The Cemetery

By W.O. Marion

12/12/07

I don’t know what was driving me.  I’m not even sure why I cared.  But finding out something, anything, about Mary Ellen O’Brien became important to me as I sat staring at a genealogical chart of the family of Patrick and Mary O’Brien.  Pat and Mary were my great-grandparents on my mother’s side.  They had met and married in Boston in the mid-1850s, not long after they’d made their sad and separate ways to America from Ireland.  They were both from a bereft County Cork, having come here – as had hundreds of thousands of their Irish brethren -- in the wake of the Potato Famine.  

Between 1857 and 1877, the couple had nine children, seven boys and two girls.  Mary Ellen was the couple’s fourth child and first daughter.  Like her three older brothers, William, John, and Daniel, she was born in Boston.  All five of the remaining children --including the youngest, my grandfather Michael -- were born in Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. 

Growing up, I had no more than a passing interest in my Irish roots, but my mother made sure they would always be there for me:  She gave me my middle name of O’Brien. Still, it would take a long, long while for me to come around. 

In the late 60s, an aunt and uncle began researching our heritage and eventually typed up their findings for distribution to the family.  My mother got a set of these documents, and after her death in 1974, my sister discovered them and made me Xeroxes.  They sat forgotten for years in a folder until I, at long last, developed a fascination for the lives of my Irish ancestors and began to seek out answers – a frustrating endeavor made all the more exasperating because by then everyone who’d personally known them was gone.  

Of course, bad timing is part and parcel of genealogy, and as I was hooked by then, it didn’t remotely deter my interest.  At times, I’d find myself gazing at those now-familiar names – William, John, Daniel, Mary Ellen, Timothy, James, Patrick, Annie, and Michael – marveling at the size of that family and wondering what their world had been like.

Only much later, when I’d learned the fate of the four Boston-born children, did the tragic pattern that plagued my great-grandparents’ lives emerge for me.

All that’s known of William and John, the first-born of the family, is that they died in infancy -- William at just 17 days and John at nine months.  How exactly they died was not passed down.  However, we do know that for the Irish in Boston, the more things changed, the more they remained the same:  They had been oppressed nearly to death by the British occupiers of their native Ireland.  Now, having fled that misery, they found that the English majority in Boston – many of them descendants of the city’s original settlers – held all things Irish in equal and constant contempt. There simply was no escape.

The swarms of penniless “paddy” immigrants, mostly laborers and servants, gravitated by necessity toward the tenements along the waterfront. With cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, and other dreaded and deadly diseases rampant in such slums, an appallingly high percentage of the infants born there didn’t see their first birthday.  Thus, the destiny of William and John was shared by a great many innocent souls in those days, though that could hardly have provided any consolation to my grieving great-grandparents. 

Fortunately, Pat and Mary’s sorrow was soon mitigated by the birth of Daniel, exactly ten months after John’s passing, and then Mary Ellen, a little over two years after Daniel arrived.  Both children somehow eluded the pervasive perils of poverty and grew safely into toddlerhood. Meanwhile, their parents struggled to make ends meet in a hostile environment with no realistic prospects.  In those days leading up to the Civil War, being Irish in Boston was akin to being Black in Atlanta.

Then word began to circulate that good jobs were to be had in the copper mines of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula.  Copper Mining had thrived for years in West Cork, near Pat’s hometown of Glengariff, on Ireland’s Beara Peninsula, and he, no doubt, was familiar with such work.  But leaving so-called civilized Boston in the early 1860s for a virtual wilderness on the shores of Lake Superior was a monumental move -- I wonder if my great-grandparents knew what they were getting into. 

Then again, perhaps it didn’t matter.  Maybe, they just wanted to get out of their frustrating and degrading circumstances. Period.  Ironically, putting 1,232 miles between themselves and Boston wasn’t enough to sever the binds entirely:  The principal investors – and those who profited most abundantly from the work of my great-grandfather and his fellow miners in the Copper Country – were Bostonian.

