James Rooney

I have no reliable information on George Nichols, except that his year of birth was 1856. Where he was born, who his parents were, are unknown to me. There is the story that he was born on a wagon train and left with the Indians, and one relative thinks she heard he was from Pennsylvania.

Cecelia Nichols was the daughter of James Rooney. The documentation I have shows he was born in Ireland in 1817 or 1818, but there is no indication of when he arrived in America. However, he must have arrived before the famine set in, because he served on the USS Delaware for the entire duration of the Civil War. He died in South Dakota. Cecelia's mother's name was Mary, and the only other information I have about her is that she was born in Illinois in 1841, which means she was 33 years younger than James. Since Cecelia was born in 1862, he must have had some quality shore leave with his 20 year old wife. Cecelia must have had a sister named Helen who married a Peter Hagan in 1881. The marriage license states that she was 23 at that date, which would mean Helen was born when her mother was only 17. They also must have had a brother whose son George attended the same school as Cecelia's children.

And that pretty well sums up all I can extract from the material I have at hand concerning my Grandmother's parents and grandparents.

The USS Delaware was a gunboat with the duty of keeping the embargo against the South in the area of the Chesapeake Bay. It was a very early implementation of steam technology in ships.

George and Cecelia Nichols

One of the reasons it's so hard to disentangle all the Nichols family relationships is that George and Cecelia had so many children. Large families were the rule in those days. These children were the generation of my grandmother and her brothers and sisters. I remember some of them but not others. I think all of them were born in South Dakota. Perhaps the photo of this sod house was taken there, maybe about the same time as when some of their children received this Christmas card from their teacher. My grandmother's name is on it and she would have been seven years old in 1902. If she is one of the two younger girls standing to Cecelia's right then both the card and the photo are from about the same time.

The next group photo was taken ten years later and they are all in Canada. I think all of the Nichols clan appears here, including May and her mother. They must have all come up together. Now that I know something about the Williams, if someone could tell me who the Moores and the Hyatts might be I would be very grateful.

May part 4

This is the last instalment of May's story. If anyone has anything to add to it, please feel free.

May's story part 3

Along with this instalment of May's story, I would like to mention that it's Randy Townsend who I have to thank for collecting it. In fact, it's Randy who has done most of the work of digging into the family's past, both Nichols and Brummet. Hopefully, I have figured out how to enable him to be a co-author of this blog so he can contribute a lot more of his knowledge and make it available to all.

May's story part 2

Re: Wordsworm's comment in the first posting. Wordsworm is Steven Young, my younger son, who has some bitter feelings about not being accepted by my family because I was not married to his mother. A person can't help his feelings, and I am intimately familiar with those kinds of feelings, but I think it's very wrong to nurse a grievance. It doesn't hurt anyone more than yourself. We're all fallible, we all blunder through life as best we can, never knowing until it's too late what the consequences of our actions may be.

That's why it is good to know what challenges were faced by previous generations. A clean slate? Doesn't work. It isn't possible to learn everything you need to know to live a good life without heeding the lessons learned by our predecessors.

And that's what I like so much about this life story of Helen May Gervais. It's a humble story, but talk about courage in the face of adversity, I'm glad to say I come from the same stock that she did.

I hadn't thought of using this blog as a way of airing grievances, but every family has them, so maybe it's not a bad idea.

So without further ado, here is another instalment.

Helen May (Williams) Gervais

I couldn't think of any brilliant title for this blog about my family history so I made it plain and simple. But obviously many more names come into it, for instance May Gervais. She was the daughter of Francis Mary Nichols, my Grandmother's sister. Until I saw this story I had never heard of her. I'm posting it here in instalments because it's so rare to have something like this and it shows how much things have changed in my lifetime. Life was very hard then. Besides, it's a good story.

I don't know a lot about the Nichols. George Nichols, my Grandmother Blanche's father was born in 1856 and lived in South Dakota. That's all I know, although I will repeat the story I have heard, that he was born on a wagon train going west. His mother died in childbirth, so he was left with the Indians as there were no nursing mothers with the group. I have no idea if it's true. He married Cecelia Rooney, the daughter of George Rooney who was born in Ireland in 1818. The trail goes cold there.

The Brummets are easier to trace, at least as far back as 1746, when James was born in the Piedmont of Virginia near present day Roanoke. Daniel Boone was traipsing the same woods about that time. A good account of what his life was like can be found here.

I've started this effort in the hope of getting as much info as possible in one place where it can be accessed by all family members. However, I hope I'm not the only one who wants to contribute. There are huge gaps in my knowledge and I'm not very good at disentangling all the relationships. If you want to add something, please avail yourself of the comments section. If you have a lot of information, I can enable you to make your own posts on this blog. I'm thinking of you, Randy.

I'll just leave things like this for now and hope it will become something people will find useful and interesting.