Personalizing History

If genealogy is good at one thing, it's personalizing history. It gives people today a sense of ownership of yesterday.

This morning, I was browsing TIME magazine, and (being entirely uninterested in the political races which took up most of the issue) read a short article titled "Brief History: Cholera Outbreaks." I got to the line that read "An 1866 New York City epidemic led to the creation of the city's board of health, the first in the U.S.," and my reaction was "That's our cholera epidemic! The one that killed Julia and James Thomas!"

Ownership is probably not the right word, and maybe I shouldn't be using a possessive pronoun. But I felt an immediate sense of recognition, and connection to the epidemic of 1866, as well as a very real awareness that, while an article about historic and current cholera epidemics might seem academic, we're actually talking about real diseases that killed - and continue to kill - real people. Julia was 15 and James Thomas only 2 1/2 when they died.

We interrupt this broadcast. . .

I've been concentrating on the O'Haras for a few days, because I have lots of records stored up that I haven't ever uploaded. However, I noticed today that the 1865 New York State Census was up on FamilySearch's Pilot Site. I've been traveling and moving and unpacking all day, but I've tried to page through (since the records are unindexed) in every free moment. Finally, at 9 at night, success! I've found the Toners! They're on the right-hand page of that image, the only family listed on the top part.

A few interesting things, bulleted because I'm short on time this evening:

• They live in a brick house worth $2,000. (If I knew more general history of the time, I'd perhaps be able to shed some light on what that said about their general material well-being.)
• Both Julia and Mary Ann, at ages 15 and 13, are employed, "sewing."
• Mary has given birth to 8 children. Only 7 are listed, and James Thomas is one of them. That means someone else died young, someone we haven't yet discovered.
  
• James Thomas is listed as James T., which I assume means he was actually called James Thomas. That's kind of cute.
  
• James Thomas was 1 and a half years old when the census was taken, which means he was about 2 1/2 when he died in August of 1866.
  
• Infuriatingly, this census lists an older woman, named Julia Toner, age listed as 60 (um, she was 63 five years ago!), who is listed as the mother of the head of household. I THOUGHT RICHARD'S MOTHER WAS JUDITH! Why, when Richard died, was she listed in her death notice as the mother of Richard Toner? I am increasingly convinced that, for some reason, the Toners used the names Judith and Julia interchangeably. Argh argh argh argh argh. Who was Richard's mother?
• Anyway, this Julia, supposedly Richard's mother, is listed as widowed, the mother of 4 children. So it seems possible that Richard had 3 siblings.
  
• Richard has been naturalized. Early naturalization records rarely had much information (later ones can be treasure troves), but there's another record I'd like to see one day.
  

That's what I've got. I'm excited, but quite frustrated by this constant Judith-Julia conflation.

Death Notice, Julia and Joseph T. Toner

I searched the New York Times for the Toners, and came upon this, another notice of the death of the first Julia Toner and her brother. It's a PDF, so I can't post it, but you should be able to view the original by clicking here. From August 21, 1866, in a section counting local deaths from the cholera epidemic:

The Cholera in Brooklyn
The official returns of yesterday show an apparent decrease of cholera
cases, while at the same time the proportion of deaths is greater than
heretofore. Nine cases are reported, of which seven died. The following is the
list:
. . .
Joseph T. Toner, corner of Van Brunt and Tremont streets. Died 19th.
Julia Toner, same residence. Died 20th.
. . .
The report of the Registrar shows that 27 burial certificates were granted
on Sunday as follows,
Cholera - 7
Cholera Infantum, Cholera Morbus, Dysentery, &c. - 11
Other zymotic diseases - 1
All other diseases - 8
Total - 27
Which shows a reduction of 12, as compared with the day
previous.

This doesn't shed much light on them, but it brings to the fore a lot about their lives. These two didn't just die of cholera; they died during a cholera epidemic. That's much different, and probably a much scarier situation to live in, both for them and for their family. Interestingly, Julia's brother is listed here as Joseph T. Toner. This poor boy's been called every name in the book! He's James Thomas in the Eagle, but that was mistranscribed as John Thomas in the first record I saw of it. Here, in the Times, he's Joseph T. I'm assuming that his name was actually James; the notice in the Eagle was more of an obituary than a statistic (it mentioned the funeral times, etc.), so I want to give that one more credence, as it was probably submitted directly by the family. I'd imagine that the information that went to the Times took a more circuitous route, probably going from the doctor treating them to, say, the County Health Commissioner (if he existed back then), to the Times.

Julia Toner death notice

In further searching the NY Newspaper Death Notices, I came across one from 1866 that reads:

Aug 19 John Thomas Toner and his sister Julia on 20th children of Richard of So Bklyn

Then I went to the Brooklyn Eagle itself, and searched through the paper for that date, and found this:

It reads: Toner - On the 19th of August, of cholera, James Thomas Toner, and his sister Julia, on the 20th inst. The funeral will take place from the residence of their father, Richard Toner, corner of Van Brunt and Tremont streets, South Brooklyn, this afternoon at 4 o'clock.

It appears there was a transcription error in the one I first posted, and that Julia's brother was named James, not John.

So it seems that - again, assuming that this Richard Toner family we've been tracking lately is the Richard Toner family of our Julia Toner - that the Julia in that family who was 20 years too old to be our Julia was not, actually, our Julia. It was not too uncommon to name a child after an older sibling who had died, and we can only assume that our Julia, born several years after her oldest sister died, was named after the earlier Julia. This James Thomas Toner, though, wasn't on the 1860 census. If he died in 1866, and hadn't yet been born in 1860, he had to have been 6 or younger. Julia was 9 in 1860, and so she would have died at about age 15. Imagine losing two of your children - the oldest and the youngest, it seems, a 15 year old girl and a 5 year old boy - within a day of each other.

If I could only find the Toners on the 1880 census, we could possibly confirm some of these assumptions. If the Toner family - clearly the same Toner family - were to show up on in 1880 with a daughter Julia, 8-12 years old, we'd know for sure that our Julia was named after her older sister.