                                                                 ***

For Daniel and Mary Ellen that long trip westward was truly star-crossed. 

A decade later, Daniel, as the oldest son, would be compelled to cut his education short and take a job to help out the still-growing family. He was just 14 when he began working at Cliff mine.  One of the early successes in the Keweenaw, Cliff was the most productive mine discovered before 1860.  All told, it would pay out dividends of some $2,500,000 to its stockholders, a profit said to be in excess of 2000% on their original investment.

As impressive as these figures were, they were of no concern to young Daniel.  He was just out to make his ten cents-or-so-an-hour to help pay some of the family’s expenses. He was doing just that on May 16, 1874, when he suffered a fractured skull while pushing a tram car out to the mill and it veered off the trestle. Young Daniel went with it, never again to regain consciousness. 

Thinking about his premature death always became more real when I imagined losing one of my own children in an accident at such early age.  These days, you read about it all too often:  It usually involves teenagers, a speeding car, beer, and a tree, and it’s always the saddest of stories, young lives stopped dead in their tracks.  I can’t fully comprehend the emotional devastation such sudden losses must cause – that undesired ability is reserved exclusively for the initiated.  But I do know that for my great-grandparents, it was a double dose of pain:  They lost both a son and a breadwinner, and not just any son, but the first of their children to endure life in disease-ridden Boston. 

Daniel had been their only child for three years and that alone gave him a lofty place in the hearts of his parents.  On the heels of the deaths of William and John, he had arrived and survived, becoming their sole focus until Mary Ellen’s birth.  He was special to them.

Indeed, my grandpa Michael, then in his 80s, said as much in a letter to one of my cousins, ‘…My mother never got over his death. She spoke of him very often…He started to work to help such a large family, and when mother was ill, she says he used to make the breakfast and take care of her. He was a lovely penman. We had some of his school exercises. One of his teachers told my brother, the Judge, that Dan was the best student in his school.’

In short, he did what he was asked, and in effect, was killed in the line of duty.

The unfairness of it all was patent, a bitter fact of life in those days, in that place, when manual laborers were as replaceable as the handles on their sledgehammers.  What was heartbreaking for me was that my great-grandpa, despite working underground ten hours a day, six days a week, year after year, still couldn’t make enough money to get by.  So his son, just into adolescence, had to be pulled from school to pitch in -- and then it all ended so tragically. 

Despite the difficulty I had with Daniel’s awful death, at least we knew something about him and with this knowledge, had closure.  Mary Ellen, however, continued to be an enigma.

                                                                     *** 

In the wake of Daniel’s fatal accident, life went on for the O’Briens. Within two years, my grandfather Michael was born, and his presence must have injected a fresh vitality into the household. But it wouldn’t last.  In 1879, the family suffered another bitter blow:  That’s the year Mary Ellen suddenly died.  She was just 17, the same age that, a quarter-century earlier, her mother – my great-grandmother, Mary – had left Ireland, alone and, as the story goes, with barely more than the clothes on her back.

As Patrick and Mary’s first daughter, she was destined to have that most popular of female Irish names – Mary – bestowed upon her.  After all, that was my great-grandma’s mother’s name and her mother’s mother’s name and probably on and on from there. In fact, in staunchly Irish-Catholic circles both here and abroad, Mary was almost mandatory, whether as a first or middle name.

Growing up, I had never heard Mary Ellen’s name mentioned.  She had died when my Grandpa was just a year or two old.  Even he had no memory of her.  So nothing about her had been passed down from him to my mother, who had been born 32 years after Mary Ellen’s death; nor, then, from my mother to me.

Nevertheless, there was her name on that genealogy form, and I wondered what her world  had been like.  Just how was it being the daughter of a copper miner, living in a small, cramped, company-owned home with all those siblings?  And in such a godforsaken place, so remote and rugged and weather-stricken, with no amenities, nothing to make one’s life easier and more productive.  

