Discovery...

Gr Grandpa Pat...RIP

Just before the holidays (you remember the holidays, right?
Those two weeks not too long ago that evaporated like a couple
 of nano-seconds?). Anyway, just before all the commotion took over,
 I got an email from a guy up in the Keeweenaw who volunteers on the
Hecla Cemetery Project** in Laurium, MI, Martha Mary (O'Brien)
 Marion's birthplace.  The O'Briens lived in the Copper Country for nigh
 on 50 years, and some died there as well.  (Mom was born there, but the
family moved immediately down to Detroit, so she had no memories
whatsoever of that area.)


Pat and Mary's first two children (William and John -- GREAT names)
died in infancy in Boston, but have headstones in the Hecla cemetery. (The
newlyweds, just over from County Cork, probably couldn't afford proper
 burials for the boys at the time -- can you say "pauper's grave?" --
and this was their "make good").


.  The next two, Daniel and Mary Ellen, also born in Boston, survived infancy
and made the arduous trip to Northern Michigan with their parents in the early
 1860s, but it didn't end well for them either.  Daniel was killed at 14 in an
 accident at Cliff Mine, and Mary Ellen died at 17.  How she died was not
 passed down. We do know that it could have been anything from...

"...fits, brain fever, childbirth, consumption, liver complaint,
cold on lungs, typhoid fever, whooping cough, dropsy, nervous
 asthenia, poisoning by tainted meat, drowned  in old shaft,
bowel complaint, water on the brain, spotted fever, convulsions, 
scarlett fever, blood poisoning, innervation, pleuresy, measles,
 killed from the kick of horse,  frozen to death...."
(As reported by The Record of Deaths
for Keeweenaw County, circa 1870s) 

In any case, in 2006, the volunteers of the Hecla Cemetery Project discovered,
 dug out, and cleaned up the two stones containing the names of the four O'Brien
children (John and Daniel are on one stone, William and Mary Ellen are on the
other - it's called economizing), but Patrick's had not yet been found, and we had
 no idea where the O'Brien family patriarch had been laid to rest. That changed
 last year when volunteer Greg Sloviak, searching for the gravestones
 of his own ancestors, came upon Patrick's.


So now we know.  And the man who left Ireland in the wake of the
Potato Famine, started a family with Mary Harrington Green, worked
most of his life underground, and then died underground in a mining
accident himself, can finally rest in peace....


**The Hecla Cemetery Project is dedicated to restoring what has been for
decades a derelict, decaying, downtrodden burial grounds.  Thanks to
its volunteer staff, the headstones of our five O'Brien ancestors have
been rescued from oblivion.