The O'Hagans are Nicholsons!

The early life of my great-grandfather, Richard Thomas O'Hagan (1882-1956), has been untraceable for many years. In 2012 I wrote about everything we knew of his life from when he enlisted in the Army in St. Louis (1906). You can read that here. But he was already 24 by then, and much remained to be explained. All that was previously known was that he was born in Dickerson, Maryland -- a small farming town in Montgomery County -- on March 28, 1882, and that his parents' names were Clarence O'Hagan and Margaret Sullivan, both of Ireland; he supposedly had 3 or 4 sisters. But, as I described in my previous post, nothing on O'Hagans could ever be found in the area, in any sort of record series. And in the last week I have learned that only some of the above information is true. Richard is from Dickerson, and his parents first names were Clarence and Margaret, but their full names were Thomas Clarence Nicholson and Margaret Z. Nicholson. (They seem to have been cousins, but more on that below.) This has recently been proven by comparing the DNA of Diane Van Trees, a user on 23andMe, with that of my father, who are estimated to be second cousins given the proportion of their DNA that they have in common. Diane's grandmother was Cora Rebecca Nicholson, daughter of Clarence and Margaret, and a sister to Richard. That is, she and my father are indeed second cousins! So how did all of this come about?

Richard Thomas Nicholson/O'Hagan (c1927)
(photo courtesy of Marco Aurelio Moya Reyes)

A little over a week ago I came across a 1900 Census record from Barnesville, MD, about 3 miles east of Dickerson. It is the household of Thomas C. Nicholson: his wife is Margaret Z., and there are four children: Richard T., Gertrude B., Cora R., and Grace E. The father, Thomas C. (who I will refer to from here on out as Clarence) is listed as a blacksmith. We knew that Richard O'Hagan was a blacksmith early in his life (later converting those skills into auto repair). The son Richard T. is listed as having been born in March 1883. (The years in the 1900 Census can often be off by one, depending on whether the enumerator correctly back-calculated the year right given a birth month and the month of enumeration.) We knew that Richard was born in March. His middle initial was 'T'; Richard O'Hagan's middle name was Thomas. This Richard Nicholson had 3 sisters, as apparently did Richard O'Hagan. I was intrigued, so I kept going.

Thomas Clarence Nicholson household (1900)
(source: Ancestry.com)

The next thing to check was to make sure this Richard T. Nicholson wasn't easily traceable later in life. If he was, he clearly could not be Richard O'Hagan, as we know a great deal about Richard O'Hagan's later life. But he wasn't traceable. There was nothing -- in terms of Census records -- after 1900. And not only the Census, but nearly every record series I could think to check after 9 years of intensive genealogy research returned no results for a Richard T. Nicholson. I was led to city directories for Washington, DC, in which the same Richard T. Nicholson appears in 1903, 1904, and 1905, and in those directories you can see him living and moving around the city with his father, as their addresses change in tandem. But in 1906 this Richard disappears, and only Clarence is left resident at the address that both had lived at in 1905. After 1905, Richard Nicholson's trail goes entirely cold. But Richard O'Hagan enlisted in the Army in St. Louis in April 1906. If this were him, of course he wouldn't be in DC directories then. And all of this was topped off by discovering that the daughter Cora, in her 1930s-era Social Security application, listed her father as Clarence T. Nicholson. Now I knew the 'C' stood for Clarence. I was really intrigued.

I will spare you the rest of the steps I walked through in order to keep tracing this family, and just begin with what I now know about my great-grandfather's life. This information comes from a number of different sources, newspapers in particular. In the end we can return to some things that still wait to be discovered.

Richard Thomas O'Hagan was born Richard Thomas Nicholson on March 28, 1882, in Dickerson, Maryland. He was the son of Thomas Clarence Nicholson (henceforth Clarence) and Margaret Z. Nicholson. Clarence was born in February, probably in 1858, in Maryland. Margaret was born in January, very likely in 1863, also in Maryland. We still don't know who Clarence's parents were. His granddaughter Patricia Kirkland has said that he grew up with relatives, and not his own parents. Margaret was the daughter of Lloyd Hamilton Nicholson and Ann Mary Purdy. If Clarence is truly a Nicholson, then he and Margaret would have been cousins of a sort. There is a 12-year-old Thomas C. Nicholson living in the household of an unmarried Cordelia Nicholson in 1870. This might be our Clarence, living with his father's sister. But it is also Margaret's paternal aunt, hence the cousin idea.

Clarence and Margaret Nicholson married in Montgomery County on August 4, 1879. By 1900 Margaret had had 7 pregnancies; 3 of those children (whose names are unknown) died in early childhood. Clarence and Margaret raised their children in the Methodist Episcopal Church. They themselves were both fully confirmed in the Church on October 15, 1888. Their daughter Gertrude Mae Boyd was baptized September 14, 1886; their daughter Cora Rebecca was baptized September 21, 1888. The surviving records don't pick up early enough to see Richard, and Grace Elizabeth does not appear, although we know from the Census that she was born in April 1894. The family probably lived throughout the 1880s and 1890s in Dickerson. Dickerson fell within the enumeration district headed by neighboring Barnesville, and as such they appear to live in Barnesville in the 1900 Census, but that is only misleading. Clarence was an active blacksmith in the area, even being described as "our popular blacksmith" in the Frederick News in 1897.

