Of Immigrant Ships and Shell Games

 

The Barque Star Queen

      Looking around the net today I stumbled across an article titled, "How To Find Your Australian Ancestors". It wasn’t particularly helpful and linked to mostly pay sites, but it got me thinking about my cousin Alice Dwyer/O’Dwyer who left Tipperary in the spring of 1875 to begin a new life in Queensland. I wrote about Alice earlier, and reading through that blog I remembered I still hadn’t figured out who in Australia had paid her fare. I didn’t figure that out today either, but I did find the incredible details of her journey.

     One free site I found useful was that of the State Library of Queensland, where I ran a search for Alice’s ship, Star Queen. Among the first hits was this manuscript-- "Isaiah de Zouche Diary, 1875". Hoping it was digitized, I opened the description to find that this man was the ship’s surgeon in 1875! While not digitized, it apparently could be borrowed. The cost for an international interlibrary loan was $45, not bad but I had my doubts the library in Australia would just ship an almost 150-year-old manuscript to New York. Maybe there were excerpts online? I tried a google search which didn’t produce the diary, but something almost as good did come up. That something was the website, Trove, a free Australian newspaper site that is very easy to search. I typed in, Isaiah de Zouche 1875, and flung open the door of the rabbit hole.

     One of the first hits began with news that on September 14th officials had signaled the Star Queen to stop at Cape Moreton, Australia, short of its destination of Maryborough, but its Captain Downing had refused to comply!  It went on to say the Colonial Secretary’s Department in Australia had received a telegram from Dr. de Zouche and as a result of its contents had ordered the ship brought to Moreton Bay.  Part of what Dr. de Zouche had written:

There should have been provisions on board for 140 days. Our biscuits were exhausted on the eighty-ninth day, when in longitude 65 E., with the exception of three and a half bags reserved for the crew. On the 31st, of August the date of our arrival, [at Melbourne] having been out 110 days from Gravesend, we had no biscuits, no preserved fresh meat, no potatoes, no molasses, and only six day's supply of salt meat and eight day's flour for passengers and crew. The passengers have conducted themselves throughout the voyage in the most exemplary manner.

     No wonder Captain Downing didn't want to stop in Moreton.  At the time Alice left Tipperary a program was in place to aid emigrants relocating to Australia, with the Colonial Office there and its counterpart in England sharing the cost. A look at the passenger manifest of the Star Queen shows that only twenty-six of its 322 passengers paid their own way, the rest were assisted or free. The Star Queen had left England on May 13th, supposedly stocked as required for 140 days at sea. That is where the trouble began. A fraud was hatched between the ship’s captain, the purser and the third mate to line their pockets using supplies intended for their passengers. 

     Conditions became so bad that on August 31st the Star Queen was forced to put in at Hobson’s Bay in Melbourne to take on provisions, this must have been when Dr. Z was able to send his incriminating telegram to officials.  In his testimony at the later enquiry, Dr. Z added that the captain was intemperate and had used threatening language in addressing him. The press had a field day with the story, Trove found far too many articles to read them all, but a common theme came through. Only a single newspaper, The Age, attempted to downplay the incident asserting the ship had, “merely put in to replenish supplies then continued on its way”, but that was early on before all the facts had come to light.

     Further testified to at the enquiry, and indeed verified by Australian officials, was the existence of barrels marked bread on one side and split peas on the other in order to deceive inspectors in England into believing the proper number of stores were onboard. Mr. Bellamy, the third mate, testified that before sailing, biscuits that had been counted and stowed were surreptitiously brought back on deck by him to be counted a second time. It was further found that Mr. Wright, the purser, had weighted the scales on the ship, the buckets supposedly holding 30 pints of water in fact held only 20, the ship was “disgustingly dirty”, there was insufficient deck space for the number of passengers, and incredibly, nineteen men from Wales and County Clare had emigrated under assumed names provided to them by crew members. The skullduggery didn’t end there, as supplies dwindled the captain ordered provisions intended for the assisted passengers be diverted to cabin passengers.

     Nor did Mrs. Currie, the ship's matron, have anything good to say for the Captain, accusing him of not supporting her in the performance of her duties and complaining of the short rations that left all the "girls" hungry, as well as the lack of water for them.