Eating and drinking and heating and cooling and washing and illuminating and communicating and traveling – everything was a chore, constant, daily drudgery done the hard way.  It was a world of darning socks by candlelight and traipsing out back in the dark to the wooden privy and fetching bath water in buckets from a nearby stream and making hotcakes on a wood-burning stove and scrubbing soiled clothing on a washboard….

In summer, swarms of mosquitoes, black flies, and gnats ravished exposed skin; in winter, it was the biting Lake Superior wind and spirit-crushing snowfall.  Staying warm was a continuous concern, and those dark, frigid northern nights must have been long, indeed.

Did she have any life at all?  Was she, as the oldest daughter, stuck at home with all those younger siblings?  Had she attended school?  How had she died?  Where was she buried?  How had my great-grandparents endured her loss?

Mary Ellen was my great-aunt, a straightforward link to be sure, but given the year of her birth – 1862, some 88 years before mine – a simultaneously remote one.  Still, she was my grandpa’s sister, and as such, there she was, lodged firmly on our family tree.  Feeling the tug of the plaintive past, I had developed this interest in her, and so I would see it through as best I could.  After all, hope of discovery is the driving force in genealogy.

In truth, I knew that adding to the meager information that we had already possessed was not likely – especially after an inquiry to the Houghton County Clerk’s office determined that there wasn’t even a record of Mary Ellen’s 1879 death on file.

How had she died?   In another letter to my cousin, my grandpa had written that Mary Ellen had passed away ‘quite young from an illness.’   That wasn’t any help, but of course, he hadn’t known his sister himself, so we were left to speculate:  What ‘illness?’  Was it Yellow Fever?  Cholera?  Smallpox?   Whooping cough?  Diphtheria?  Scrofula?  Dysentery?  Scarlet fever? Hydrocephalus?  Bronchitis?  Consumption?  Typhoid fever?  Or was it something else on the seemingly endless list of formerly-fatal diseases that modern medicine has either done away with or can, for the most part, cope with today?

It was frustrating that the short story of Mary Ellen’s life had not been written or passed down – but that only prompted me to keep my eyes open a little wider….

                                                                        ***

I was in the library of Michigan Tech University in Houghton, MI.  The repository of much of the written history of the Copper Country’s heyday, it is the place to learn about life in the Keweenaw during the mining era.  In reality, I was there doing research on my great-grandpa, Patrick O’Brien – Mary Ellen’s father – but at some point, the question of Mary Ellen began tugging at me, and just like that, I had gotten sidetracked.  Now I was searching through 1879 newspapers on microfilm, hoping to run across mention of Mary Ellen’s passing.  

Spinning through those text-heavy papers gave me no joy, but it seems, I simply couldn’t get her off my mind.  In truth, I felt sorry for her; she had died so young and so long ago that she had all but fallen off our family map.  Still, I was beginning to comprehend that it would take months of sitting there scrolling and sifting and scrutinizing and even then, there was no guarantee that I’d find anything.  The newspapers were poorly organized with death notices randomly placed, and the ones that I was able to find were tiny, wedged in between long articles and ads which were all crammed together in a morass of newsprint.  The type was so small that it was actually painful to read for long. 

Unfortunately, my wife, Linda, and I had only a few short hours of library time blocked into our five-day trip to the Keweenaw from our home in Ann Arbor, some 550 miles to the south. We had journeyed into the Copper Country for the first time, and with so much to see and so little time, we had to spread ourselves thin. It was now or never, as who knew when we’d be able to return?

Frustrated, I returned the microfilm to the archivist and asked his advice.  He explained that doctors didn’t have to submit death certificates back then and that death notices for ordinary people were rare.  The Obituary Section, a failsafe profit center for today’s newspapers, had not yet come into existence.  

At this point, I took a different tack and asked how I might find out where Mary Ellen was buried.   

