Identity area
Reference code
Title
Date(s)
- 1873-1990 (Creation)
Level of description
Extent and medium
9pp
Context area
Archival history
Kerby A. Miller created his transcripts of the Cassin Fitzpatrick letters from copies provided to him by Joseph A. King in June 1990.
Immediate source of acquisition or transfer
Content and structure area
Scope and content
Transcripts of four letters written by Honora Cassin Fitzpatrick of Green Bay, Wisconsin, to her mother and sister in Oshkosh, Wisconsin during the 1870s, plus a forwarding letter providing further family information.
Per Joseph A. King: ‘Nora was born in 1848 in Queens County, near the village of Coolrain, the daughter of John Cassin and Catherine Brennan. Her parents emigrated to Wisconsin in the early 1850s. Nora was left in Ireland in the care of a Protestant aunt (Sarah Cassin Bolton), but rejoined her family in Wisconsin about 1860. In 1860 at age 12, recently arrived from Ireland, she was living in Bovina, Outagamie Co., in the household of an older married sister, Sarah Smith; later she joined her parents in Oshkosh, where she met and married Daniel Fitzpatrick. Dan was an unstable fellow whose first wife got an annulment after Dan, so she claimed, threatened her with a knife, among other pranks. He apparently wasn't treating Nora much better, judging from the letters. Nora and Dan had two children, Mary (May) and Daniel Edward. At the time of the letters the family of four was living in Green Bay, and the letters indicate Nora's unhappiness in her exile from her parents and sisters in Oshkosh. Nora's daughter May had a touch of polio, which crippled her for life, but she married and had a large family of her own. Nora died at age 30 in 1878.