L is for Lumery

L is for Lumery

One of my brick walls.  Like this one, an outer wall of an Irish barn I photographed years ago. 

I first learned about the Lumery family from notes my father, Ernie Wilkowski, made when he was studying the travel diary of a distant cousin. Here is the most tantalizing excerpt. The entire transcript can be found here.

 "Called at Presentation Convent. Met Sister Savior and Sister Bernard who were both Misses Supple of Ballyheigue, cousins of father. Sister Bernard, the younger of the two, resembles my sister very much. Father always said she looked like Nell Supple, Grandmother's mother. Her husband, George Lumery came to Ireland from England who with his father manufactured silk in England. George came to Ireland on account of his failing health and met Nell Supple and married her, remaining in Ireland. They had 2 children, Grandmother Mary Lumery and William Lumery who married Catherine Dalton, called Nana. They had 3 children, John, George, and Mary Lumery, Mary marrying mother's brother Patrick Dorgan. The other child (of George and Nell), Mary Lumery, my grandmother, married Thomas Dugan. They had 3 children, John, Martain and Michael, my father. Great Grandfather, George Lumery, joined the Catholic Church and was baptized on his death bed"

Good stuff, right? This one little passage has been the seed that really grew my Irish tree. From the rest of the diary Dad plotted a family tree that so far has been proven 100% accurate. There are still some loose ends and I am determined.

Family tree constructed by Ernie Wilkowski sometime in the 1980s

But then there is English George. Nothing so far, zip, zero, zilch. I've found 5 or 6 ways to spell the name and not much else. I have a time frame based on the births of the children of the late 1700s. But because it's so early, I don't find any church records. And Supple is a very common County Kerry name.

I find it very touching that to the family the most significant part of his life was his deathbed conversion. I'm going to try and channel some of that faith as I search for George.

D is for Patrick Dorgan (1831-1907)

Patrick was my great-grandfather. he was born in 1831 on the Dingle peninsula, County Kerry, Ireland. He was the oldest of the five children of Owen Dorgan and Johanna Bowler and came to the United States in 1860. He settled in the Fond du Lac, Wisconsin area and soon married Mary Lumery, another County Kerry girl. Together they had 12 children. 

Patrick worked in the timber industry, in the saw mill and as a lumber cruiser. A lumber cruiser would cruise or walk the forest and estimate the timber yield from a stand of trees.

Not much else is known about him. He died in Fond du Lac at the age of 76. The photos below are representative of lumbering in the 19th century. 

This is my favorite. That jam goes for miles.

Freshets in the West--great jam of logs at Chippewa Falls boom, Wisconsin. This illustration appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1869 and is from the Library of Congress

A woodcut drawing also from the Library of Congress titled Logging in northern Wisconsin / drawn by T. de Thulstrup, Zimerman & Negri, se.

This is an undated postcard I purchased. Location unknown.