     Captain Downing was found culpable and given the choice of paying a fine of 211 pounds or spending three months in prison for breaches of the Passenger’s Act. He chose the fine. Oddly, no mention was made in the newspapers of any charges against the purser or third mate being pursued. After slogging through more articles, it came to light Dr. Z had promised to request immunity for the pair if they revealed to him all they knew of the scheme, which the Colonial Secretary agreed to.  As a result, they were never charged. It’s well known that this sort of embezzlement went on during the years of famine immigration, but with the passage of various passenger acts such flagrant violations became thankfully, not as common. The outrage over the events on the Star Queen was universal, inspiring the song below within months:

     The writer of this amusing ditty, cursing the Star Queen’s beams, would get his wish a few years later when at the end of July in 1878, the ship ran aground on the treacherous Murray Reefs located off the coast of southwestern Australia and was wrecked, fortunately with no loss of life.  I would imagine Alice and her fellow immigrants, who were unfortunate enough to have been passengers on the horrendous voyage of 1875 aboard the Star Queen, shed  few tears.  As for Captain Downs, his name appeared on the passenger list of the ship Ramsey, bound for London on the 12th of November in 1875.  A few names away from his in second cabin was that of Mrs. Currie. That must have been an interesting trip.

End of the Line Part Deux, in Which Facts Are Twisted and a Scandal Comes to Light

 

     As we saw yesterday, Edward S. Wheat Jr. was the last surviving child of Emma Spence Wheat.  Edward's grandfather had brutally murdered his father, shooting him in the back on a Nashville street, and his two brothers were deceased.  The last days of Edward Jr.’s life have been reconstructed here using mainly contemporary newspaper articles -- not an ideal source, but other than dry vital records, are all that’s available.  

     It should be kept in mind that journalistic standards in the 19^th century were basically nonexistent. The primary goal of papers then was not to impart the facts, but to titillate readers and make money. If that could be achieved by altering a story, reporters had no qualms about doing so.  As an example, another of my ancestors who died during this era was linked, in a fanciful newspaper account, to a US senator of the same name when in fact no such connection existed. The articles in Edward Jr.’s case  are full of false assertions, some possibilities and, I assume, a few facts.  Bearing that in mind, this is the story of Edward’s demise.

     The first I learned of Edward’s death came in the form of a short notice in a Nashville newspaper informing its readers Edward had died the previous day in St. Louis and his remains were expected in Nashville for burial.  Missouri death records and a burial permit added the bare-boned facts such as his place of death, 814 South Fourteenth Street in St. Louis, the date, 14 June 1892, and the cause, gastroenteritis accompanied by heart failure.  That scant information left the St. Louis newspapers to reveal the sordid story behind those facts which they were happy to do:

    

     There are some obviously false claims in the above story.  For one, it alleges Edward’s father was killed “about a year ago in a fight", when in fact he had died eight years earlier and certainly not in a fight.  It also states that Edward Jr. was living in St. Louis for the two years before his death but no trace of him is found in city directories and the line on his burial permit for length of residence in St. Louis was left blank. Further, he was arrested in Nashville the month before his death after a fist fight with another young man, and an obituary in a Nashville paper noted he was visiting St. Louis at the time of his death. The part about Sallie Chamberlain knowing him in Nashville is also false. With a bit of sleuthing I found "Sallie" was in fact Clara Mayer, the daughter of immigrants, who was born about 1870 right there in St. Louis.  In the year 1887 Clara married a man named Charles Allen from whom she separated three months later and afterwards divorced.

     The wording of the article is also curious in that it does not say Edward Jr. died at the residence of Sallie Chamberlain, but that he passed at, “a house kept by Mme. Sallie Chamberlain”.  That and her alias immediately aroused my suspicions.  Also, how strange is it that the doctor who attended Edward refused to certify his death but shortly after relented and did so?  Were I a cynical woman, I might suppose some form of persuasion may have been deployed.

     My doubts about Sallie, aka Clara, were confirmed by another death notice published in a rival newspaper that read, “Edward S. Wheat, a wealthy and well-connected young Tennessean, died yesterday morning in a disreputable house, No. 814 South Fourteenth Street…”.  It went on to invent his last words as, “Allie, the disgrace is all over”.  The part about Edward being an alumnus of the Keeley Institute, an early center for the treatment of alcoholism, may be true though I've found nothing more to support that and no further articles about Edward's time in the city. 

     The St. Louis newspapers are however, filled with stories about Clara Allen.  They mention her handsomely furnished parlors there at number 814, the elaborate funeral she provided for Darling, her beloved Scottish Terrier whom she had buried in Pickett's Cemetery in a custom made white coffin, along with accounts of dances and robberies that took place at her home over the years.  Clara Allen was only about aged thirty when she died in 1899, leaving a sizeable estate to her sister’s family.  Interestingly, that sister, Emma Mayer Fairham, lived for a time on Chamberlain Street in St. Louis, quite possibly the inspiration for Clara's nom de guerre.  When Clara’s home was listed for rent after her death, it was not only identified by its address, as were other listings in the real estate section, but also as, “the former home of Clara Allen”.  The inventory of her estate makes fascinating reading, a music box worth over $700 in today's money, a piano valued at over $1,600 today, and an expensive gold bracelet, along with five beds, (one brass), assorted rugs, draperies, and decorative objects.

