Johanna “Hannah” FitzGerrold was born in 1837 in Conugh-na-gree, Cork, Ireland to Richard FitzGerrold and Nancy (Murphy) FitzGerrold. Her mother died when she was only three years old. She arrived in America in 1850, and was married to Thomas O’Sullivan on April 20, 1863 in Bay City, Michigan. She and Thomas had a daughter, Mary Jane “Minnie,” on January 14, 1866. They resided in Flint, Genesee, Michigan in 1880, and had moved to Milwaukee by 1900. Hannah died on July 2, 1919 in Columbia, Brown County, South Dakota.
From Our Family: Daly-Sullivan Family History:
Johannah FitzGerrold was born in the parish of Conugh-na-gree, by the Blackwater River, near Fermoy, County Cork, Ireland. She was the youngest of six children of Nancy and Richard FitzGerrold. Both parents died when she was about three, and she went to live in the home of her uncle, William FitzGerrold.
Hannah – Age 14
Her earliest memories were of the fires at night in the lime-kilns on the surrounding farms, also the bitter feeling that her people had for the English rulers who kept them poor. History of Cromwell’s time tells that FitzGerrold land was given to Sir Walter Raleigh.
Hannah, as she preferred to be called, learned to read in the “Hedge-row Schools.” Education was forbidden, and soldiers destroyed books when they could find them. Schools were conducted on the sly by anyone who could read and write, and who dared. They had no paper or pencils, so they wrote on the ground with pointed sticks. The teacher was often the priest, and he used the catechism for a reader. The forbidden Irish language was also taught in these schools.
When Hannah was eleven, conditions in Ireland became so unbearable, due to the failure of the potato crop and to the practice of the landlords of taking all livestock and grain in the name of rent, that her brothers and sisters decided to go to America. They took Hannah with them. They came first to Connecticut, where she earned her living by caring for children in their homes. Later they went to Glen Falls, New York. Her brother Daniel went on to Burlington, Iowa, where he died in 1858. Mary married Daniel Lenihan, and Julia married John Mahoney and stayed in Glen Falls till her death. The brothers John and William went to Flint, Michigan. John lived at a place called Ergemot, and William owned and lived on a forty acre farm near Flint. In an old letter from John to Hannah, he scolds her for interfering when William would have gotten married. He adds: “William lived miserable, without anyone to cook for him and care for him.” He also said that liquor was the cause of William’s death, and says that he “had the rites of the Church.”
Hannah went by train, and alone, to Flint when she was thirteen.
There she did housework for a living. At the time of her marriage, she was pastry cook at a home for the deaf and dumb.
In April 1865, Hannah was married to Thomas Sullivan in Bay City, Michigan by Fr. Schultz, who had been their pastor in Flint. They lived in Flint till the spring of 1881. Thomas and his brother Daniel owned and operated Sullivan Bros. furniture store in Flint.
Eight children were born to Thomas and Hannah while they lived in Flint. The coming to Dakota story is told in a letter from Lucy Sullivan Coyle, youngest daughter of Hannah and about eight years old when they came:
“We came to Watertown, as far as the railroad came in May, 1881. It was the first train since the fall before. The people turned out to welcome the train, with tin pans and anything that would make a noise. Ma was expecting Indians but didn’t know the people would act so crazy.
Pa left us at the hotel and walked to Columbia after the team and wagon. He and John Lambert, from Flint, had bought three horses and a wagon the year before in Columbia, and Lambert had stayed all winter and cared for them. Most people had a yoke of oxen, but we had three white horses. I remember their names yet: Sam, Doc, and Silver. When he got back to Watertown he put a prairie schooner top of the wagon and we all piled in. Grandma and Grandpa Daniel Sullivan were with us.
When we got back to the big slough it had filled full after Pa had left for Watertown. We had been rafted and pulled across a good many creeks and little sloughs, but this was too much. Tom Murphy’s sod house was on the east side where Dan Holland used to live, and we stayed there all night and the next day drove north around it, about twelve miles over raw prairie. When we did get there, we found some men–in trying to burn the roots off the sides of the sod house–had burned the thatch roof off. We stayed in the sod church till they got the new roof on.
We lived in Dakota all summer and went back in the fall. The foundry that Pa had worked for in Flint had moved to Muskegon, and he knew he’d get a job if he went there. Daniel O’Sullivan died there the next March. George was born there the next November.
The next spring, 1883, we came to Columbia. The railroad had got that far then. That summer Pa built the house on the preemption, two miles, I think, east of Walter’s Corner. They lived there till about 1886. The home place and the island I think Grandma Ellen Sullivan filed on, the island a tree claim.
We lived with Dalys while Pa built our house. George Daly had a sod house on the southwest corner of his home place, and Johnnie a little frame house across the road from it. It’s the dining room of their house now. Eddie had a shanty on the north corner of his place. Pa and Charlie and Frank slept in George’s house with him and Grandma and the girls slept in Johnnie’s house. He was doing some office work in Columbia then. Ma cooked and fed the whole gang in Eddie’s house. If Grandpa Daly was there I don’t know where he stayed. Eddie later moved his shanty to the southeast corner of his claim and Johnnie moved his house to his tree-claim where it is yet. George built his house and other buildings a half mile north where they still are. All this happened after we had moved into our own house. Probably you never knew that Daly Corners used to be one half mile south of where they are now.
Columbia Flooding
Most of the grandchildren remember the Sullivan place about three or four miles northwest of Putney where they lived for thirty years after moving their house in 1886. The slough was often a barrier between there and Daly Corners, in the spring and part of the trip was made by boat.
Charles, Bernard, and George left the farm and took to railroading, and Frank farmed at home or nearby. In 1915 Grandma (Hannah) and Grandpa (Thomas) went to Columbia and kept house for Father O’Keefe for a while and then moved into a house they built across the street from the Catholic Church. Grandma (Hannah) became unable to do her own work, and they moved out to Daly Corners and lived with their daughter, Hannah. Grandpa (Thomas) built a two-room house joining the main house, and they lived there till her death in 1919. He lived there till his death two years later.
Hannah and Thomas Golden Wedding Anniversary 1913 (Hannah & Thomas Far Right)
