Saturday, April 2, 2011

The Landrigan Puzzle, Part 2: How John Landrigan became Richard A. Wells

Mystery, Intrigue and a Little Bit of Luck: How John Landrigan became Richard A. Wells

In my last entry, I explored the life of my great-grandmother, Kathryn Hunter, and I expanded a little on her mother Katherine Landrigan. The Landrigan family is, to say the least, an enigma, and Katherine's older brother John is no exception.

John A. Landrigan was born March 17, 1865 in Charlottetown, PEI to James Landrigan and Mary Ann MacAulay. John had three siblings: Nellie (b. 1869), Katie (b. 1872, my great-great grandmother) and a younger half-sister, Mary Ann Murphy (b. 1883). John's father was twenty-three years older than his mother, and in 1874 James died, leaving behind his widow and three children. Mary Ann Landrigan left for Boston with her three children in June of 1879. The family came to Winthrop, Massachusetts, where Mary's younger sister Catharine Boylan was living with her husband and two daughters. Mary remarried, but her husband left in the early 1880s, leaving John to help support his three younger sisters. He married Elizabeth Hines in the spring of 1890, and they had their first (and only) child that fall.

Landrigan family, 1900 US census.
The last record of John A. Landrigan is on the death certificate of his wife in 1904. Up to this point, the search was not at all difficult: John was a typical Irish-Canadian immigrant. He listed his birth date as March 17 (an extremely common date for Irishmen who were unsure of their births), he regularly attended mass, and he worked as a laborer on the railroad, where he introduced my great-great grandmother to my great-great grandfather.

Death of Elizabeth Landrigan, 1904. The last known
mention of John A. Landrigan before his 1909 name change.
(Note John Landrigan's mother-in-law: Ann Welles)
Yet John Landrigan seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth after his wife died. I spent nearly a year scouring city directories and Massachusetts death indices for John Landrigan, but considering he didn't appear on the 1910 or 1920 censuses, I assumed he had died or left the country. After all, his daughter was listed as living with a new family in 1910, something that seemed unlikely for a girl with a living father. In what seemed like a last attempt to find my uncle, I grabbed the Suffolk county probate index (1894-1910) to see if he had indeed died in-state, but perhaps the death had been indexed improperly. I found John Landrigan in the index, but the document was neither an administration, nor a will, nor even an abandonment case: it was a 1909 name change in which my ancestor, John A. Landrigan, had changed his name to Richard A. Wells.

From there, finding more about Richard Wells was simple. He married Julia Belle MacGillivray on November 27, 1909, a mere two weeks before he changed his name. Of course, on the marriage record he had already assumed his new identity, so it was likely that Julia was unaware of John Landrigan at this point. Furthermore, Richard Wells had four more children, as evidenced by the 1930 US census:
Richard Wells (a.k.a. John Landrigan) and family, 1930 census.
I found the birth and marriage records for two of the four children, and from there, I discovered that Richard and Julia had quite a few grandchildren, most of whom were still living. I should add that the Wells family posed a fascinating genealogical phenomenon: since Richard Wells had his first child in 1890 at the age of 25, and his last in 1920 at the age of 55, there was a difference of 30 years between the five Landrigan/Wells siblings. Richard Wells Jr. was an uncle a few times over by the time he was born, though apparently the younger kids were not very close to their older sister.

I got in touch with Rita Annabelle Wells son Richie (who happened to be named for his grandfather) and learned quite a bit about what happened to my uncle after 1909. The family was aware of John Landrigan, and family lore suggests that he changed his name around marriage so that he could find a job more easily, as Irish prejudice made this difficult in the early 20th century. Richard Wells was a loving father, and in 1933, he died, just after his youngest son turned 13. There was an old family rumor that he had gone back to Canada in the 1900s and tried to incite a rebellion, but I have yet to find any evidence to confirm this.

Julia Belle McNeil-MacGillivray-Wells-Grant died in 1972 at age 89 after her third marriage. Richard Wells' last child, Rita, died in 2004, and he currently has living grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great grandchildren, and great-great-great grandchildren. Like the rest of his family, Richard Wells was, to say the least, and interesting character.

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