Another scrap

I went back to genealogy as a hobby. It's getting towards autumn and it makes me nicely nostalgic and melancholy and those feelings go with genealogy in a way that they don't go with bike riding and gardening. Really.

I ran into my cousin Amanda on Saturday night. She and her husband had found my family tree online--they'd just signed up for ancestry.com as well and were amused/impressed by what I had so far. So that night I stayed up late and did a bit. Sunday night, too. But I'm at a point at which it's not so many aha moments anymore. Right now I'm extrapolating based on name, age, and date of entry when the Kidney/Dwyer sisters might have come to the US. I have a ten year span, of course the height of the famine diaspora, and there's no real way of knowing for sure what last name they used. Plus, it's not like the people putting them on boats in Liverpool or Cork had much to say about them besides a name and an approximate age. I don't know why I care about their passage to the US--it doesn't help me find records in Ireland, except maybe to narrow down dates. It's not like they list a former address on the steerage form.

But while I was tooling around this afternoon during naptime, dinner in the crock pot and the public rooms of the house passable, I was looking for records of Bridget Kidney Blake. I found a record in a city directory in East St. Louis, where she lived with her husband Edward. He ran a saloon, I know (they left their two sons, one of which is my great-great-grandfather, in Kansas City with her sister to go to East St. Louis during the railroad/stockyard boom). I found the listing in 1890, which was after his suicide in 1886 (gravestone here). It had an address: 310 Market Ave.

Then I took that information and looked it up on google maps. There was a street view. It's all fallow ground now, of course, not even a street sign marking it. I stared at it a moment and wondered where their bar was. Was it here? Closer to the center of town? So I went back to google and made several attempts to find information. You can't find that kind of information, at least I can't, on google. That will require trips to government offices or newspaper archives. I sighed. Then I put in "Edward Blake" saloon East St. Louis.

And I got something. An article in the New York times, dated October 29, 1886. A man named William Vanderough (later I found evidence that his name was really Vandervoort), an engineer for the Indianapolis & St. Louis Railroad, was in a saloon in East St. Louis. He got very drunk. He argued with the proprietor, Edward Blake, over his bill. Came at him, and Blake warned him to back off. He didn't, and Edward Blake took out his revolver and shot him.

He died of "traumatic peritonitis" in Mullanphy Hospital in St. Louis two days later. Lots of scrawled handwritten notes in the one-line death record that I can't read just yet. I'm going to try later with fewer distractions (after the kids are in bed).

I read this and my heart stopped. 1886? But that's the year Edward committed suicide. Wait. I went back to ancestry and looked at his own death certificate.

He took rat poison (arsenic in those days) 20 days after killing a man in his bar.

He was born in 1828 and married Bridget at age 30. He survived/escaped the potato famine. He had two sons and a wife and a niece who lived with them. He had something of a successful business. And then he shoots a drunk, possibly in self-defense, I mean, I can't find a record that he died in jail or something like that. And maybe that was just too much?

I looked a bit on Ancestry to see if William Vandervoort showed up in anyone's genealogy. I can't tell for sure--turns out Vandervoort isn't as rare as it seems like it should be. I think I have him in the 1880 census, though, in New York (which maybe explains why the Times took an interest?). No marriage record, no obituary per se.

It's 124 years later and I want to apologize. That's probably a crazy thing to think, but the whole story, fleshed out like this, is fascinating, tragic, and almost as if it's waiting for me to do something with. So if you know any New York Vandervoorts with railroad connections and a story of a murder, send them my way.