The other night I experienced a strange confluence of coincidental forces. While in the midst of research into my family’s roots in Salford, Lancashire, England, I just happened to have the TV on. I always check to see what’s playing on TCM when I’m home of an evening. As I was reading about my ancestors, the O’Haras, who were shoemakers in Salford, Robert Osborne introduced a film by David Lean entitled Hobson’s Choice. Well, I like David Lean movies as much as the next guy, but I’d never seen this one. So I peeked at it while scouring Ancestry.com for my genealogical links. Suddenly the TV screen was alive with images of Salford in the late 19th century. Hobson’s Choice, based on a play by Harold Brighouse, takes place in a shoemaker’s shop in Salford and stars one of my all-time favorite actors, Charles Laughton.

It was as if someone had opened a family scrapbook and showed me photographs of my ancestors! For David Lean’s keen eye for detail makes Hobson’s Choice come alive with vivid authenticity. The wet pavements, the dreary gray buildings set against ominously dark skies, the working class pubs and cosy storefronts of Salford. The film opens with a spooky shot of a mysterious leg swinging in the wind. One’s mind wonders if someone has hanged himself. It turns out just to be a boot sign, but it sets the slightly black-humor tone for this brilliant, under-appreciated film.

So what about my ancestors? Most people when I tell them I have been compiling a family genealogy roll their eyes and quickly slip away. I know exactly how they feel. The subject of one’s roots is fascinating to the person doing his family research but of little interest to those outside the immediate family circle. Even my own family rarely discussed its ancestors. I could have asked my grandmother all these things while she was still alive but I waited until both my parents were dead and she was in the grave for over 30 years before I even knew her name! It turns out her name was Florence Brooks. She married my grandfather, Carl Bruno Peters, on September 11, 1909 in Manhattan. She was 22 years old and lived with her parents, Henry and Margaret Brooks.

My fascination with my grandmother’s family (on my father’s side) has to do, unsurprisingly, with the name Brooks. I’ve always loved that name and was curious to know its origins, at least within the family context. Most people think of Brooks as a WASPy British name, but it’s also a popular old Irish name. My Brooks ancestors came from Ireland to New York in the mid-1840s, during the early years of the Potato Famine. My grandmother’s father, Henry worked in retail, supervising a crockery shop that belonged to his wife Margaret. She turns out to have been born Margaret O’Hara. By checking New York City’s archives (which include bride and groom indexes, police census from 1890, and various vital records statistics) I was able to assemble a somewhat hazy picture of her family. Maggie’s mom was also named Margaret O’Hara and had moved to New York from England in the 1860s. Throughout the 1890s, this elder Margaret O’Hara (”widow of Peter”) ran a store at 119 8th Avenue variously described as selling “crockery,” “furnishings,” “hardware,” and “china.”

But genealogy is a very difficult and treacherous pursuit. First of all, a lot of the information recorded is simply inaccurate. Sometimes this is the fault of the person gathering the data. A census taker might write down the name O’Hara as O’Hare, or O’Harrah, or O’Hear. Thus finding the person you are looking for can be time-consuming and sometimes futile. Other times it is the person being asked the questions to fill out who is in error. Very often a person did not know the correct answer and merely fudged a reply. Or they deliberately lied about their age. Or they were protecting themselves against some perceived injustice. (A good case of this happened on the Peters side. When filling out a WWI registration card in 1917, my great uncle Bruno Peters gave “Mabel” as his mother’s name, even though she was called Bertha. But in 1917 the name Bertha was hardly a pro-American type name and rather than risk his mother being investigated as a spy, he called her by an English name. But more on the Peters clan later.)

I was having a great deal of trouble finding dependable information on the O’Haras. Old Margaret’s crockery shop had originally been located at 1959 Third Avenue, and before that at 215 First Avenue, and was run at that latter address as early as the 1870s by Hugh O’Hara. Hugh died in 1879 at the young age of 24 from “a blood clot to the brain” as well as “catarrhal pneumonia.” Hugh, I knew, was the son of this older Margaret O’Hara. I learned all this by studying the archives, and by visiting Calvary Cemetery on Long Island where the family is buried. Graveyards are usually the best place to find accurate genealogical information.

Once I found the elder Margaret O’Hara’s death year, I was able to find a death record. She died at home (119 8th Avenue) in 1897 from “apoplexy” at the age of 78. She was listed as “widowed.” The death record states that her father was Robert Wright and her mother Jane Wright, meaning her maiden name would have also been Wright.

When I looked at the younger Margaret O’Hara’s wedding record, however, I faced a major hurdle. My great-grandmother Maggie married Henry Brooks in 1880 in Manhattan. In the section where she was to name her parents someone had put in that her father was named August O’Hara and her mother was Mary Kelly. Well, this information didn’t match the names on her death certificate (which I also was able to read on microfilm in the Municipal Archives). Margaret, approximately 54 years old, had died in 1903, at 841 8th Avenue, from “acute Bright’s disease,” a kidney disorder. On this document, someone had written that her parents were named “Peatie” and “Margaret Brooks.” First thing wrong there, of course, is that her maiden name was O’Hara, not Brooks. And whoever wrote in this information didn’t know how to spell “Peter”! But that aside, the obvious inference is that her parents were Peter and Margaret O’Hara.

