Ellen Powers

While visiting St. Pius cemetery in Mt. Pleasant I had always heard of Ellen, one of my great-great-grandmothers. Ellen's daughter was Annie, my great-grandmother. In the spring of 1903, Annie lost her first husband after an accident in the coal mine. Thomas Meagher was buried at the head of town (the city cemetery), with the specific location now forgotten. The Irish have a way of avoiding tragic memories. Two years after losing Thomas, the widow Annie Meagher lost her mother. By then (1905) a new Catholic cemetery had been established in Mt. Pleasant. Ellen was an early arrival at the new cemetery, the first to be buried in a block of eight gravesites. Annie, on the other hand, was later buried with her second husband in an opposite corner of the cemetery. As a result, the eight gravesites purchased by the widow Meagher are all now devoted to surnames other than Meagher. The eight gravesites skip Annie's generation; they represent the generation before and the three generations after.

Just beyond the entrance to St. Pius cemetery, the drive splits into a one-way loop. Ellen's gravesite is close to a curve in the driveway. Visitors often found her site a convenient spot to pull completely off the road, allowing other cars to pass effortlessly. Over the years my Dad concocted a variety of flags to draw attention to the corner of Ellen's gravesite, all of which proved no match for a metal bumper. We concluded that he would not rest in peace until Ellen had her own stone marker. That meant finding out more about Ellen.

A little research quickly revealed that Ellen's maiden name was Powers, that she belonged to a large family that had moved from New York to Frostburg MD in the 1850's, and that she and her entire family were Famine Immigrants, arriving in New York on 13 Sep 1847 aboard the Issac-Walton. By chance, a death record in Frostburg indicated that one of Ellen's brothers was a native of Kings County. That led to a request for information from Irish Midlands Ancestry. (The current, presumably much faster way to do this starts with an online search at the Irish Family History Foundation.) The report from Irish Midlands Ancestry revealed that Ellen and all of her siblings were baptized in the parish of Kilcormac, in the western part of County Offaly (formerly Kings County). Ellen was only 5 years old when her family left Ireland. Her oldest sister, Catherine, was 16 and her youngest sister, Anne, was only 1 year old. So, thanks to the baptismal records, we know that the Powers family was in or around Kilcormac from 1831 into 1846. Then we have the ship manifest placing them in New York in 1847. That leaves only a little over one year of uncertainty, extending from July 1846 (when Anne was baptized) to September 1847. It would have been a hectic and difficult year. The family would have made the decision to leave Ireland (or else have had it made for them by their landlord or some agency). They would have needed to gather the resources to pay for their trip (or the landlord or some other agency did that for them). They would have had to make their way over land to a port city (probably Cork). Records for the Famine years, even when they have managed to survive, can be especially cryptic. So we may never know the details of Ellen's last year in Ireland. But for one possible scenario, see the next post in this blog.