By Their Church, Ye Shall Know Them

“By their affiliations, you shall know them” to restate a familiar biblical quote. Many genealogical experts urge us to look at the groups our ancestors joined to learn more about them. One of the potentially richest sources of information for genealogists is the church where our ancestor worshipped. The records created by churches sometimes include, and may go beyond, the sacramental records of baptism, communion, confirmation and marriage.

As I have mentioned before in this blog, serendipity along with the steady mining of information from a variety of sources can sometimes result in unexpected and amazing finds. Last year I became aware of the Chicago Genealogical Society On the CGS website, I clicked the publications tab and found the listing of the contents of copies of the quarterly journal of the Society, The Chicago Genealogist, going all the way back to 1969. But the best news of all is that the Newberry Library in Chicago has digitized all the copies of this journal.

It is a two-step process to find articles of interest in The Chicago Genealogist. First, you look at the list of articles on the CGS website. When you find an article of interest (be sure to note the date, volume, number), you search for it on the Newberry’s digitized collection.  From this page, you can click on “Advanced Search” at the top and search for the exact volume.

I made a list of several articles I wanted to read, including “Some Early Irish Residents of Chicago’s West Side” in vol. XI #3 Spring 1979. When I located the article in the Newberry Library's collection, I was astonished to see what it actually was: “A list of contributors to the building of the main altar at Holy Family Catholic Church during the years 1863-65.”

As I looked down the list of names of parishioners, I saw some of my target surnames (J. Carney, Patrick Kearney, J. Duffy), as well as names from their collateral families (Anthony Dinan, Bernard Cosgrove, John Cosgrove, T. Cosgrove).

This find was exciting because I had been stuck in my Irish paternal great great grandparents’generation: my great great grandfather John Carney/Kearney and my great great grandmother Mary Duffy. I had found little information about them. They are identified as my great grandmother’s (Mary Carney/Kearney Kries Lauer) parents only on her second marriage application.

I have found mention of people in John’s and Mary’s  close social circle (collateral families) on baptism records. Julia Mercer Cosgrove is listed as a baptismal sponsor for Patrick William Kearney, the son of John Kearney and Mary Duffy. In the next generation, Catherine Sweeney Brookins Dinan and her son, Charles Dinan, were baptismal sponsors for Henrietta Kries, the daughter of Mary Carney/Kearney Kries and Henry Kries.

With this list of altar contributors, I had moved back a generation. But there was more to be found in this journal article. At the very top of the first page, the transcriber, Thomas M. Cook, gave the source of this list: “…originally published in Holy Family Parish, by Bro. Thomas Mulkerins S.J., Universal Press, Chicago, 1923.” And Cook even tells his reader where to find the book: “A copy of this book can be found in the collection of the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Library.”

Another caveat to researchers that genealogy experts put forward is that if at all possible, a researcher should always go back to the original source. You never know if mistakes were made by an indexer or transcriber or if information was left out. So I needed to consult Brother Mulkerins’ book on the first parish of my Chicago ancestors.

I went to the University of Illinois Chicago Campus and searched for the book on the UIC library page. I found that there were two copies, one in Special Collections which was non-circulating and one in the stacks. I telephoned the library just to be sure the latter could be requested through Interlibrary Loan (ILL). Fortunately, I was able to obtain this treasure through my local library’s ILL program.You can also read Holy Family Parish online at archive.org. 

One of the key elements of the book is the parish map that is included. I was actually able to locate the area where my great great grandparents lived (Halsted and Maxwell/Hastings) on this map.

 As I looked through the history of Holy Family Parish, I found several items of great interest to me that did not appear in the altar contributors’ list; in fact, although that list was crucial for me to identify ancestral surnames and to tie them to later generations, there was so much more to learn about the church and the community it served:

1. What the land around Holy Family Parish looked like when the     church was built in 1857.
2. Why so many parishioners were included as contributors to the altar society drive.
3. What the neighborhood was like – what kinds of commercial establishments lined the streets.