“That’s easy,” he replied.  “You could ask Peg.”

“Peg?”

“Peg Niedholdt.”  He nodded in the direction of a woman who was sitting across the room, staring intently at the screen of her laptop.  “She’s part of the Houghton-Keweenaw County Genealogical Society which is just now in the middle of cataloging the local cemeteries.  Who knows?  You might get lucky….”                                                                                                                                                                                             

                                                        *** 

Peg Niedholt is a professional genealogist who lives in nearby Laurium, where she also works as Patient Financial Services Supervisor at the local hospital. After introducing myself and Linda, I explained that we were trying to find the burial site of my great-aunt.

“What’s her name,” asked Peg.

‘Mary Ellen O’Brien.”

Peg did a sort of double-take, and then motioned for us to look at the spreadsheet she was working on.  In one of those inexplicably bizarre coincidences, she had just typed this into the database:  Mary Ellen O’Brien, Born Jan. 25, 1862, Died April 14, 1879. 

“Is this who you’re looking for?” she asked. 

“Unbelievable!” I said, taken completely aback. “It sure looks like it.”  The dates of birth and death were certainly in the ballpark, and the age at death was exactly right – 17.  “Where is she buried?”

“The Hecla Cemetery in Laurium,” replied Peg. “Though it’s not much a cemetery…the place has been going to ruin for decades.”

Seeing Mary Ellen’s name and those corresponding dates on a computer screen is one thing, but then Peg pulled out a binder and showed us the photo she'd taken of Mary Ellen’s headstone.  Flipping the page, she then pointed out the photos of the stones of the only other O'Briens she'd discovered there thus far:  William, John, and Daniel.  William’s inscription was actually on one side of Mary Ellen’s gravestone, and John and Daniel shared their own stone.

I was flabbergasted.  I had gone from utter microfilm futility to a genealogical grandslam all in a matter of a few minutes.  Or, at least I thought I had.   In the excitement of discovery, I didn’t stop to question why William and John’s graves would be in the Hecla Cemetery – they had both died in Boston.  Nor did I wonder why Daniel, who had been killed at Cliff mine, which had its own Catholic cemetery, would be buried here.  Besides this, all three – William, John, and Daniel – had passed away well before the Hecla Cemetery had opened in 1880.  And even Mary Ellen herself had died in 1879 for that matter.  And finally, while the birth and death dates seemed close to what we had for them on our family tree, I wasn’t sure if they all synched perfectly up.

No matter -- I decided right then and there that we’d worry about the logic of it all later.  The fact that the four were paired as they were put the odds that these were our O’Briens significantly in our favor.  I was confident that we had lucked into a real familial find. 

Going far beyond the call of duty and capping the night off for us, Peg then volunteered to personally take us to the cemetery in the morning and show us Mary Ellen's gravesite, which she had found just a day or two before.

Talk about timing.

* * *

True to her word, Peg took a break from her work at the hospital at 10 am and delivered us to Hecla cemetery.  It's a good thing she did, too, because if you don’t know it’s there, you could easily miss this relic of a graveyard, perhaps mistaking it instead for just another abandoned and overgrown mining site of which there are countless on this peninsula. 

In fact, Hecla cemetery is in absolute shambles with few gravestones actually standing straight up.  Derelict and untended, it is a microcosm of the Keweenaw itself with its ghost towns, collapsing buildings, and fading memories of a bygone era. 

But all of that, of course, didn’t deter Peg:  With a hand-drawn schematic for reference, she led us up this overgrown path and down that one until finally, she stopped and pointed over at a gravestone.  “That’s it,” she said. “Mary Ellen’s inscription’s on the right side, and William’s is on top.”  

Then, having so graciously gotten us here but needing to return to work, she handed us a copy of her map and indicated where we'd find the other O'Briens,  We thanked her profusely for her kindness, still quite dumbfounded by our good fortune at having been in the same place at the same time with her the evening before.  Peg’s selfless efforts to restore dignity to this forsaken and forgotten cemetery had already paid considerable dividends, and we were among the beneficiaries.

