Mahoney Mystery Continues

William Mahoney Remains Elusive

In my previous post about William Mahoney, I explain the very few pieces of evidence that have been found on the man who was the first husband of my 2nd great grandmother Catherine Newmeier. William had a short life and he seems to have left almost no written record about it. I have searched for years and have very little to show for it.

William was born in either Ireland or Canada depending on the record. He was a farmer, he was Catholic, and his parents were Daniel Mahoney and Margaret. He was in Unity, Clark County, Wisconsin in May of 1879 when he was married and in June of 1880 when he was enumerated on the US Federal Census. He died in July of 1880, probably in Stevens Point, Portage County, Wisconsin. I have been unable to locate an immigration record or any other census records for William after years of looking. I have looked into other Mahoney families in the areas surrounding Unity, WI and Stevens Point, WI in hopes of finding a parent or sibling and traced many, many trees back with no matches to William. Then I decided to look in Canadian records.

There is an interesting Mahoney family from County Cork, Ireland who immigrated to the area of Low, Ottawa, Canada East just prior to 1851. The family is Catholic and on the 1851 Canadian census it consists of Daniel Mahoney, his wife Margaret, sons Patrick, William, and Daniel. In 1861, the family is still in Low and young Daniel is missing, but added to the family are son Dennis (age 10 and the first child born in Canada) and 3 daughters, Mary, Margaret, and Hannah. In 1871, this family is still in Low. Daniel and Margaret have added son Daniel, and daughters Annie and Bridget, but daughter Hannah is no longer listed with the family. By 1881, most of the children have left the family but Daniel Jr and Annie are still at home with their parents. Patrick and Dennis have married and are living nearby with their families. The only son missing is William.

William went missing from this family after the 1871 census and I am unable to find him anywhere in Canada after this record. Now, we all know that not everything is available online so it is possible that there are records in an archive somewhere that would answer all our questions. If William stayed in the area where the rest of his family lived, I think he would appear in the records of the nearby Catholic church like the rest of his family and those records are available online. He is not there, so it is logical to think he moved out of the area sometime after 1871.

I found a tree on Ancestry which has traced Daniel Mahoney and family back to Ireland, and they also cannot find William after 1871. The owner of the tree – also called Daniel – has had his DNA done and so I was hoping for a match to one of William Mahoney’s descendants. Unfortunately, Daniel does not match anyone that is a descendant of William here in the US. It was admittedly a long shot due to William only having 1 child before his death in 1880. The pool of samples is very small – only 2 people in my DNA matches are descendants of William and his daughter Margaret.

I did gain some valuable insight while talking with Daniel about the Mahoney tree. Daniel said, “Lots of the woodsmen from the Gatineau Valley went to Wisconsin as the accessible first-growth timber here was cut out around the watercourses that could float it out. A birth date of 1840s/ early 1850s in Ireland and arriving as a young child to grow up in Canada before heading south is pretty normal.” This time period would have been during the Famine years in Ireland and thousands of families were fleeing to other countries. As with my Wisconsin German ancestors, many of them were farmers in the summer and lumbermen during the winter.

As to the frustrating lack of records, Daniel said,”Before Canadian Confederation in 1867 there were no immigration records for people arriving from the UK and Ireland. If he arrived, made his way to central Canada and then crossed to the US there probably are no records at all.” Regarding the few records that do exist in Canada from that time: “Lots of the old Church records here were in poor shape, photographed in the 1950s, microfilmed and then digitized. Some are impossible to read.”

So – is it possible that a young farmer/lumberman from the area around Ottawa, Canada migrated to a small village in northern central Wisconsin in the mid to late 1870s? I think the answer is yes.

According to the Centennial 1872-1972 : Unity, Wisconsin, June 23-24-25, the railroad through Unity, WI was completed by 1874. A new sawmill was built by 1873 to accommodate the lumber being cleared in the area and to make materials for the growing community that already included a school, hotel, and general store. In Canada, the steam ships were allowing for faster and easier travel up and down the larger rivers and the Great Lakes. An 1880 map of the Wisconsin Central Line lists Unity along with points as far west as Oregon and east to the shores of Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. I also found a family story with a similar path.

The Nebeker Family History site has a biography of their Irish famine immigrant ancestor who settled in Low, Canada. The Sullivan family was enumerated in Low in 1861 along with the Mahoney family. The story describes the life of hard work in the lumber camps in the winter and how by 1881 the Sullivan family was looking for a new place to work due to the depletion of the timber in the valley and some of the older sons in the family had moved to Wisconsin. By 1884 the parents followed the sons and settled in the city of Wausau, Wisconsin!

There is nothing I have found so far that can absolutely say that this is our William, but there is also nothing as yet to rule him out either. He disappears from Canada at roughly the same time as our William appears in the US. He was not previously married in Canada, he was a farmer (and perhaps a lumberman). He was born in about the same time as our William was reported to be and his parents have names matching those in the marriage record for our William.

It seems we will have to wait for a little longer to definitively solve the riddle of William Mahoney’s life prior to his 1879 marriage to my 2nd great grandmother Catherine Newmeier. Hopefully a previously uncovered record will appear or someone will match DNA to a Mahoney family that can be traced back to William. In the meantime, I am not ready to rule out this Irish/Canadian family of Mahoneys.