Carney Family Reunion

The Carney family immigrated from Ireland.  Either they didn’t all come together, or they didn’t keep track of dates very well.  The 1900 census is the first time people were asked to report the year they went to the US.

The father of this Carney family was John Kearney/Carney.  John died in Illinois in 1876.  So he came before that.

• The eldest son, Thomas, died in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1895.  So again not sure when he arrived,
• The second son, Michael, was married in Trenton, New Jersey in 1868 and reported that he came in the US in 1863.
• The third son, Bernard, married in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1870 and reported that he arrived in the US in 1860.
• The fourth son, James Carney, married in 1873 in Chicago, Illinois, and reported that he immigrated from Ireland around 1870.
• The fifth child, and only daughter, Mary, was married in Chicago, Illinois in what appears to have been a joint ceremony with her brother James.  Mary died in 1894.

James met Mary Gibbs, an Irish immigrant,  in Chicago, and they were married.  They had five children while they lived in Chicago.  The first two were twins, John & Margaret.  The twins were either stillborn or died shortly after birth.  The third child was Margaret Marie Carney, my great-grandmother.  James and Mary had two more sons, John James, and Charles.  Although the rest of the family stayed in Illinois, the James Carney family moved to Nebraska between 1885 and 1890.  They bought farmland in Oak Grove Township, Section 27.  Their youngest son Charles died around 1888.  Since Chicago has no record of his death, I assume he died in Nebraska, where they didn’t keep vital records.

Their neighbors to the north and west of them in Section 28 was the Enoch Parr family.  The families were joined in September 1896 when James’ daughter Maggie married Enoch’s son Elmer.  In 1906, Maggie’s brother John married Mayme Strangman, who also lived nearby.  John eventually took over his father’s farm.  Elmer and Maggie bought land north of the original Parr homestead, and the two remaining Carney siblings stayed close, and their children attended school together.

In going through old family photos, we found many with the Carney siblings’ families, but there was one that we couldn’t quite sort out.  It appears to have been taken in Nebraska at the Carney farm (by then owned by John & Mayme).  One day I came across the exact same picture on Ancestry! It had been posted by John Hunt.  John said the photograph had been taken when the Carney family had gone to visit the “Nebraska Carneys.”  He could identify all the Illinois Carneys in the picture but had been struggling to identify the Nebraska Carneys.    So together, we sorted everybody out, but I had to expand my family tree to cover the details of James Carney’s siblings’ families.

James Carney’s eldest brother, Thomas, apparently never married. The second brother, Michael, married Anna Dunne. Michael and Anna had 6 children: John, Annie, Margaret, Thomas James, Mayme, and William Francis.  The third brother, Bernard, married twice.  He had six children with his first wife Sarah Boyle: Margaret, James John, John F, William J, Thomas B, and Michael Joseph.  He married his second wife, Mrs. Mary Moore Shortell, after Sarah’s death when he was 51.  James’s sister, Mary, married Thomas Dunne and had two children: William Patrick and Katherine.

So who is in the photo in front of John & Mayme Carney’s house in Nebraska?
The family on the far left is Bernard’s grandson, Bernard J, his wife Lillian, and their children: Larry, Gerald, Bernice, and baby Murray. Then the next pair over is Michael J & Frances Carney – Bernard’s son and Bernard J’s parents.  Next to Michael J Carney, along the back row, is Mayme Carney, John Carney, and their son Henry. The rest of the younger adults across the front are Michael and Frances’ son Michael F, John and Mayme’s daughter Mary Carney, Michael and Francis’ daughters: Constance Carney and Marjorie Carney Hunt.

The photo must have been taken around 1940, assuming baby Murray was born in 1938.