This tale is one of broken hearts, and loss, and reunion. It is a tale of luck and perseverance and discovery. It is a tale about family. It's a fitting tale for Valentine's Day.
Mary Boyle was 25 years old when she stepped off the SS Cameronia in 1930 with her cousin, also named Mary Boyle, in New York Harbor. The Great Depression was in full swing, but things at home in Uphall, Scotland, were worse. The shale mining boom that had brought Mary's father to Uphall from a little village in Donegal in the 1890s had gone bust, and Broxburn, her birthplace, had all but become a ghost town. Mary's brother John, like other Irish and British laborers, had moved to New York 3 years earlier, looking for work. There were still enough service jobs to be had--clerks and security guards and domestics--that there was little to lose by venturing abroad. In some ways, whether to stay or to go seemed a Hobson's choice. Mary found work as a live-in housekeeper for theater diva Eva La Gallienne in Brooklyn Heights.
Sometimes on her errands Mary would get on the IRT subway line at Borough Hall. Whenever she'd ride, she'd see the same man patrolling the platform, and finally he noticed her. One day, the man, whose name was Fred, asked Mary on a date. Three years later they were wed at a church in Brooklyn. Mary continued living with her employer, Judge Brown, as his live-in housekeeper, until she was able to pay off her passage to America.
Mary didn't know much about Fred, but she was seduced by his Irish charm. He was the first man she'd ever been with, which was not unusual for a Catholic woman of her upbringing, even at the age of 30. Eventually Fred and Mary settled in Flatbush, in a floor-through apartment atop a Chinese laundry. Mary got pregnant and stayed at home, while Fred went to work at the local Catholic church as a sexton so he could be closer to Mary and his first daughter, Mary Jane. Almost 3 years later, Mary gave birth to their second daughter, Eileen.
Over the years Mary had been noticing the letters that Fred received from Dublin. The handwriting, which looked like a woman's, was always the same. From Fred's behavior and things he'd said, she'd begun to suspect that Fred was harboring some sort of secret. She never questioned him on the letters, but one day she couldn't contain herself. She steamed open the airmail envelope. As she read the words, the questions, the pleas, her heart sank and hardened. The letter was from someone named Ellie. She asked Fred when he would be sending for them, why his letters had become so infrequent. It became apparent that Fred had a whole other family in Dublin--another wife, children even. She felt sick by the betrayal and confronted her husband, who admitted to having another wife. He told Mary that it was over between him and Ellie, that he had gone back to Dublin once to try to patch things up with her, but in the end she sent him away and he had returned to America, jumping ship because he was not supposed to have left the country. Things were never again right between Mary and Fred. From that day on, Mary did not consider Fred her husband, would not let him touch her, as they were, in her words, "not married in the eyes of God."
The church found out about the bigamy, whether through Mary or someone else is not clear. Fred was relieved of his duties at the church. A letter was sent to the family in Dublin informing them of the second family. In the ensuing years Mary and Fred's relationship was cool at best. The night before Mary Jane Mason's 11th birthday in 1948, Fred Mason had a heart attack and died at the dinner table. He was 56 years old.
During their marriage Mary had spoken only once with Fred's sister Eileen, who worked as a nurse on Ward's Island. As far as she knew Fred had no other family. After his death she had no way to contact Eileen or anyone else in Fred's family. She realized how little she truly knew about him. Mary would not discuss the circumstances of her duplicitous husband with her young daughters, so heavy was her shame. A year after Fred died her brother Neil came over from Scotland to help Mary raise Mary Jane and Eileen. Neil was a stern Scot, a figure whom the daughters considered more like a father than Fred. The specter of Fred's other life was raised only once more, when Scotland Yard phoned Mary to inquire of Fred's whereabouts. The Irish family, with whom Fred had ceased communication altogether, finally learned about Fred's death, 10 years after the fact.
"Let sleeping dogs lie," the saying goes, but for years, Mary Jane, my mother, and her sister Eileen could not abide it. As I grew into adulthood, I became curious about the family history and interviewed my grandmother Mary. She told me everything she knew about her own family but had nothing to say about her husband's. In 1982, Mary passed away. I wanted the answers for myself, but I didn't know where to begin. My mother and aunt always seemed burdened by the not knowing, the suspicion, the mystery of who their father really was and why he had abandoned his family in Ireland. Rumors abounded that he was a gun runner for the IRA, a philanderer, a shady character with sinister connections. The girls knew that Fred had carried on an affair with their next-door neighbor and suspected that he had even fathered her child. He was not a man to be trusted. His daughters were not yet teens when Fred died. There were issues about their own abandonment as well.
About a year and a half ago, I set out to find some answers. I had very little to go on, other than Fred's birth certificate, which my mother and aunt had sent to Ireland for in 1975, hoping to find out that maybe his name wasn't Fred Mason after all, that he had stolen an Irish operative's identity, that his birth date and place didn't match what he'd said. Their notions were perhaps a bit romantic, because all the information I found was consistent. Maybe there was a simpler explanation for what Fred had done.
