The O’Donnells, Generation 1: Bridget Clifford O’Donnell (C. 1824-1904)

Introduction

Bridget Neavin Clifford O’Donnell may be the most elusive person in the archive. 

Bridget’s Life With Some Certainty

Here’s what we know about her with reasonable certainty:

• according to her death record, she was born into the Neavin family, her father’s name given there as Dennis “Nevin” and her mother Mary Whalen;
• she first married a Mr. Clifford, then married William O’Donnell in 1851 following the deaths of their first spouses;
• and she became the mother of four daughters with William.

Bridget’s Life With Less Certainty

Less certain are her emigration in 1845 and when she was born, two sizable obstacles to tracking her through the historical record.

Bridget was another one of our ancestors with the exasperating habit of giving inconsistent answers to government officials about her age, sowing confusion about her life story for her descendants.

According to the records, she was born in Galway in:

• 1832 (1860 census)
• 1825 (1870 census)
• 1815 (1880)
• 1824 (1900. Here she gives 1845 as the year she arrived)
• 1822 (Wisconsin, Death Records Index).

The uncertainties created when an individual makes deliberate misrepresentations are difficult enough to untangle. They turn Gordian when they’re compounded by errors entered into the historical record by government officials. Bridget’s death registration (below) offers a tidy demonstration of the problem.

According to the official record (below), Bridget died of pneumonia when she was 82 years, 0 months, and seven days old, or born in 1822 (line 7). Yet just nine lines further down, the same city clerk has her birth year as 1814, or reaching the fullness of 90 years before her death. The clerk’s hand is firm and steady. There isn’t a trace of doubt in his mind that he was right. Yet he managed to nonchalantly make a not-insignificant mistake in what must have been less than a minute of question and answer.

Unfortunately, no other documents have surfaced to pin down the right date, and Bridget herself didn’t help matters with her creative use of birth years.

Bridget’s Life,  Some Estimates

However, we we can make informed estimates of both her birth and arrival dates.

The 1814 birth date doesn’t seem likely. It would make Bridget eight years older than her husband, William. Possible, but it seems long odds. And no document has come to light that would confirm when she arrived. Just the opposite. An astonishing number of Bridget Neavins (variant spellings included) left Ireland for America in the 1840s.

We are left with what Bridget herself tells us. In the 1900 census she says  she was born in 1824 and arrived in 1845. It seems sensible to accept these dates provisionally. We’ll use the 1824 date as the most likely and add a ‘circa’ to remind ourselves of its tentativeness. And we can accept the 1845 arrival date, too, also as a reasonable conjecture.

A third mystery is when Bridget Neavin married Mr. Clifford. There’s no doubt she did marry him. In later documents like the birth certificates of her children or their marriage records, she uses ‘Neavin’ and ‘Clifford’ almost interchangeably when asked about her previous name. Mr. Clifford couldn’t be traced, and no marriage record  was found. All we can do is assume Bridget married Mr. Clifford sometime between 1845 and 1850, that is, before his death and her subsequent marriage to William O’Donnell in 1851.

Bridget’s Life As An O’Donnell

Bridget and William O’Donnell had four daughters together, besides William’s son, James:

• James, b. 1844. Son of William and his first wife, “Mrs. O’Donnell,” born in Ireland
• Mary, b. 1853
• Margaret, b. 1854
• Josephine, b. 1856 (she preferred ‘Johanna’)
• Catherine, 1858-1925.

The 1900 census lists her as having had seven children, four of them living in that year (above). The other three children’s names couldn’t be found, which could mean they were all born in the 1860s and all died before the 1870 census, where they are not mentioned, nor are they in 1880. Bridget could have lost three children in utero, by stillbirth, or childbed fever. All three miseries were more common before modern antibiotics and life-saving obstetric technologies. It does seem open to question that Bridget would lose three children in succession after four successful, successive child births, . The answer the evidence suggests is the census taker in 1900 made a mistake. 

In 1880 “Catherine O’Donnell,” age around 22, was living with her parents and her daughter Mary, age five. 

Bridget’s Old Age

In 1900 Bridget was a 76 year old recent widow living with the same daughter, now Catherine O’Donnell May, and Delbert H. May. Of Mr. May little has come down to us. We do know that in 1890 the Fox and May plumbing business was operating at 430 Grand Avenue. The close-knit Irish community of the Fourth Ward could easily have brought together a plumber and a member of the O’Donnell family of plumbing contractors.

Fox and May is where Dad’s father apprenticed between 1891 and 1896.  

Also in the 1900 household was “Gennie Flanagan,” age 22, who is described as the daughter of Catherine and Delbert. More accurately, Gennie was Catherine’s niece, daughter of Johanna O’Donnell Flannigan (this is the correct spelling). If she were named after her mother, ‘Gennie’ (or ‘Jennie’) is an easily imagined nickname for ‘Johanna’.

Why Gennie was living with her aunt and uncle isn’t known, but there’s a clue elsewhere in the 1900 census. A “Johana Flannagan” is listed as residing at 185 Jefferson St. She’s a widow, with six children living in her household out of ten born to her. She forgot to mention a seventh, a daughter living elsewhere.  

An unemployed widow with seven children who had to rely on the earnings of the four oldest may have found it helpful to send an older child to live with her sister and husband whose own daughter had left the household by then.

All seven children of Johanna Flannigan:

Nothing could be found discovered about Mr. Flannigan other than his having been born in Ireland.

Bridget Neavin Clifford O’Donnell died on June 1, 1904 and is buried next to William in Calvary Cemetery.