                                                                * * *

In keeping with the general state of disorder on those sorry premises, Mary Ellen’s stone lay tumbled onto its back.  Bending down for a closer look, we could see that the inscription was easily distinguishable, appearing just as we had seen it in Peg’s photo at the library:

MARY ELLEN O’BRIEN

BORN

Jan. 25, 1862

DIED

Apr. 14, 1879

Finding this gravestone was special for me because now Mary Ellen was more than simply a name typed into a genealogical chart.  Here she rested right before us – poor, unfortunate soul that she'd been – and this fact made her existence somehow more real.  She was the sister of my grandfather, left behind and destined for oblivion when the family migrated to Detroit in 1911. Now, thanks to fate or serendipity or just plain luck, she was forgotten no more.

Seeing the significant dates of a short life on a gravestone always stirs up feelings of melancholy in me, but when that person is related, it has special resonance.  Why her? I wondered.  Why so young?  Her mother lived well into her 80s.  So did most of her brothers.  Her sister, Annie, died at 78.  My own grandpa, Michael, died just five months shy of his 90^th birthday.  But Mary Ellen was just barely seventeen.  So brief a span.  A fleeting life, suddenly gone.  ‘It was God’s will,’ they would have said.  ‘She’s in a better place.’

And in the aftermath, once again, it was history repeated for a fourth time:  A father, distraught. A mother, devastated.  And a family shaken by yet more ill fortune.

In this fashion, I stood there musing and looking down at the only tangible reminder of Mary Ellen’s existence in existence – a crumbling remnant of a grave marker.  In fact, this fortuitous discovery would alone have made for a very successful trip up to the Copper Country. But we weren’t done yet.  Having contemplated her brief life, we then focused our attention William’s.  His inscription was also still easy to read:

William O’Brien

BORN

Apr. 2, 1867

DIED

Apr. 19, 1867

This surely had to be Pat and Mary’s first child – the year was a bit off, but his presence on the stone made perfect sense:  When my great-grandparents lost William, they could not afford to properly bury him; thus, the story that has been passed down that he and his brother John were both laid to rest in pauper's graves in Boston without markers.  At the time, that was the best they could do.

Now, fast forward two decades to the Keweenaw and to Mary Ellen’s 1879 death.  At long last having the resources and already paying for her stone and one engraving, Pat and Mary must have decided to pay a little extra for a second.  In doing so, they would be achieving belated recognition of the life and death of young William.  His body wasn’t here, but that didn’t matter.  Finally, they would achieve some closure for their loss.

This same explanation could also be applied to the grave of Daniel and John O’Brien. Putting the brothers together was an economical way of memorializing them both; they simply had been unable to afford to do so when each had died.  It could well be, in fact, that both gravestones, encompassing the lives of all four children, were purchased at the same time.  

That being said, it didn’t seem possible that we’d ever come across Daniel and John’s marker.  Thanks to Peg’s photo and hand-drawn map, we had a general idea of what it looked like and where it might be, but we just couldn’t locate it.  Around and around we went without success.  It was cold and grey and taxing bending over half-sunken stones attempting to discern their inscriptions, often having to scrape dirt or weeds away with a shoe. 

At one point, I thought I’d found it, but I simply could not read the lettering -- it had deteriorated so utterly that I finally gave up on it and wandered away.  Linda wasn’t having any luck either; many of the engravings were worn almost completely away as with an eraser. The decades of neglect appeared to be irreversible in several cases.  Forty minutes later, chilled and feeling hopeless, I was ready to give up and get out of there when, at Linda’s urging, I took her back to the decrepit gravestone I’d earlier thought was it but had finally walked away from in frustration.