When Father Arnold Damen began work on building Holy Family Church in 1857, this is what the area looked like, according to Father Mulkerins:

“…the territory allotted to the parish was a prairie during part of the year and a swamp during another with scarcely a structure worthy of the name of house in the entire parish, and only a few scattered cabins here and there.”¹

But it seems that things certainly changed once the church was built:

“Even in those early days it had already become a matter of quite general knowledge that the establishment of a Catholic Church…generally had the effect of drawing people to the vicinity….In an incredibly short time there were numerous families living near the site of the church, and there were numerous additions to the industrial plants.” ² And why was this?

“…wise business men knew well that amongst the Catholic population…there would be many who would make suitable employees.”³ 

The second fact that I learned from reading Holy Family Parish was about the altar society contributors’ list itself. There were about 800 names on the list but most of the donations were only $1.00. What was this all about? Well, it seems that Father Damen preferred to make sure everyone in the parish could enjoy the blessings that came from contributing to the building of the new altar. He and his assistants went door-to-door to see that no one was overlooked. And in addition to the heavenly blessing that a donor would receive, Father Damen added as a further inducement that “each donor was to have his or her name engrossed on parchment and placed under the altar.”⁴ 

The third piece of information I gleaned from Mulkerins’ history of Holy Family Parish is perhaps the most important. The book actually could serve as a “Fodor’s Guide” to Chicago’s Near West Side in the nineteenth century. We learn first about one of the hallmarks of poverty that still exists today: stores that sell alcohol abound in poor neighborhoods:

“Many of the grocery stores in the early days and up to the eighties (1880s), were a sort of combination of saloon and grocery….The grocery stores were very numerous everywhere in those times, and there were no department stores then as now….They were very numerous, sometimes two, three or even four on the corners of intersecting streets and possibly a few more within the block.”⁵  

Between pages 725 and 747, Father Mulkerins takes us on a walk through the neighborhood and describes the commercial establishments, other than grocery/saloons, including: drug stores and shoe stores, bakeries and undertakers, coal businesses and hay stores, candle manufacturers and hardware stores, house movers and dry goods stores, meat markets and ice cream stores, hatters and leather stores, and tobacco stores and livery businesses.

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

 Yes, Holy Family Parish was a magnificent discovery. I learned that before my great grandparents attended St. Patrick’s Church, their parents were members of Holy Family Parish. I had the opportunity, one that is so often out of reach to genealogists, to “tour” the neighborhood where my people lived, shopped, worked and worshipped.

Notes:

1.    Thomas M. Mulkerins, Brother, Holy Family Parish, Chicago: Priests and People (Chicago, IL: Universal Press, 1923), 718.
2.     Ibid., 719
3.     Ibid., 719.
4.     Ibid., 58.
5.     Ibid., 720.

Categories: genealogy groups

Discoveries at the Chicago History Museum Part II

Here I am again in the Chicago History Museum (see my post of  Dec 27, 2012 for Part I.)

After I checked out the Sanborn maps, I took a walk around the Research Center. It is really important to become familiar with the lay of the land, to see what the site you are visiting offers. Although much of the material is kept in closed stacks outside of the main Center room, there are open bookcases along the walls.


As I was looking at some books on a shelf, my eyes were drawn to one title in particular: 

The Slum and the Ghetto: neighborhood deterioration and middle-class reform, Chicago, 1880 – 1930 was written by Thomas Lee Philpott, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas. Just by chance, I had found a reference that would give me new and chilling insight into the NearWest Side where my Irish ancestors lived in the late nineteenth century. I wrote about this area in my post of December 6, 2012 when I showed how Clara Laughlin described that area and time period of Chicago in her novel, Just Folks. Now I would have a view of my ancestors’ neighborhood from a historian’s perspective.