Map of Nicholson Family Locations in Maryland

Shortly after the family was enumerated in June 1900, Clarence abandoned the family, moving to DC, some 60 miles away. On November 12, 1901 he was arrested for "keeping an unlicensed dog" (The Evening Star [DC], 11/13/1901, p. 3). By 1902 he lived at an unnumbered residence on Brookeville Rd. NW, but the following year both he and Richard were living together at an unnumbered residence on Wisconsin Ave. NW. (Note that women's names were not listed separately of their husbands' at this time.) They moved together in 1904, and again in 1905, settling at 1043 33rd St. NW, in Georgetown. (The building there no longer stands.) Throughout these directory records Clarence is listed as a blacksmith, and Richard as a flagman and motorman, the latter of which was also his profession when he lived briefly in Seattle in 1910 (by then under the name Richard O'Hagan).

Margaret seems to have followed Clarence after he abandoned the family. In 1904 he disappeared for 3 months without notifying any of them. On August 5, 1905, he disappeared again, and this time Margaret filed a police report with one Captain Boardman. All the local hospitals were searched, but he wasn't to be found. Fortunately, a week later he returned, citing a "mild jamboree" as the reason for his disappearance (The Evening Star, August 12, 1905, p. 3). On January 3, 1906, Margaret hauled him before the court, charging that he did not provide financially for his children. The judge ordered him to pay $4 per week. You can read the original below. (Note that mention of daughters refers to Gertrude and Grace. Cora was already off living on her own, and, importantly, Richard is not mentioned!) But Clarence didn't pay, and in October of the same year the DC police arrested him for it, although he was released shortly thereafter. 

The Evening Star, January 3, 1906

It's not clear what happened next, but Clarence and Margaret seem to have separated for good at this time. In February 1910, Clarence was living in Boyds, between Dickerson and Gaithersburg; but by April (1910 Census) he was living in Gaithersburg. That February that he was in Boyds, he fell asleep in a rick (basically a pile of hay) at night -- in winter. He was outside for too long and his feet became badly frostbitten; at least one, and possibly both, were amputated as a result. In the 1910 Census he is listed as still married; but Margaret and Gertrude and Grace are nowhere to be found. (But Cora is living with her first husband.) 

In February 1911, Margaret filed for divorce from Clarence in the Montgomery County Circuit Court in Rockville, MD, closer to Dickerson where they'd lived before. At that time she lived in Bethesda, between Gaithersburg and DC. In newspaper mentions of the divorce suit, Margaret charged Clarence with having abandoned her family 11 years prior, which probably refers to the moment at which he left Dickerson around 1900. She says they'd lived together for 20 years, which more or less fits with their having married in 1879. They were officially divorced on July 15, 1911.

The next month, August 28, 1911, Clarence married Minnie Blanche Saffell, some thirty years his junior, with whom he had already begun having children in 1908. They had four children who lived to adulthood: William Elijah (1908-1981), Marion Elizabeth (1910-?), Estelle M. (1916-1996), and Clarence Baker (1920-1986). This brings Clarence's adult children to 8, with 38 years separating the oldest and youngest. In March of 1920, Clarence was living with this family, still in Gaithersburg. But after this he was committed to the Springfield State Hospital in Sykesville, MD, a mental hospital. He died there on February 17, 1925 and is buried there. His family did not claim the body.

Very little is known of Margaret after their divorce. She does not appear in the 1920 Census, but at some point she remarried a man with the surname Jones. She, like her first husband Clarence, was committed to a mental hospital, St. Elizabeths in DC, where she died on September 2, 1922. She was buried at the United Methodist Church cemetery in Potomac, MD, along with her stepmother Delilah (née Andrews, 1838-1900), half-sister Laura (1878-1964), and step-sister Clara (née Pearre, 1869-1951).

St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, DC (early 20th century)
(source: Wikipedia)

Clarence and Margaret's daughters have various descendants that I will describe later. At this point I have requested copies of Clarence's police records from DC, and Margaret's records from St. Elizabeths, both from the National Archives. I am attempting to locate the repository for the records from Springfield State Hospital. I have also already begun to explore the Nicholson family. Clarence's early life is similarly mysterious. Margaret, however, was the daughter of Lloyd Hamilton Nicholson (b. c1822, MD) and Ann Mary Purdy (b. c1828, MD). Lloyd and Ann separated during the Civil War, probably very shortly after Margaret's birth in January 1863, and Ann remarried to a man Samuel T. Cecil (1838-1905) on March 26, 1864, in Montgomery County. When Margaret's mother Ann died sometime after 1870, Samuel moved with his children and stepdaughter to live in Montgomery Co., which brought her closer to the area where Clarence was probably living.

At this point it's not obvious why my great-grandfather Richard left home, and especially why he changed his surname. If it was because of criminal activity, this should be traceable in the records of the DC police. It's also unclear what his reasons were for changing only parts of the story of his past: he was indeed born where he always said he was born, to parents with the first names that he always indicated. But their surnames were different, they weren't Catholic -- everyone seems to have been Methodist --, and at least Margaret was certainly not from Ireland, even though Richard said that she was, even giving her the specious maiden name Sullivan. One possibility is that Clarence was an Irish orphan, and that he was only raised by Nicholsons. Perhaps Richard knew this and opted for a different surname when he left. (But there was intense prejudice against the Irish at the time, and it's not apparent why someone would have opted for an Irish surname.) This will be hard to figure out. But given that Richard made up the fact that his mother was from Ireland, it's likely he made up the fact that his father was from Ireland too. It's at least the less likely story given that all records point only to Nicholsons in Maryland, really for quite some time into the past.