Employing an old cemetery prowler’s trick of placing a sheet of paper over the faulty inscription and running a pencil back and forth across it, she transferred the lettering magically onto the paper.  (We later learned that Peg was able to get such clear photos of the stones by first rubbing chalk over the inscriptions, another good trick.)   Linda’s effort immediately paid off, as this is what appeared:

John O’Brien

BORN

Feb. 10, 1858

DIED

Nov. 4, 1858

_________

Daniel O’Brien

BORN

Sept. 4, 1859

DIED

May, 26, 1874

On the very edge of defeat, we had found it -- the grave marker of my great-uncles:  John, born and died in infancy in Boston; and Daniel, a boy killed trying to do a man’s job, dead before his 15^th birthday. The letters and numbers on their stone were quickly becoming obliterated by the elements and the years; our appearance at the Hecla Cemetery to find and photograph it was perfectly timed, as this grave in particular could easily have been lost forever.

                                                                    ***

And so it was that I had gone from knowing virtually nothing about the lives of my great-grandparents just a few years ago to -- through a slow unveiling of family history -- discovering the great misfortune that marked their passage through this world.  I’ve heard it said that the greatest tragedy that could befall parents is the death of one of their children.  And here, in this dilapidated, overgrown, forlorn place were the memorials to four of those heart-wrenching events, the premature deaths of their first four children.

Genealogy, more often than not, is a disappointing, futile, foolish endeavor.  Facts and figures are frequently all that your research yields, with the stories of the way things were and what actually happened having vaporized never to be retrieved.

So sometimes stark numbers and brief verbiage on a headstone are what you have to settle for.  We’ll never know anything more than what we know now about infants William and John.  Their lives were counted in days, not years.  They never had a chance. 

Daniel didn’t either.  A victim of his time and place, he was a good son, doing what he was asked to do, obedient to a fault.

And poor Mary Ellen.  She was the last of Pat and Mary’s Boston-born children to succumb.  We know not how, but we know how young.  Infinitely sad.

And now, at least, we DO know where they all rest, if not in body, certainly in spirit, and that is something because without a little good luck and good timing and the good will of Peg Niedholt, those gravesites may never have been discovered.

In genealogy, you take what you can get, however it comes your way.

 ###

SIDEBAR:  The 1880 census had to have been bittersweet one for the Patrick and Mary O’Brien family of Calumet, Houghton County, Michigan.  It was the first one taken after the deaths of 14-year-old Daniel and 17-year-old Mary Ellen, and their absence on that document had to have opened old wounds for the couple.  On the other hand, it was also the first census that included my grandfather Michael, who would turn three that year.  His siblings Annie, Patrick, Jim, and Timothy were all officially present and accounted for as well. 

As I looked over the form, I was struck by one particularly disturbing entry.  It pertained to Timothy who, with the loss of Daniel and Mary Ellen, had moved up a couple of rungs and, at 16, was now the oldest child in the family.  Despite Daniel’s fate and his own youth, Tim had also left school, and just like his late brother, had taken up the occupation of Mine Laborer for the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company. 

I was shocked by this discovery.  How could it be that Tim was following in his brother’s footsteps?   Wasn’t there anything else that he could do to help support the family?  Was it absolutely essential that the oldest O’Brien son quit school and go to work in the mine?  How could this be?  The mine was deadly -- that had already been proven in his own family and was happening regularly at mining sites all over the Keweenaw.  Did the O’Briens need his contributions so desperately that they were willing to put his life at risk?

Sadly, that appears to be the case.

Ultimately, Tim would survive his C & H mining experience, eventually getting out of the business and moving downstate to the Detroit area.  A loner who never married, he died in 1918 at age 54.

His father, my great-grandfather Patrick J. O’Brien, a long-time Calumet & Hecla employee, wasn’t so lucky.  He would live to see another census, but just barely.  Like his son Daniel, he died tragically in a mining accident, falling into the number 11 South Hecla shaft and plummeting to the bottom.  Patrick’s death came only two months after the 1890 census; he was 56 years old.