Family album – Barrett.

In 2003, John and I went to Milwaukee in search of my grandfather’s birthplace. Grandpa was born at his parents’ home, 454 Prospect Avenue. Unfortunately, the house was long gone. I was able to get a copy of the Sanborn map of the site at the Milwaukee Public Library, and I guess that’s as close as I’m going to get. I keep hoping to find a collection of old photos of the area that might show the actual house, but no luck so far.

Sanborn maps are insurance maps, created during the period 1867-1970 for insurance assessment purposes. I’ve never had much occasion to use them except in the case my ancestors who lived in Milwaukee. For the most part, my American ancestors lived mostly in rural areas and small towns that don’t seem to have been covered by the Sanborn Company, or the old houses are still standing, or they were torn down long before Sanborn maps.

The map above shows the block where my great-grandparents, Jeremiah and Elizabeth Barrett, lived from about 1895 until their deaths. Jerry died in 1909, and Elizabeth in 1911. (Did Elizabeth have a nickname? I don’t know, and it’s too late to ask anybody who knew her. Lizzie is the nickname I’d expect for the time and place, but Betsy and Betty are possibilities, too. Beth is unlikely. Her children referred to her as Elizabeth, so maybe she had no nickname.)

454 is seen one house down from the corner of Prospect and Ivanhoe. The yellow buildings were wooden structures, and 454 was 1½ stories. I don’t know much more than that. The “auto sales and service station” across the street wasn’t built yet when my family lived there, and I don’t know what occupied that space when my grandfather was a boy. I always picture more wooden houses. My great-grandfather’s sisters, Elizabeth Owens and Mary Dowling, lived on the same block, at 436 and 434 Prospect Avenue, respectively.

My great-grandfather, Jeremiah James Barrett, was a house painter and an auxiliary policeman. The house painting came about, I’m sure, through his family connections. His older brothers John and William were carpenters, and William was later a contractor. Their brother-in-law, Robert Owens, was a painter and later a painter contractor. Building trades ran in the family.

My grandfather told me that Jerry painted the statues at Holy Rosary Church, too, and I wonder what kind of painting he did. Was it colorful painting designed to make the saints look lifelike, or were the statues all painted white, or maybe ivory? I never thought to ask when my grandfather was living. John and I went to the church — now part of the Three Holy Women Parish — but it was closed during our visit. For all I know, the statues have been repainted since Jerry died, anyway.

Jerry was born on a farm in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, the son of Irish immigrants. He’s supposed to have been born 28 August 1862, but census records show him, a year old, in 1860. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Jeremiah Quinn. Jerry’s eldest brother, Thomas, died in Union service in 1863, aged 15 or 16, of yellow fever. Jerry’s father, William, died that July, “thrown from his horse and kicked in the act of falling.” The widow, Ann, and the six surviving children stayed on the farm until the late 1880s, when the family moved to Milwaukee.

In Milwaukee, Jerry met Elizabeth Reilly. Elizabeth was an Irish immigrant, like his parents. They were married at Holy Rosary Church on 5 August 1891, as recorded in the parish register:

Die 5 Augusti 1891 in matrimonium conjunxi Jeremiah Barrett ex Cedarburg, Wis. filium Gulielmi Barrett et Annae Quin uxoris, et Elizabeth Reilly ex Hibernia, filiam Joannis Reilly et Rosae Savage uxoris. Sponsores fuerunt: Patricius Reilly et Maria Healey. W. F. McGill.

They had eight children, and six of them were born at 454 Prospect Avenue. The first few years of their marriage, Jerry and Elizabeth lived with Jerry’s mother at 453 Cramer Street, and Annetta and Thomas were born there. By 1900, Jerry owned 454 Prospect Avenue “free” — that is, it wasn’t mortgaged.

Jerry and Elizabeth moved to the house before 8 February 1895, because that’s where Thomas died, aged seventeen moths, of “eclampsia” — an odd cause of death for a baby nearly a year and a half old, but I take it to mean that he died in convulsions. Sylvester, the fourth child, died at home in December 1897, aged five months, and his death certificate gives “convulsions” as the cause of death, too.

The other six children were Annetta, Jeremiah, William (my grandfather), Laura, Raymond, and Frances. The last of them, Frances, died more than thirty years ago.