     The heartbreaking truth seems to be that Edward S. Wheat Jr. developed a fondness for alcohol and died in a St. Louis bordello. It's unclear how much his mother knew of the details surrounding her son's death, but scandal spreads quickly and only 300 miles lie between Nashville and St. Louis.  Emma, her family now gone, must have at least had an inkling of the circumstances.  According to her obituary, she died at her home in Pensacola, Florida in 1920 and was taken to Nashville for burial.  Thus ends the story of this once promising family.

The End of Edward S. Wheat's Line

     

     Moses Wheat of England was among the first settlers of Concord, Massachusetts, arriving there in about 1695.  Moses along with his wife Tamzen Brooks, was the founder of the American branch of the family and they were fruitful, multiplied, and scattered far and wide.  In the summer of 1795, my line left Massachusetts and relocated to the Town of Phelps, New York where they began the back breaking work of clearing a homestead from the dense forest and undergrowth.  A grandson of those original Phelps pioneers, Benjamin F. Wheat, left New York in 1896 for Michigan.  It was there he met and married Mary Hermance, beginning a family of his own in Branch County.  Their daughter Luany was born there in 1840, followed in 1841 by a son, Edward S. Wheat.

   When the American Civil War erupted in 1861, Edward Wheat enlisted in the Union Army as a sergeant in the 1st Michigan Light Artillery, rapidly advancing through the ranks.  While stationed in Murfreesboro, Tennessee near war's end he met a local girl named Emma Spence.  Her father William Spence had been a resident of Murfreesboro for many years, but was born in Ireland, in the north I strongly suspect.  A few months after hostilities ended, Edward and Emma were married, beginning their new life there in Murfreesboro near her parents.  Had Emma possessed a crystal ball and caught a glimpse of the tragedies that lay in store, she likely would have declined Edward's proposal.

      I found at Google Books, a biographical album of the sort so popular in the late 19th century.  It contained a short biography about Edward and another about his father Benjamin and his early life in New York State, but what really caught my eye was the next to last sentence, "Edward S. Wheat came to his death by violence in the streets of Nashville, Tennessee, being shot on March 11, 1884."

     My mind raced with questions; who would have killed Edward and for what reason?  Foremost in my thoughts was the animosity that existed in the south towards the north after the war.  The book mentioned that after leaving the military Edward had been appointed Revenue Assessor and later, US Marshall for the Middle District of Tennessee.  None of those jobs would have endeared him to the locals.  The possibility that Edward was murdered by one of them seemed reinforced by the Freedman's Bureau records at Ancestry.  Among their papers was a report mentioning Edward once being threatened by an angry rebel with a loaded, cocked, pistol, "pointed in his face".  A newspaper at the Library of Congress site told a much different story however:

     Col. Edward S. Wheat was murdered by his father-in-law Col. William Spence in Nashville Tuesday morning at the corner of Church and College streets.  Spence was crossing the street behind Wheat and shot him in the back, the ball passing through the heart.  He then ran up to his victim placed the pistol at his side, and fired the second shot.  Wheat was about 43 years old and Spence 65.  The difficulty grew out of a disagreement about business transactions and had been of long standing.

     After picking my jaw up off the floor I began looking into this shocking crime.  I found Edward and his young family, along with his in-laws, had moved to Nashville after Edward was appointed US Marshal.  He and Emma were the parents of three boys, William F. born in 1868 died of typhoid fever in 1884, nine months after his father's murder; Edward S. Jr. was born in 1870 and passed away in 1892.  The youngest was Harry Elliott, born in 1873 who died in 1875 at age two from tuberculosis of the abdominal lymph glands contracted by drinking milk from an infected cow, not uncommon in those days before pasteurization.

     And what of William Spence?  He mounted an insanity defense but was found guilty of murder at his trial and sentenced, "to be hanged in the jail yard on the 18th of July".  His family sprang into action, petitioning Tennessee Governor Bate for leniency.  Bate reduced William's sentence to a life term, but the family filed another petition with the new governor of the state, the first signature on that document was that of Edward's widow Emma!  The second was his son Edward Jr.  Their petition was warmly received and on February 5, 1887 Governor Robert Taylor granted William a full pardon. Soon afterwards, William, his wife Matilda, and their daughter Emma Wheat along with her one surviving son, Edward Jr., all moved to Pensacola Florida.  William died there in November of 1892, followed by Matilda in 1894.