In order to understand how so many people in Chicago and other large American cities were living in crowded, unsanitary, dark substandard housing in the late nineteenth century, known as tenements, (see photo below that shows the wooden tenement buildings built so close together)

The Maxwell Street area in 1906, from the Charles R. Clark Collection, in the folder for "Interpersonal Relations--Manners and Customs--City and town life--Slums--Illinois--Chicago--Near West Side.", used by permission of the Chicago History Museum. 

 we need to look at several factors.  It took a convergence of all of these factors to produce a perfect storm

of squalid living conditions that led to disease and death for a large number of people who lived in the tenements of Chicago.

First, in the latter part of the nineteenth century industrial progress and capacity had grown exponentially and stockyards, meat packing plants and factories of all kinds sprang up in many cities, especially Chicago.¹

The Great Union Stock Yards of Chicago, 1870, Photo by Rascher, Charles, Chicago: Published by Walsh & Co., c1878, Wikimedia, public domain due to copyright expiration.

These businesses required thousands of workers to do unskilled labor at very low wages. And where did this labor come from? A great number of Europeans were looking for new opportunities. The photo below shows hundreds of new arrivals from Europe waiting for processing at Ellis Island:

Underwood & Underwood, photographer, c1906. cph 3a23424 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a23424, [Emigrants in "pens" at Ellis Island, New York, probably on or near Christmas --note the decorations,] Library of Congress.

A second factor in the mix that produced tenement slums in Chicago was that during this time economic and political conditions in Europe were driving many poor and low-skilled people to look to America for a better life. But no one in the municipal government of Chicago was actually planning for this influx. So it was left to market forces, in this case land developers and landlords, (see section: Tenement Inspections as Public Health Practice, paragraph 4) to fill the areas in and around the new industrial areas with as many housing units as they could fit and to build them for the cheapest price. This was the formula that resulted in tenement slums: a need on the part of poor people in Europe to escape their living conditions that left them no hope for economic improvement in their countries of origin and a need on the part of industry in Chicago for huge numbers of workers to do low-skilled work at low wages:

Image of eight girls sitting and facing a narrow table, sewing by hand on material held in their laps, during a sweatshop inspection in Chicago, Illinois. The girls are all looking at the camera, 1093. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society.

A third factor in this already bad situation in the Near West Side happened in 1871. It was the Great Chicago Fire  in which “One-third of the city’s 300,000 residents lost their homes.” ²    

Gibson & Co. (Cincinnati, Ohio), c1871, The Great fire at Chicago Oct. 9th 1871. View from the west side, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92506070/, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Many of these refugees ended up in the tenements, and this added to the already deadly overcrowding.

By the late 1880s, the slum housing of Chicago had become so bad that government officials had to take notice. Social reformers, such as Jane Adams 

Jane Addams, Wikimedia, public domain due to copyright expiration.

who founded Hull House

Hull House Women's Club building on Polk Street, 1905, Wikimedia, public domain due to copyright expiration.

in the Near West Side, began documenting conditions in the tenements while offering language programs, day-care centers, playgrounds, nutritional advice and hope to those who had been relegated to the bottom of the social ladder by low wages in dead-end jobs with no way out.  Philpott describes their plight:

“The great majority of the laborers had no marketable skills. The work they did was hard, stultifyingly dull, and often dangerous. They swept and shoveled streets, dug ditches, sweated over garments, peddled from pushcarts, tended machines. Employment was irregular because of market fluctuations and weather conditions. Laborers went long stretches without work….”³

In 1901,Robert Hunter published a report for the City Homes Association  called Tenement Conditions in Chicago.  Hunter studied blocks around Hull House and documented the overcrowding, lack of sanitation, no access to clean water, absence of light in many of the tenement rooms, among other grievous conditions.  According to his statistical research, Hunter stated that between 35%and 47% of Chicagoans lived in substandard housing.⁴

As mentioned above, in the late nineteenth century, European immigrants came by the thousands to find jobs in Chicago as well as in other American cities. They found low-paying jobs that only allowed them to afford substandard housing in tenements. The immigrants came from not only one country but from many, and they arrived in stages, as Philpott describes: 