I wrote to the Social Security Administration for Fred's application, then to the Department of Vital Records for his death certificate and for his and Mary's marriage record. Everything jibed with everything else I knew. If Fred were hiding something, he wasn't doing a very good job.
I looked for ways to find out more information about him. For months I was at an impasse. I signed up with a half dozen genealogy sites, including Genes Reunited and Ancestry.com, where I found Fred's draft registration card from 1942, when he was nearly 50. No other clues emerged. I figured that my only hope was to find his father Samuel's military record or a clue about his family in Dublin. I didn't know how, but I started looking. It occurred to me that on my upcoming trip to Ireland I could go to the General Records Office and research marriage records in the years after Fred turned 18. Since Mason is not a common Irish name, I was hoping he'd be easy to find in a place like Dublin.
I started with 1910, the year turned Fred Mason turned 18. It wasn't until 1917 that I hit pay dirt. I remember sitting in the records office, getting goosebumps when the name leapt up at me. Was this, perhaps, my
Golden Ticket? I ordered the marriage record, and there was the name of Fred's first wife: Ellen Josephine Hamilton. The parents' names, dates, places--all of them matched. I surmised that any children Fred and Ellen would have probably followed shortly after they got married. The first one I found was a son, John, born in 1918. The next boy, Samuel, came in 1921, followed by Gladys in 1923. After that, there was nothing.
Exhilarated, I told my mother, who was with me in Dublin at the time. She called my aunt in Brooklyn to let her know. Aunt Eileen was excited, but the news also resuscitated deeply held resentments about her father as well as the other family. I had to remind her that
we were the "other family," not the other way around. "Your aunt says we should look them up," my mother said, handing me a page out of the Dublin phone book. It was the page of Mason entries. There were at least 100. Even if you found one, I said to my mother, what would you say? "Hi, I'm your long-lost half-sister? What if they didn't even know about you?" At any rate, the important thing was that Fred's daughters had learned pieces of the puzzle that for so many years had eluded them.
I continued my search for more clues, but the facts were not forthcoming. Through research I found that John, the oldest son, had died in London in 1991 from injuries sustained in a fall from a ladder. I knew that if any of Fred and Ellen's children were still alive, it would be Gladys. But chances were that Gladys had married, and finding her married name would be next to impossible.
On a trip to London last November I got my next breakthrough. At the National Archives in Kew I found Samuel Mason's military record, another possible Golden Ticket. It turns out Fred had 8 siblings, including a sister named Eileen. She did exist after all. A month after that, I located on Ancestry.com Fred's ship manifest. He arrived in New York Harbor on the SS Baltic in 1925, just 2 years after Gladys's birth, and was discharged to an uncle in Greenpoint. I began to wonder if the uncle was real or just a fictional character. The legacy of shame from my grandfather's roguishness had made me question every document I found. But in the end, it all fit together. My one remaining hope was to find a way to contact the family in Ireland.
Genes Reunited is the site that helped me reunite with my long-lost cousin Kevin in England last November. Members post their family trees, and a spider finds names and dates that may match other members' trees and notified you. I had searched for months and months for Gladys Mason. I tried misspelling her name, using a different year, a different birth place. I knew, though, that no matter how hard I tried, I was never going to find her.
What I never imagined was that she would find me.
This morning I opened my e-mail and saw a query in my Genes Reunited account. It was from someone named Anne-Marie, inquiring about Ellen Hamilton.
I clicked on the link. The query contained one simple sentence: "Kieran, is this the Ellie Hamilton who married Freddy Mason and emigrated to Brooklyn, New York?"
My mouth dropped and my heart started pounding. I couldn't believe what I had just read. I quickly replied that, indeed, it was the same Ellie. Anne-Marie responded that she was Gladys Mason's daughter-in-law, the wife of Willie, Gladys's son. Gladys was alive and kicking and living in London. The two older brothers were dead. Over the course of the day, the heartbreaking truth emerged about the father of Gladys Mason and her brothers:
"Their mother Ellen (Ellie) was 98 years old when she died and had never re-married or had another partner. Fred went to America in order to get work and told Ellie that he would send for her and the children as soon as he was settled with somewhere for them all to live; this of course never happened and gradually his letters became more infrequent. Ellie raised her children by herself and eventually moved to London with her daughter Gladys to help her raise her own children. Gladys says that there was never any argument between Ellie and Frank and no formal separation. She was simply waiting for him to send for her."
As strange as it may sound, those words broke my heart and healed it at the same time. I didn't know any of these people, not even my own grandfather, but across time and oceans the distance had closed almost instantly. Gladys was overjoyed to hear of our connection, and the family there has been telephoning each other all day with information about our newly forged connection. Gladys, now 83, still has the letters that Fred sent to Ellie, as well as the letter from the church informing Ellie about Fred's marriage to Mary. I want to know more. Not ony did I get the Golden Ticket; I got the whole chocolate factory.
Labels: england, family, genealogy, ireland
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