Sixty-six year old Patrick McCabe awoke on the first morning of 1887 in what would be his home for the next four years, the Cayuga County Almshouse in Sennett, New York where he had been admitted the day before. The admissions form gave the reason for his dependence as old age, his habits as, "intemperate". It further stated Patrick, a married man, was born in Ireland and had entered the United States thirty-four years earlier. Though the form asked additional questions about Patrick's parents and grandparents, the word "unknown" was written across those spaces. The final question on the form was, "What is the probable destiny of the Person as respects recovery from the cause of Dependence?" The terse response was, "Future doubtful". Indeed, New York State records show Patrick died on 20 October 1891 there at Sennett, though whoever wrote his obituary gave the place of death as his home in Auburn, New York. Probably to avoid embarrassment to the family.
Patrick arrived in America about 1851. He was married to my third-great-aunt, Mary O'Hora, the sister of my great-great-grandfather, James O'Hora, in 1853 at Auburn. Like her husband, Mary was born in Ireland and baptized in 1831 at Rathvilly in County Carlow, making her quite a bit younger than Patrick. Mary was expecting their first child, Michael, at the time of her marriage and over the next twenty-five years she would give birth to fourteen more. At least four of her children died during childhood and several more passed in their teens and early twenties. When Mary O'Hora McCabe passed away, she had outlived eight of her children.
Patrick was a laborer and the family struggled financially which may explain the two youngest daughter's light fingered tendencies. Agnes, born in 1874 was jailed for stealing a pair of shoes while her sister Louise born in 1877, the youngest of the McCabe children, was arrested for grand larceny in 1891, at age fourteen. The victim of her crime was my great-grandfather Edward O'Hora, the son of her mother's brother James. While visiting her O'Hora relatives in Littleville, New York, Louise stole a large sum of money from the bedroom of her cousin and headed back to Auburn where she was apprehended. Newspaper articles of the time noted her tender age along with the remarkable fact this was not her first offence. Louise was sentenced to two years in Auburn prison whose records describe her as tall, slender, and illiterate. Her older brother Edward also had a checkered past. Edward McCabe was the victim of a vicious murder in 1914, you can read the lurid details here.
It occurs to me, poverty, frequent loss of siblings, coupled with the lack of an education and father figure could well have influenced the behavior of Agnes and Louise. Patrick was absent from their lives beginning in 1887 and his designation as intemperate may have suggested a problem with the drink.
Quite a few years have passed since I found Louise's story and I hadn't thought of her for awhile when I noticed a new database at Ancestry called, "New York Discharges of Convicts". Louise had been sentenced in Ontario County where her crime occurred, a small place, so I wasn't expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised to find her there. Turns out she had four months shaved off her sentence.
Not all the McCabe offspring had questionable pasts. James, the fourth child, went on to become a member of the Auburn Board of Supervisors, Sarah Jane, the eighth child, was a weaver at one of the Auburn mills at the time of her death at twenty-three from typhoid fever. Lydia, the tenth child, appears to have been a respectable married lady who suffered the loss of her husband at a young age, and three years later the loss of the daughter with whom she had been pregnant at her husband's demise.
Patrick's widow, Mary, died in Auburn on 20 October 1897 at the home formerly shared by her late daughter Mary Ann and Mary Ann's husband James Burke. Mary Ann had passed away in August of 1896 after the death of her four year old son Joseph that April and the birth in June of her daughter Clara. The infant passed away a week after her mother from cholera infantum, undoubtedly caused by improper feeding of the eight week old child. With three deaths in a matter of months, this family had more than it's share of tragedy, made all the sadder by the fact that had a simple antibiotic been available they probably could have been saved.
Now, as we wait for our magic bullet to stop this new virus on our doorsteps, it brings home in a real way the dread our ancestors felt when their children fell ill. And there were so many illnesses to fear. Tuberculosis, scarlet, typhoid and yellow fevers, pneumonia, meningitis; even measles and childhood diarrhea could prove fatal in that era. They would have understood our current fears only too well.
