Sullivan, Moores Forks, 1860

Summer 2008.  I stopped in to visit the Town Historian in Moore’s Forks to get some insight into the place where Sullivan began his American life.  The librarian gave me a copy of a large and well written book about the town but warned me that it would not be helpful.   Indeed, it was just as she said, not very helpful for reading about my gg grandfather, but it gave me an idea of what he was up against.  This well written book, done nearly a century ago, now, barely acknowledged the Canadians among the townsfolk.  Of course this is a pattern that was common at the time, the educated and powerful simply didn’t deign to mention the lesser folk of the town, no need to speak of those “others’.  The ancient Egyptians had to go to all the trouble of scraping out the names of those they didn’t regard, in more recent times the erudite had learned to not even mention them.

The census could not ignore them, and yet the census taker struggled with the combination of unfamiliar accents and French names and irony or irony, showed his own lack of education because of his unfamiliarity with the language of our neighbor land.  Not that anyone at the time would have seen it that way, and in fact, for all my education I am illiterate in French and mute as well… but these problems leave us today with a struggle to understand what records that do remain.

Sullivan appears in the Moores Forks census for 1860, he is 20 years old and his wife Mary gives her age as 22.   Their 1 year old son David is with them.  They live next door to a family whose name could be Duffy or Daffy and another whose name might be Gitier, such is the handwriting of the census taker.  Or maybe the census taker could not figure out how to spell the names of these neighbors and scrawled illegibly as a cover.  There is good reason to think he could not figure out what he heard because he wrote Salman or Salomon or something that could fall somewhere in between for Sullivan.  Mr. Phinney, the census taker, could have taken a bit more time to get this right.  Sullivan had already Anglicized his name, trading in the Canadian Roy (or Roi) for the more American King, and more importantly both Sullivan and Mary could read and write, persumably in English, since Mary was born in Churubusco and perhaps in French as well. 

Now of all the things in the world to complain about, it is silly to bemoan the sloppiness of a long dead part-time civil service clerk, and lord knows that the handwriting skills of some of the priests who kept the official Canadian and American Catholic records left much to be desired, not to mention the fanciful mix of latin and French that they used to sanctify the names of these ordinary folk; but still, on this secular document, we could hope for a more readable name.

So here he is, 20 years old, already a dad, working as a shoemaker with worldly goods of just $110 to his name and $100 in real estate, which according to other sources means he probably lived in a log cabin.  He was a little guy, not tall, very wiry, and I bet as tough as a nail. Mary, I would bet, was taller at least by a little, and probably just as hardy, I have to wonder what she looked like at 22, when we see her in mid life she looks stern and forbidding, on the porch at the house at Chazy Lake she looks busy.  She could write, I wonder if we will ever see letters from her discovered in an old attic somewhere in the North Country.

1860 Census Entry for Sullivan, Mary and David King