“The area around Hull House was a ‘labyrinth’ of nationalities and creeds. Catholics predominated on three sides of the settlement, and the Jewish ‘ghetto’ was to the south. Protestants were scattered through the district….Most Jews were either Russians or Poles….The Catholics…came from more than a dozen different counties….The most numerous foreigners at the beginning were Irishmen, Bohemians, and Germans. They gradually gave way to Italians, Russians, Poles and Greeks. But at any given time in the 1890s people of twenty-six or more nationalities could be found living within three blocks of Hull House.”⁵

My own family history bears out what Professor Philpott observed. First my Irish ancestors showed up on the Near West Side around the 1860s. They lived on Halsted at Hastings. Then the Bohemian contingent arrived in the early 1900s and settled on Blue Island Street.

As we saw above, the immigrants lacked money to demand better housing and they lacked any social cohesion because of the maze of different languages and cultures that were found in the tenements. Instead of cooperation, there was competition and the attitude of “We don’t trust or like you because you’re different from us.” In addition, many of the immigrants who had arrived earlier in the century disliked the more recent arrivals, seeing them as interlopers who just added to the poor, overcrowded living conditions. Photo below shows the crowded conditions of a typical market street in Chicago in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century:

 One of the busiest streets in the world--State St., Chicago, Ill. (18 miles long), N. from Madison St. New York : Underwood & Underwood, publishers, c1903. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

This isolation into small groups worked against community building. And this was another factor that kept the population of the Near West Side powerless. As Philpott writes:

“A community crisscrossed by so many lines of cleavage seemed to lack all coherence. Nothing the settlement workers encountered in the tenement districts distressed them more than the disorganization and disorder they saw all around them. To Jane Adams it looked as if the entire ‘social organism,’ from the family level up, had ‘broken down’ on the Near West Side.” ⁶

Thus we have seen how the perfect storm of tenement housing developed from six factors:

1.     The explosion of industrial activity in Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century which resulted in the need for large numbers of low-skilled workers to fill the factories and slaughter houses

2.     The influx of poor, low-skilled immigrants from Europe

3.     The lack of a municipal plan to house these new immigrants which left a vacuum: the need for some kind of shelter for the newly arrived workers

4.     The type of shelter devised by businessmen (responding to market forces) who came in and built as many housing units as the land would hold at the cheapest cost

5.     The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 which forced many of the homeless to seek housing in the Near West Side which added to the overcrowding

6.     The powerlessness of the poor of the Near West Side in the face of economic and political forces of the times

It would take until 1901 for the reports of reformers and the overwhelming visual evidence of huge areas of the city mired in slums to open up the eyes of both the public and the politicians of Chicago as documented on the history.comwebsite:

“In 1901 city officials passed the Tenement House Law, which effectively outlawed the construction of new tenements on 25-foot lots and mandated improved sanitary conditions, fire escapes and access to light. Under the new law--which in contrast to past legislation would actually be enforced--pre-existing tenement structures were updated, and more than 200,000 new apartments were built over the next 15 years, supervised by city authorities. By the late 1920s, many tenements in Chicago had been demolished and replaced with large, privately subsidized apartment projects.”⁷

As I have learned more about the conditions my ancestors endured in the Chicago tenements, I realize once again the debt that I owe these brave people. It was through their sacrifices as they worked to gain a foothold in this country that I have benefited. Thank you to those who came before.

Notes:

1.      Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930, The Urban Life in America Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) p. 7.

2.      Fire of 1871, Encyclopedia, online http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1740.html, downloaded 6 Jan 2013.

3.      Philpott  p. 64.

4.      City Homes Association, Encyclopedia, online http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/289.html, downloaded 6 Jan 2013.

5.      Philpott, p. 67.

6.      Ibid., p. 69.

7.      Tenements, History.com, online < http://www.history.com/topics/tenements>, downloaded 5 Jan 2013.

Categories: US citizenship