My grandfather only told me four things about life at 454 Prospect Avenue:

1. Jerry and Elizabeth had two armchairs in the parlor with a round table between them. On the table they kept a tin of tobacco and two clay pipes. In the evening, my great-grandparents would sit in their chairs and enjoy a smoke together.

2. The sidewalks in those days were made of wood, and the neighborhood children played mumblety-peg on the wooden sidewalks. In mumblety-peg, you stand with your feet apart and throw your knife to stick as close to your foot as possible. Whoever gets closest, wins. As I understood it when Grandpa described it to me, you threw the knife not at your own foot, but at your partner’s foot, and part of the game was proving your nerve as the knife drove into the wood near your foot. That sounds less likely than the standard rules, though, and I might have misunderstood. Or maybe the children of Milwaukee played a more daring game.

3. There was a privy in the basement of the house. Grandpa used to tell the story of Laura falling into the privy. The girl was holding onto the seat, dangling above the pit, and Elizabeth came to save her with “the baby” on her hip, pulling Laura out with one hand. The one-handed rescue made a great impression on my grandfather, and he always said, “She was a tough old gal, my mudder.” I never thought to ask whether “the baby” was Ray or Frances, so I don’t know how old Laura was at the time. She could have been anywhere between three and, say, eight.

4. There’s another story about Elizabeth being “a tough old gal,” and it’s the family favorite, so I saved it for last. One night, Jerry was off at the police station, and Elizabeth was home with the children. Jerry kept his gun in a locked tin box in the cupboard, but since he was at the station, he had taken his gun with him, and Elizabeth was unarmed. She heard a prowler creeping in the narrow space between the houses. Grandpa always emphasized how narrow the space was, so I always imagine the prowler was in the space to the north of the house, between 454 and 456, but the space was pretty narrow on either side.

Elizabeth hushed the children, and moved swiftly and quietly to defend her family. She went to the cupboard, for she had no gun, but she did have a potato masher. It wasn’t the kind of potato masher you see today, with metal mesh or rods for mashing the potatoes; it was made entirely of wood, a great heavy knob with a handle. Elizabeth took the potato masher in hand and flattened herself against the wall by the window. (I always imagine her holding her breath, with the masher raised high above her head.)

The prowler laid his hands on her windowsill, and lifted himself up and into her house. As his head came through the window, the potato masher came down. (Did he have a hat? Was there a muffled ffffump! or a resounding clonk! as the wooden knob met his head?)

The prowler slumped out the window, between the houses. Elizabeth flew outside, and grabbed the miscreant up by the collar. She dragged him out to the street, raining blows on his head all the way. She held him there, on the sidewalk, beating him mercilessly with that potato masher.

Somebody — not Elizabeth — called the police, and they told Jerry there was a disturbance at his house. As the police rushed to answer the call, he went anxiously along with them. Grandpa never said he laughed, and I wonder whether he laughed, or looked on the poor man with compassion.

“Leave him go,” Jerry said to the policemen. “He’s had enough.”

The story always ended the same way: “She was a tough old gal, my mudder.”

And that’s all I know. I know now that my grandfather loved me, but he was a difficult man — volatile and profane, quick to anger. I learned to be afraid of him, and then, when I was a little more sure of myself, to dislike him. I loved Sheboygan because of Grandma; Grandpa was the brooding, angry presence in the background. After she died, his health declined quickly, and he became a thin, frail old man. I remember walking him around the block once, because he couldn’t make it alone. I grew to pity him, but still we were never close. I never understood their relationship till years later, but now I see how much he loved her; how much he loved all of us. It was hard for him to show. A few times, he tried to open up, and share his life with me, and I was interested, but I was uncomfortable around him.

I wish now that I’d had the wisdom to listen more. He cherished his memories of his parents and his brothers and sisters, and he wanted to share those memories, but I just wanted to move away from him, to be someplace more comfortable for me. Most of whatever he might have told me, I never heard. It’s one of my great regrets that I wasn’t more patient, more understanding, more attentive. But I was just a kid.

Jerry and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis. The story handed down in the family was that they contracted the disease from mixing lead-based paint in closed spaces, but tuberculosis was the scourge of the age, and overcrowding and poor sanitation had a lot to do with that.

