More About That Lost Son of Johanna Gunn

            My last blog ended with the amazing discovery of Johanna Gunn's firstborn, living in the same townland as his mother, after many years of my believing he likely hadn't survived childhood.  Naturally, after all that searching, I wanted to know more about this man's life.

     Edward Gunn was born December first in 1867 and baptized the fourth day of December in the parish of Listowel, County Kerry.  The church register of baptisms shows the parish priest wrote, mother Johanna Gunn of Ballygologue, godparents George and Mary Gunn.  No father's name was recorded there or on the registration of his birth as seen above.  And there it ended, Edward Gunn couldn't be found in the 1901 or 1911 censuses, nor did he appear in any other civil registrations after his birth.  I had nearly given him up, but while researching that blog about his mother Johanna, it suddenly became clear he had simply changed his surname to that of his father, Edward Burke Sr., and had never left Ballygologue.  Like his half brothers William and John Connor, Edward was a shoemaker; in 1898 he married Mary Denihan, setting up housekeeping in Ballygologue.  Their daughter Ellie was born there in 1899, followed by Daniel Joseph Burke in1902, then four more sons, and daughter Mary Ellen in 1910.

Edward, Mary and Ellie Burke 1901 with Mary's father, all spoke English and Irish

     In studying my Kerry ancestors, I was struck by how bleak and precarious their lives seemed.  Johanna's mother, Margaret Browne Gunn, gave birth to seven children with only three surviving her, Johanna and two others who immigrated.  Johanna had seven children but again, only three survived her, two of them in the states.  Edward Gunn Burke was also father to seven children, three of whom survived him, two in Ireland and one in the states.  Do you see a pattern here?  I know it was not unusual to lose a child, but my ancestors from southeast Ireland seemed to have much better luck with children.  The losses in this family seem staggering by today's standards.  I'm convinced the social and economic conditions in Kerry, one of the poorest counties in Ireland at the time, were a big factor in the death rates and why so many of my realtives left.  In the period after the famine, County Kerry had the highest immigration rate, followed by counties Cork and Clare.

    The only child of Edward's to try his luck in America was his oldest son Daniel.  While putting the pieces of Edward's life together I found an obituary for a Daniel Burke of Palmyra, New York, fifteen minutes from my current home.  That could have been any old Daniel Burke, it's hardly an uncommon name, and yet, this one was from Ireland, was of the right age, and had two brothers with the correct names still living there.  And he was in Palmyra.  Looking at the 1930 census of Palmyra, I found a Dannie Burke from Ireland living with Mary Mahoney from Ireland, (maiden name O'Connor I knew from previous research), and her husband. That had to be him! 

     The census had an immigration date which led me to the passenger list of Daniel's ship arriving 22 September1924 in New York.  Passenger lists from that time period contain a trove of information.  From that single document I learned Daniel was an agricultural laborer, stood 5 feet 3 inches tall, had black hair and gray eyes, and $30 in his pocket.  It showed his father's half-brother William O'Connor, already in America, had put up the money for his nephew's passage.  It further showed Daniel was on his way to the home of his great-aunt, Mary Gunn Power, my great-great-grandmother, in upstate New York, and he had left a father, Mr. Ned Burke, in Ballygologue.  

     It gives me such a rush to make the connection between Ireland and the place where I still live.  A feeling of closeness.  Daniel's destination, the Power home, was a mile from where I would grow up decades later, Palmyra was the next village over.  Daniel eventually landed a good job, married in 1935, and raised two children, Daniel Jr. and Rosemary.  He passed away in Rochester, New York in 1971.  

     Back in Ireland, Edward Gunn Burke lived out his days in Ballygologue, his wife passing in 1928, his mother Johanna in 1930, and himself in 1939 at age 71.  His death registration says he died from toxemia of burns in Listowel Hospital, but even after extensive newspaper searches, the scant information in the registration was all I could find.  By then he had lost his firstborn daughter Ellie to bronchitis in 1902 at the age of two, two young sons to whooping cough at ages two and four in 1907, his only remaining daughter, Mary Ellen at 18 from typhoid fever, along with his wife. His oldest son Daniel was far away, but Edward at least had his sons Mike and Edward Jr. with him until the end.