Jimmie O’Donnell was a good boy who never knew his dad and shot his step-father smack-dab in the heart, but I’ve already told you about that. Cleveland was rough in 1903.

Jimmie’s mom was my great-grandmother, Kate. She had a flock of kids and watched Jimmie shoot her husband dead, but she was okay with that. By all accounts, John Atkinson had it coming.

I must tell you that I have never known a happy day with my husband since I married him. He has been a drinking man all the time, and many a time I have been forced to accept his abuse through this accursed stuff.”

He was a hard worker, and as a man who was acquainted with him remarked, ‘He did not have a lazy bone in his body, but he was too fond of drink, and it made him quarrelsome.'”

Cleveland Leader, March 14, 1903, pages 1, 3. Read the complete article.

Unwinding the family connections was tricky. Jimmie was twenty-two in 1903. The 1900 Federal Census shows Kate’s nine surviving children still living at home, but it doesn’t differentiate between those of her first and second husband. The birthdates of the two eldest sons are off by three years and their last names are listed as Atkinson (well, Atkison, but nobody ever spells it right, even now).

The boys’ last name was O’Donnell. The news reports of John’s killing said that, and so did some records that my dad had saved from his father’s business. By searching the Cuyahoga County, Ohio birth registers on Ancestry.com, I found records for John, August 9, 1878, and James, June 14, 1880.

Katie (Catharine) McMahon and James O’Donnell were Jimmie and John O’Donnell’s parents.

Wondering what happened to James, I poked around for the family in the 1880 census records. I couldn’t find James or Jimmie, but I found Kate and her two-year old son John living with her parents, Arthur and Bridget McMann. Kate’s brother Fred McMann, and her brother-in-law, Joseph O’Donnell lived there too.

Two other items jumped out: Kate is listed as a 21 year-old widow and the date of the census enumeration was June 14, 1880, the day of the Jimmie O’Donnell’s birth. It must have been a busy day at the McMann household.

Next, I found Kate’s 1881 marriage certificate to John C. Atkinson.

Still, I didn’t know what had happened to James, so I kept at it. I can count to nine, so figuring backwards, James must have died between September 1879 and June 1880. A Find A Grave entry looked promising. It showed the Cleveland death of twenty-four year-old James O’Donnell on November 19, 1879. With that, a GenealogyBank search revealed that on November 19, 1879,

“James O’Donnell was at work at the H. M. Chaplin & Co’s slaughter house, trying to make a passage through a chute for salt to run, the salt gave way unexpectedly to O’Donnell, and carrying him through the chute, buried him under five feet of salt, where he was found an hour later smothered to death.”

Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, November 20, 1879. Read the complete article.

…probably around the same time that Kate might have figured she was pregnant with his second son. Sheesh. Cleveland was rough in 1879.