Jerry died first, on 17 May 1909, leaving Elizabeth with six children aged seventeen to two. On 27 September 1910, Elizabeth turned her four youngest children over to Catholic orphanages. Bill and Ray went to St. Aemilian’s, and Laura and Frances to St. Rose’s. I don’t know why the family didn’t help. Jerry had five brothers and sisters living in Milwaukee, and Elizabeth had a sister and probably more family besides. Were the relatives too poor to help? Were family relations distant? Too strained? Was Elizabeth too proud to ask? I don’t know.

Anyway, the youngest four went to orphanages, and it probably wasn’t too long after that that Elizabeth and Annetta went to the Milwaukee County General Hospital. I don’t know where young Jerry was then. Elizabeth died 8 April 1911, and was buried on the 11th. On the 13th, Annetta died, less than three weeks short of her 19th birthday. She had wanted to be a nun.

The younger girls were claimed in October by the Carolan sisters of Sheboygan County — Laura by Mary Mullen, and Frances by Mary’s sister Bridget Fee. I don’t know whether the Carolans were related to the children. It was 1913 when the boys went to the home of Matthias and Anna Stutz, and they ran away soon enough, I guess, for Bill was fourteen that July and he always said he was on his own from that age. Old family letters tell me Ray ran with him, but while Bill never returned, Ray did, and was adopted by the Stutzes in 1920.

Laura, aged 18, found herself pregnant the same year, and her adoptive parents, who were strict Catholics, were angry and embarrassed. They packed her off to Milwaukee to have the baby. She gave him up for adoption; years later, after Laura was dead, he traced his birth family, and contacted Frances. In 1925, Laura married William Krueger, but they couldn’t have children. The story was that William had the mumps, and they fell on him, making him sterile. They adopted a little girl they named Marwood, so Laura and both her children were adopted, one way or another. Woody was only four, and my father only an infant, when Laura died of rheumatic heart disease in 1938.

Jerry had died next after Annetta. He was working on Laura’s adoptive brother’s farm when he succumbed to sunstroke in 1916, aged 20.

Bill, my Grandpa, was a wanderer. I know he was in Colorado for a while, and I know he worked for a carnival for some time. It was during those years that he got the tattoo on his forearm, and acquired the friends that made my grandmother feel annoyed and uncomfortable whenever the carnival came to town. When Jerry died, Bill was “in Dakota with Emmo Meyer.” Eventually he moved to Sheboygan, and in 1929 he got a job at the power plant. The same year, he married Helen Roberts in a civil ceremony in Waukegan, Illinois. After two years, they married in the Catholic Church, and two years after that, they divorced. In 1936 he married my grandmother, and they lived together for 36 years before she died. He died, more or less of grief, in 1975.

Ray was a merchant marine. He never married, and he was something of a schemer and a dreamer. He lived in San Francisco, but he used to visit Wisconsin and squabble with Grandpa and Aunt Frances. They were a prickly bunch. Ray would leave vowing never to come back, but he always came back. He loved my dad and Frances’ daughters, and no doubt he loved his brother and sister, too. My grandmother used to say they fought so they wouldn’t have to say goodbye. In 1966, Ray died in Vietnam aboard the S.S. Baton Rouge Victory when it hit a mine in the Long Tau River. It was supposed to have been his last voyage before he retired.

Frances married Leo Gahagan and had five daughters and 22 grandchildren. Like most of the family, Frances and Leo struggled with drink and poverty for a while, but in some ways, Frances was the most successful of the family. She quit drinking, and she forged strong bonds with her grandchildren, and she was the only one of the family who found consolation, in her old age, in the Catholicism of their parents. I only saw her four times. I remember her as a tiny old woman in her garden in Plymouth, saying, “So, you’re little Billy’s little boy.” She lived to be the last survivor of the Barretts of 454 Prospect Avenue, and died in 1977.

Jerry and Elizabeth and all their children have been dead for years. (Most of their grandchildren are dead now, too; only my dad and his cousin Sharon are left.) But a hundred years ago, that house on Prospect Avenue was the one place they shared, the one place where they all felt safe and secure before everything fell apart — before the children became defensive and angry and hard to get along with. I wish I had a picture of it.

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