     As a young man, Edward Jr. became involved in the grain business, a fitting occupation for one bearing the Wheat surname.  He passed away in St. Louis at the age of 22, from gastroenteritis and heart failure, on the 14th of June in 1892.  His death came five months prior to that of his grandfather William's.  Edward's burial permit, issued in St. Louis, noted that his remains were transported to Nashville for interment in the family plot at Mount Olivet Cemetery in that city.  It should be noted, the dates for Harry Elliott Wheat are incorrect at Find A Grave as well as on his marker.  State death records have the right dates, and interment records of Mount Olivet show that Harry was buried there in October of 1875, then reinterred with his father when he was killed in 1884.  That may be the year the monument was erected and Harry's dates were not remembered correctly.

     I was about to post this blog when I decided to do one more newspaper search for Edward Jr.'s obituary in the St. Louis papers and was I in for a surprise!  The circumstances surrounding the death of the young grain merchant from a good family were not at all what I had believed them to be!

More tomorrow...

     

     

      

New Ancestry Database in Time for the Day of the Dead

Hospital Ship Daniel Webster

     Ancestry has a new database that may hold some clues for those researching Irish ancestors.  Called, "New York, New York, U.S., Bodies in Transit, 1859-1894", this is a database of bodies transported into, out of, and through Manhattan during those thirty-five years.  There are a significant number of Irish names included, and the available years cover the civil war period, potentially making it even more useful to family historians.

     I tried a few searches and in a matter of minutes had found two members of my family.  Cousins, both named Daniel McGarr, who were Union soldiers born at Cayuga County, New York to Irish immigrants.* The transcription of the transit record that came up on Ancestry looked like this, there are no images of the records there:

     

     This Daniel McGarr was the son of John McGarr, who I believe was the brother of my 3rd-great-grandfather Daniel McGarr of Ballyraggan, County Kildare.  The lack of an image was annoying however, after a little poking around on the net, I found the books have been digitized, and can be viewed here. It seems the easiest way to find your ancestor would be to do a search at Ancestry, find the record and date, then go to the book and use its index. The index is arranged by the first letter of the last name, then chronologically so having the date is very useful. That's how I found Daniel, whose entry differs markedly from the transcription at Ancestry:

     The transcription is not well done, the record clearly says Mc Garr with an abbreviation for Daniel-- Dan'l, there is no "Dane".  Makes me wonder who does these?  I knew from my research over the years that Daniel did in fact die at sea as noted in both the book and the transcription; on a hospital ship carrying him homeward:

Auburn Daily Bulletin May 19 1862-- Daniel McGarr, son of John McGarr, a member of Kennedy's Battery, died on the way from Williamsburg on board the hospital ship Daniel Webster the 12th inst. age 18 years. The remains were interred at Long Island but removed by friends who went to NYC for that purpose. The remains arrived at Auburn Sunday morning and were interred at the State Street Catholic burying ground.

     The register gives Daniel's cause of death as wounds and Cypress Hills Cemetery as the place of his initial interment.  It was an existing cemetery, located in Brooklyn, at that time part of Long Island. During the Civil War burial space was needed for the numerous soldiers dying in the military hospitals around New York City.  To meet the need, the federal government established a soldier's lot at Cypress Hills in April of 1862.  In 1884 the government purchased a large tract of land in the cemetery to create Cypress Hills National Cemetery, the only National Cemetery in New York City.

     The bottom entry above is Daniel's.  I'm not sure how to interpret all of it.  It looks like it could be the name of an official, JM Ars? then probably an abbreviation for, "Sanitary Commission Ship Daniel Webster".  The other soldier's entries above Daniel's end with MD and Surgeon, but of course poor Daniel had no use for either. The ship's name is a small detail, but one that would be of interest to a genealogist.  I did have that information from Daniel's obituary but if he hadn't had one, I would have missed learning about the ship if not for the register.  

     I also would have missed the eyewitness account of a nurse, found at Google Books, describing how on May 11th patients were taken onboard the Daniel Webster which sailed for New York early on the morning of the 12th; the day Daniel died on the ship.  Arrival was expected in New York the night of the13th.  The transit permit issued the 14th suggests Daniel was buried that day, four days later he was reburied in Auburn.  Proving once again that it's worth taking the time to check the original record when possible.

* A third cousin, Michael McGarr, who was born in County Wicklow, the son of William McGarr, also perished in the war.  He was buried in North Carolina where he died so doesn't appear in the database.