Cain history page 4 - and now for something completely different

Page four of the Cain history features a number of changes. First and foremost, the copy quality is SO MUCH BETTER. It was a struggle to read some of the earlier pages, but this one is clear and clean and so easy to read. My eyes just went "aaaaaahhhhhhhh."

The epidemic mentioned on the previous page was apparently sweeping the country, and claimed the lives of both of Dennis's parents. I can't imagine the impact of losing both parents at such a young age. The history never mentioned what kind of work John O'Kane did, but it doesn't seem like the family was wealthy. An orphaned teenager in pre-famine Ireland probably didn't have a lot of options available to him - no one to pay for schooling, no one to provide for him. Being in that situation, the history says Dennis's paternal aunt "sent for him," and his uncle paid for his passage to New Brunswick. It makes me wonder - how did a relative an ocean away become aware of Dennis's situation? Steamships or steam-sail hybrids started crossing the Atlantic around 1815 (per Wikipedia at least), but getting word to the aunt of John and Mary's passing, then sending a response back to Ireland would have taken weeks, if not months. When was he sent for? What did Dennis do in the meantime? Was put in a poor house, an orphanage, something else? The history doesn't answer these questions.

So Dennis crosses the ocean to live with his Protestant (and unnamed) aunt and her husband, John Darrah, on a farm on the Saint John river in New Brunswick. Apparently his relatives tried to win him over to his father's former religion, but Dennis was no "turncoat" (a word he his reported to have used) and stuck with Catholicism. In describing his desire to stay Catholic, Virginia leaves off of retelling history and begins adding commentary - "the fine Irish faith instilled in him by his wonderful mother, the prayers she taught him and his love for Our Blessed [Mother]" reveal Virginia's Catholicism (or pro-Catholic leanings at least). That's not bad, it's just interesting to see how her perspective influenced the way she told the story.

There's not a lot of information to go on to find Dennis's relatives that supposedly took him in. Census records don't really begin for all of Canada until 1851, 11 years after Dennis married Catherine Mulhearn. If the aunt and uncle were about the same age as Dennis's parents, they would have been born around 1780. If they lived to be enumerated in the 1851 census, they would have been at least in their 70s. Records that early in New Brunswick are kind of spotty, or were the last time I really tried looking. It would help if I had more to go on. But at least there's a name and a place, that's something specific that can be checked for and verified.

Cain family history page 3 - love changes everything

Today we're looking at page three of the Cain family history.

So John O'Kane's wife was revealed to be Mary O'Neill. She was apparently a school teacher, which Virginia says was a highly esteemed and enviable position. Maybe it's my upbringing and societal conditioning speaking, but teachers never seem to get the respect they deserve for all the work they do. Maybe 1800s Ireland was different?

The history also says Mary was educated at an unnamed convent in Dublin. Again, that's across the island from County Mayo, on the eastern coast of Ireland. Were there convents for young single girls? It just seems like Virginia is naming big cities - Dublin, Belfast - for the locations of these events. Granted, there were people who lived in those big cities, but now John and Mary are both said to have crossed the continent for their education and occupation, and it has me wondering if that was really a common thing to do? If Mary was a school teacher and was trained in a convent, was it a religious school? The history doesn't say.

John and Mary's marriage was opposed by her parents due to John's Protestant faith, so he apparently converted, if not for the wedding then sometime after. Dennis's daughter Catherine married an Anglican, so religious differences in that time weren't always a bar to marriage, but I can see how it would be. Catherine had to get a special dispensation from the local authority in New Brunswick to marry John Gibson, but she did it. It's strange to think her grandfather may have left the faith she married into.

Dennis Cain was apparently the only child of John and Mary, born in 1811 according to the history. That's a few years earlier than what I found in census records, but censuses have a way of being wrong about a lot of things, so I'm not bothered by that. He was supposedly taught Catholicism by his mother, and was apparently an altar boy and loved his religion. His continuing association with the Catholic Church in Canada and Montana certainly bespeaks a deep level of commitment to it.

The bottom of the page mentions an epidemic of black lung fever when Dennis was about 14, so about 1825. I couldn't find any explanation online of what disease "black lung fever" was referring to. Black lung was a disease caused by chronic inhalation of coal dust, but fever wasn't a symptom of that. There were outbreaks of cholera and typhus around that time, maybe one of those are what she meant? Dennis did live through at least a couple epidemics, though depending on where he was, he may or may not have been directly affected by them.

I think to corroborate the stories thus far, I'd have to locate the marriage of John O'Kane and Mary O'Neill sometime around 1810, and probably somewhere in Northern Ireland. If that much checks out, then I can look into the political movement and religious conversion parts of the story.