Next Steps in Telling Her Story: Mary Jane Sheridan

Might Mary Jane have dressed something like this in the 1890s?

Mary Jane Sheridan may have met her future husband Philip Cassidy through fellow parishioners in the Buffalo, New York, Catholic church where her family worshiped. It was the same church where Philip's sister got married.

Her extended family—including her Sheridan parents and siblings, as well as her future sister-in-law and two nieces—made the same migration from Western New York to Grantham, Lincoln, Canada West, in the late 1850s.

She was widowed within months of bearing her eighth child. 

Five years later, Mary Jane was forced to sell the family land in Grantham Township in Lincoln, Ontario, to satisfy her late husband's debt—land that had been in family hands for thirty years.

She would bury two sons in Canada while another son would devote his life to education as a Christian Brother in Ontario.

Eventually, she and two other sons would move to Cleveland, Ohio, where her only daughter also lived. (Ironically, their homes were within blocks of my older brother's former home in the same neighborhood.)

These are just a few of the things that I have learned about Mary Jane Sheridan, a great-great-great-grandmother since I began this year's quest to learn more about several of my under-documented women ancestors. 

I first attempted to find the missing documentation of Mary Jane and Philip Cassidy's marriage. Though that goal was unsuccessful (so far), I learned a great deal about Mary Jane and her larger family during the process. 

• I documented residences, migrations, births of children, land transactions, taxes, deaths, and burials.
• I learned more about each of the five localities where she lived throughout her life—from Buffalo, Erie County, New York to Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, with a stop in Canada in the middle—one of several similar migrations in my family. 
• I also discovered relationships that expanded my knowledge of her siblings and children and their spouses, as well as her parents. In particular, I discovered her relationship to individuals with the Saul surname who appear in numerous records alongside her family: Saul was Philip Cassidy's sister Elizabeth's married surname. 
• I also discovered a previously unknown connection of my Cassidy line to Buffalo, New York.

As fascinating as these discoveries have been, I am now turning back to what started this focus on the women of my tree: the book Telling Her Story: A Guide to Researching and Writing About the Women of the Past by Sharon DeBartolo Carmack. The author encourages deep research on the women of our family trees to discover more of their story, the story that goes beyond the dates and places to provide more insight into the woman and her trials, triumphs, and everyday life.

As DeBartolo Carmack notes, "The ingredients are all of the sources you consult in your research project. But the sources themselves do not tell your ancestor's life story." She continues, "In the second step, you analyze each record, comparing and combining information from each document with information from social history." The final step, she argues, is writing, "...where your meld all of your sources into an interesting narrative..."¹

I'm in the second phase of the author's recipe. Creating Mary Jane and her family's timeline and analyzing each document has offered a wealth of possible topics for further research, among them:

• The reasons for her family's migration to Canada in the 1850s from western New York.
• Her role as administrator of her husband Philip's estate in Canada in the late 1870s.
• The impact the forced sale of the family land would have had on the widowed Mary Jane.
  
• What community life was like in the near west side of Cleveland in the late 1890s where she lived.
• The tragedy surrounding her son James' untimely death in 1898 in a train accident.
  
• Medical treatment of breast cancer in the early 1900s, the disease which would take her life in 1919.
• What her parish life might have been like at Cleveland's St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church, where she was a parishioner in her later life.

St. Thomas Aquinas Church, Cleveland, the "Irish Cathedral" where Mary Jane worshiped in her later life.

 

Though I know of no other descendants of the Sheridan or Saul families who are connected to Mary Jane, I could also research other living descendants to see if anyone has any personal information or heirlooms that belonged to her.

So many choices, so little time. Stay tuned for where the research takes me next.

Until next time...

© Nancy Gilbride Casey, 2025. All rights reserved.

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IMAGES

Untitled (Lady by a Riverbank) (1890) by Clement Rollins Grant. In the public domain.

Unknown photographer, St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church, Superior Ave., 1909; imaged, "Postcards of Cleveland," Cleveland Memory (https://clevelandmemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/postcards/id/4240/rec/7 : accessed 11 Feb. 2025); citing Special Collections, Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University.

 

NOTES

¹ Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, Telling Her Story: A Guide to Researching and Writing about Women of the Past (Salt Lake City, Utah: Scattered Leaves Press, 2024),17.