to look into the mystery surrounding their father's grave it took a while to sort things out. First, you have to know that in NYC it is common for multiple bodies to placed (stacked) in one plot. In the case of Tom Lennon it was a three body plot but I have found as many as six bodies in plots owned by my grandfather's family. So having someone else in there with your loved one is pretty common but you usually know who you ended up with. My great aunt Agnes had visited Tom's grave a couple of years before and taken note of the woman buried beneath him: Margaret Rowland. No one in the family had a clue who Margaret was.
How do you resist a challenge like this one?
The first thing I did was write to St Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx and ask for the full names of everyone buried in my great grandfather's plot. I got back that Tom and Margaret were there together and also that the grave had been bought by Edward Rowland, husband of Margaret, when she died in 1918. (It cost $38 if you're wondering.) With the exact date of death I was able to send away for a copy of her death certificate for genealogical reasons (no Ancestry.com back then). We were thinking she was an aunt or cousin of my great grandfather but the death certificate proved to a be a bit more complicated. Margaret was born in the U.S. in 1875 (and only 42 when she died of uterine cancer). Her parents were both born in Ireland and their names were Bridget Waldren & John Lennon.
On one hand you have to take the names of deceased parents & circumstances of birth on a death certificate with a grain of salt, because they can often be wrong. But John Lennon was the name of Tom's father and my grandmother thought he had been married twice (maybe - all of her Lennon grandparents were dead long before she came along). Tom's mother was named Catherine (and we had his baptismal certificate along with his siblings' from the Church of the Sacred Hearth in the Bronx so we knew the names of John & Catherine were true.) So maybe Margaret was from the first marriage and thus his half sister? Bridget is such an unusual name and the Irish are infamous for keeping names for generations (we are knee deep in Catherines for example). For the past couple of decades we just looked at it all this way and put a big question mark next to Bridget and when she might have died.
Until I got all busy recently on Ancestry.com.
I was looking in the 1900 census for another family member - supposed sister or aunt of Tom - who had an unusual married name (more on her later - but she's another Catherine). And I found her, as a widow in the 1900 NYC census, living with her children and her sister Margaret (born 1874 - which is close enough) and her brother Robert (Tom had an Uncle Rob my grandmother knew quite well) and her mother, a widow named Bridget Lennon.
Talk about a shocker.
Bridget was not the first wife of John Lennon and her children were not Tom's half siblings. She was Tom's grandmother - married to John Lennon, Sr who was apparently Tom's grandfather (we had never gotten that far back but I'm so not surprised to find yet another John). Tom was buried with his aunt - not his half sister. Here's how it looks:
John Lennon married Bridget Waldren and they had at least four children: Catherine, Margaret, Robert & another John. (My grandmother personally knew Catherine & Rob.)
The younger John married Catherine Nolan and they had lots of kids (like another John, a James, a Catherine, etc) including, in 1888, Tom Lennon. (And both died before any of Tom's kids ever knew them.)
Tom Lennon married Julia Pressl in 1910 and had eight children - including my grandmother (another Catherine) (and yes - there is another John in there as well).
So after twenty years, Margaret finally led me to Bridget who all this time was a generational leap that I never recognized. My great great great grandmother died in New York City - she seems to be the first generation to come here from Ireland. She is the one who made the trip and now I know her - I know who she is.
Days like this, I miss my grandmother more than you can possibly imagine. She would have loved this. Now, I just need to find where Bridget was buried and when she died and exactly who all those kids were. But still....I'm a lot further along then I used to be!
PS. Is this the perfect St Patrick's Day post, or what?
[Post pic of St Raymond's Church & Cemetery in the Bronx in 1905 - where my great grandfather is buried. The church is still open; Tom Lennon, 1928. He died five years later at age 43.]