Since I found out that my 2x great-grandfather didn’t abandon and divorce my grandmother’s grandmother and had some other family out there, that in fact he had died of consumption (tuberculosis) at the age of 28, leaving his young wife Ellen, and their two-year-old daughter Elizabeth behind.

But what were his 28 years like?

Now that I had his death certificate, I knew his parents names: Michael J. Nevins (Sr.) and Ann J. Conlon. All three of their birthplaces showed “England” in this document.

The next piece of the puzzle lay in England. I dug up an 1881 UK Census from Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire, England. Michael Sr., Ann, a four-year-old daughter Mary and a two-year-old son Michael. I learned that Michael Sr. (27 years old at the time) was actually born in Ireland, not England like Michael Jr.’s death certificate showed.

Immigration Across the Atlantic

About three years later the growing family must have decided to try for a better life in America, because I found their names on the manifest of passengers for the S.S. Borderer sailing from Liverpool to Boston on September 24, 1884.

Now, it’s not uncommon to find discrepancies in information like place, age, name spelling. So you just have to gather as much as you can to make a reasonable assumption you are looking at the same family. So I’m giving the steward, John H. Hill, that wrote the manifest in 1884, a break for the misspelling of Nevins to Naven.

Not the S.S. Borderer, but what a passenger steamer looked like in 1884:

They arrive in Boston and find a place to call home in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Lawrence was known as Immigrant City, so I wonder if they may have heard about it while in England and had a plan when they arrived on how they were going to make a living. The woolen mills gave employment to hundreds of immigrants and the Nevins family was no different. Michael Sr. was a woolen carpet weaver back in Heckmondwike so this move seem to make sense.

Since the 1890 US census was lost to a fire, the best I have so far is what I learned about Michael and family in the year 1900.

But Michael Sr. was missing. Ann had become a widow.

A Hard Start in a New Country

So I had to back track again. I found Michael Sr.’s death certificate. Only 38, he died in 1891 of apoplexy (stroke or brain hemorrhage). At this point I always get bogged down with dates and names and occupations that I have to stop and remind myself of what was happening all around. What they may have been feeling. If they did come to America for a new start, there were certainly no shortage of rough times.

Five years after their arrival to America, in 1889, Michael and Ann had their seventh child named Richard in January. Sadly he contracted Infant Cholera and died in June, only six months old.

Once I learned more about what cholera was, I was convinced that their living conditions could have been poor enough to have contaminated drinking water, not much food and obviously crowded spaces. I found a couple of excerpts from “The Journal of Infectious Diseases” from 1910 and it sheds light on the conditions in Lawrence, Mass. and surrounding areas during the 1880s and 90s. Apparently they saw a drop in disease related deaths after the area began a water purification program.

And as I read, I saw that Cholera was sometimes brought on because people were mixing raw river water with milk and giving it to their infants. 

The following year, 1890, they lost Michael Sr.’s father, Anthony (55) to heart disease and their six year old daughter, Ann to marasmus.

Two children gone in a year’s time and the patriarch, Anthony, from Ireland. Then in 1891, Michael Sr. dies. Now a single mother, Ann raised the rest of the children on her own: Sarah (16), Mary (13), Michael Jr. (11), Catherine (9), and Patrick (6).

In 1900, Michael, Catherine and Patrick were still living with their mother but by May of 1905 Michael had married an English immigrant named Ellen Taylor. Ellen came to the Methuen/Lawrence, Massachusetts area in 1898 on the S.S. New England at the age of 14 with her parents and sister, Maud. Nine months later, little Elizabeth Nevins arrives on February 23, 1906. Michael still worked as a carriage painter just as it’s recorded he did in the 1900 census. They married in 1905 and we know what happens just three years later. Michael’s younger brother Patrick would die from the same illness two years after his brother, in 1910. Patrick was only 25 years old.

New Marriage, New Life

1910 was also a happy year. Ellen gets remarried to Peter Beeley. They would spend the next 40 years of their lives together.

Lastly, I came across Michael and Ellen’s marriage record, which further gives me more solid proof to back up all the other finds. Apparently he took a break in between his carriage painter profession to be a dairy man, because that’s what is listed as his occupation in their marriage record. Hmmm. So my great-grandma could really say her daddy was the milk-man? Well, carriage painter turned milk-man, turned carriage painter once more.

There were some wonderful finds that my grandmother showed us a few years back, things that Ellen Taylor Nevins Beeley tucked away that were connected with her first love, Michael, for her daughter Elizabeth to remember him by.

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