Well, if young Maggie didn’t know who her parents were, who would? I instinctively trusted her earlier marriage license more than her death certificate. But that was a mistake on my part. By continuing my research I have discovered that there has never been a single “August O’Hara” in any census record in the USA. I knew that her father probably didn’t make it over from Ireland, but the fact that there were no other August O’Haras anywhere at all indicated the fact that this was a suspiciously uncommon name. In fact after years of research I have never encountered anyone by this name in any connection to Irish records, or in any documents at all. I began to believe that this information was just plain wrong.

Voila, thanks to Ancestry.com which I was scouring while watching Hobson’s Choice the other night, I have finally come to a satisfactory solution to this bizarre dilemma. And it all came down to a tiny slip of paper. I was able to find a Request for Naturalization record for Hugh O’Hara from 1875 that has put everything into perspective. In it, I learned that Hugh O’Hara had come over from England in 1864. (See actual record below; note the address).

Armed with this vital statistic, I then combed the online Passenger Ship records and found that on January 13, 1864, the O’Hara family traveled from Liverpool to New York on a ship called “The Cultivator”. Margaret O’Harrah was 45, listed as a widow, originally from Down County, Ireland. Her daughter, Mary, 19, was born in Lancashire and was listed as a “boot braider”. Her sister Catherine was 15. Hugh, her brother was 9. Agnes 7 and young Margaret, was 4. I am confident this is the same family because I happen to know that Catherine and Margaret were sisters (through a friend of my uncle’s who has since passed away) and later documents backed it up. (Below is an ad for a packet ship not unlike the one that my ancestors took from Liverpool).

In 1870 the O’Hara househould shows up in the census living in Brooklyn. Mary, Catherine and Hugh are all listed as “shoe fitters”. This was not a surprise to me as my uncle Brooks had once told me that our Irish ancestors had been in the “shoe business.” The important thing here is that young Margaret is listed as “daughter.” If she had been a niece or cousin, they would have most likely described her as “other.” (Below is a photograph of an American shoe shop, similar I would imagine to the type of establishment my forebears would have toiled in during the 1870s and 1880s in New York.)

To put a final nail in the shoe leather, so to speak, I sent for a census record from England, and found that Margaret O’Hara and her children lived in Salford, Lancashire with her husband Peter O’Hara, “boot and shoe maker.” He and his children are enumerated in the 1851 census. In 1861, they reappear, with young Maggie listed as their daughter, 2 years old. Peter must have died sometime between that census and when Margaret, the elder, sailed with her brood to the new world. (Below is another photo I found of an old-fashioned shoe shop in England. I imagine the O’Hara store was similar in spirit.)

I wanted to find out more about Peter O’Hara, the shoemaker, and contacted a researcher in England. She helped find a wedding record of a Peter O’Hara, “cordwainer” (shoemaker) who wed a Jane Wright in Manchester England in 1847. But that would mean their daughter Mary was born before they were married, as certain dates would indicate from census records. So either this is the wrong couple or perhaps Peter had a daughter from a previous marriage, or perhaps most likely, the date was transcribed incorrectly when it was entered later into an index. If it were 1844 or 1841, it would match the rest of the details perfectly. Such questions are legion when conducting research into a family’s background. It’s best sometimes to ignore it until all the facts are straight, if they ever are.

(Below is a photograph I found on the web showing a typical Salford street in the 19th century.)

I can only imagine what life must have been like for them in Salford. Immigrants from Ireland, living in the poorer section of an industrial, heavily polluted town. Although I hardly think they were impoverished. A “cordwainer” (which derives from the French word cordovan) was a step above a “cobbler.” A cordwainer worked with new leather to create new shoes, while a cobbler mostly repaired old shoes, or worked with used leather. The 1861 census indicates that Peter O’Hara hired two assistant shoemakers. This would put him on a par with Charles Laughton’s character Hobson in Hobson’s Choice. The entire premise of the play and film is that Hobson is eventually outsmarted by his allegedly dim-witted boot hand, aided in his quest for partnership in the firm by his clever wife, Hobson’s daughter.

I suspect Margaret O’Hara was as clever as Hobson’s daughter. She managed to pay for her entire family’s trip across the Pond to America. And they traveled in what was described on the Passenger Register as “After Upper Between Decks” which I imagine was a cut above “steerage.” I can just see Margaret O’Hara, my great-great-grandmother bossing her husband Peter O’Hara around, just the way Brenda De Banzie does to John Mills. Seeing Hobson’s Choice brought to life on film has made me feel closer to these erstwhile ethereal relatives. Here is a link to a clip from the film I found on Youtube. Enjoy.

This is the first in a series of postings about my family. Stay tuned for the next installment: The Quirks of Old Chicago.