Grandfather George Fitzgerald spent his first Yukon winter in Dawson as a common laborer digging frozen mine tundra for turning out in spring runoffs. Thus he was one of the world's first to hear of the 1899 second big strike on Nome, Alaska's sands at the other end of the Yukon River. At spring thaw he worked his way downstream on a steamer, hitting Nome's beaches while gold rush digging was still at the "second line" and wintering with a partner on Snow Creek. In spring he bought his partner out and moved the cabin to the tent shanty town of Nome on Anvil Creek to set up the first, eventually the only, bakery in the rough and ready Alaska gold rush mining camp, staying 10 years.
George Fitzgerald was born 1870 in Swansea, Wales, of Welsh and Irish ancestry. His father kept a tavern, learning his trade from his father before the potato famine forced the family to leave Dublin. He did not come from a large family in respect to those times but only had a brother or two and a couple of sisters. His brother Ned Fitzgerald was the only family member to leave the British Isles for America. At 19 George traveled by schooner to America, jumping ship with his seaman's pay to buy a transcontinental railroad ticket for a fresh start in San Francisco's teeming North Beach Irish community. He lived there during the 1890s while fellow Alaska gold rush 98er Jack London was an oyster pirate across the bay in Oakland.
Seattle steamers summer 1897 brought word of Alaska gold. Chilikoot Pass became one long line of gold seekers that winter trying to be first into Dawson and the Klondike after the spring thaw. My grandfather, then 25, was grubstaked by a grocer he clerked for and set out the following spring taking the longer but more certain Yukon River route to Dawson, arriving midsummer. Little reliable documentation remains of covered over accounts of Nome's 1899 standoff between gold rush pioneers and claimjumpers, requiring U S Cavalry occupation and the appointment of a territorial judge to sit in Nome summer 1899 to settle disputes. SJSU library staff razorbladed chapters covering these disputes along with later San Jose disputes out of rare copies of books chronicling Fitzgerald family history in Alaska and California, written by George Fitzgerald. Meanwhile everyone ate at George Fitzgerald's bakery. There he met and married German-Polish Frieda Polski, who traveling with her mother as a camp follower, worked for him. Their son born in 1904 died during their 1906 return trip to Nome. In Yuba City California they witnessed the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. I once owned a copy of a newspaper printed the day of the earthquake.
My father Ralph Fitzgerald was born a few years later when Frieda, unhappy in Alaska, the "Land of the Midnight Sun," wanted to return to the Lower 48. Like many other Alaska gold rush 98ers they settled near San Francisco, operating a San Mateo County bakery prior to World War I. When competition from the Teamsters Union ended their business he took his family and small Klondike fortune to the Santa Clara Valley, bought a 40-acre prune ranch outside Campbell on what is now Foxworthy Ave and spent the rest of his life as a gentleman farmer despite his lack of farming skills. My father became a Catholic as did his father in return for a Santa Clara University engineering scholarship. He worked for Westinghouse during the Depression, installing electrical power for western Pennsylvania farms. He returned in 1932 to help with the family farm, which in the meantime had built a dehydrator to process prunes. George Fitzgerald died when I was 6. Hilda Larson Huston, the only grandparent I came to know, survived until just before I entered college.
I have distant Fitzgerald cousins in Wales and Scotland as well as in California. I'd like to hear from them and know more about them and about our family's history.
Fitzgerald is Irish.
Coat of Arms contains a silver shield with a red saltire. The Crest is a monkey statant with a collar around his middle. Family motto: Crom aboo Spelling variations include: Fitzgerald, Geraldines, Desmond, Gerald, and others.
First found in Munster where they were granted lands by the Earl of Pembroke during his invasion of Ireland in 1172. First landed in North America: Redmond Fitzgerald landed in Virginia, 1635.