Keating Ancestry

Cousin Petra sent me this photo and it is so terrific, I felt it merited a blog posting.  Although the photo is undated, Petra thinks it is from around 1955.  Thanks to Petra, we know all of the people in the photo: Back row: Father Laurence, Irma Manning, Alice Stevens, Genie Lynch, Jean Marie Manning Front row: Edward (Buzz) Manning, Eleanor "Lillie" Motie Keating (seated), Petra Manning Steele, in the very  front holding a chicken Mary Manning (Emily Skafish's mom!). Date and place.  Although we do not know the exact date, from the ages of everyone present, we think it is 1954 or 1955.  We also think it is springtime.  Springtime in Chicago often includes coats, but little Mary is holding a chicken and Petra remembers that one year they got chickens in their Easter baskets (I'm guessing you only do that once!)   The photo is taken in front of Irma and Ed Manning's home in Chesterton, Indiana.  Eleanor was widowed in late 1944 and moved to ...

Just in time for Bastille Day, I thought I would write a quick blog on some research I've done over the past few months into our French ancestors who lived in Illinois in the early 18th Century. First, a quick history of the French in North America.  As we know, European countries began to explore and colonize North America starting in the mid-16th Century.  The French got into this game with Jacques Cartier entering and exploring the St. Lawrence River on numerous voyages in the mid 1500s.  In 1603, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain established a French settlement in what is now Quebec City.  The French, like all of the Europeans, wanted to find a passage to the Pacific and had high hopes that the great Mississippi River they'd heard so much about from the native peoples would get them there.       It was actually 350 years ago in the summer of 1673 that French explorers Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette traveled down the Mississip...

  This is a photo of our great, great grandmother Mary Maguire Motie.  (Sometimes Maguire is spelled as McGuire). This undated photo is from Ancestry.com, (I've tried to reach out to the person who posted it to find out a date, but I haven't heard back from him.)  Mary was born on December 26, 1828 in Kilrush, County Clare, Ireland.  I have not been able to find her immigration records, but she immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was still a young person.  In fact, several of her young siblings were born in Iowa (sister Margaret was born in 1842 in Iowa), so we know the Maguire family was in Iowa by 1842. Mary married our great, great grandfather, Joseph Motie, in Dubuque, Iowa in 1843 when she was 15 years old; Joseph was 25.  (Joseph had a first marriage, but his wife, Louisa Knott died). Joseph and Mary had a long and fruitful marriage.  They had 13 children, although not all of them survived to adulthood.  I am guessing t...

  Eleanor "Lillie" Motie and Edward M. Keating 1893 Chicago    Amy and I took a road trip this past Saturday to Davenport Iowa to learn more about our Keating and Motie relatives who lived in this area in the 1840s through the 1890s.  Davenport is a mid-sized city (population around 380,000) located on the eastern border of Iowa along the Mississippi River. It is the largest of the so-called Quad Cities with a great location on rolling bluffs. This part of Iowa was originally inhabited by the Sauk, Fox, and Winnebago peoples.  By the late 1600s, French explorers were in this area as they navigated up and down the river system.   The Davenport area was part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803  and technically became United States territory at that time.  In 1832, the famous Black Hawk war occurred in the area around Davenport and when that war was concluded, American settlers began founding more permanent cities.     French settler Ant...

  More about Felicite   Thanks for all of the feedback and interest in our great, great, great  “grand mere” Felicite Constant! I decided I needed to do a bit more research to understand her life. My dad gave me yet another very informative book by historian Carl J. Ekberg.  This one is titled “Francois Valle and His World”. Valle was a wealthy man who lived in the same general area (Upper Louisiana/Illinois Country) in roughly the same time period (1780-90s) when the area West of the Mississippi was under control of the Spanish Crown.  I’ve used Ekberg’s description of Valle and his life to extrapolate information about Felicite and her family. As we know, Felicite was born in 1783 in Carondolet, Missouri, a small agricultural town just south of St. Louis. Felicite was a French Creole, which means a French-speaking person born in the French colonial territories outside of France.  Technically the area Felicite lived in was under Spanish control at the time...

  This is my (our) great, great, great grandmother, Felicite Constant Motier, who was born in 1783 in the Louisiana Territory and died in 1873 in Davenport, Iowa.   This is a photo taken of her in 1871 when she was almost 90 and gave an interview about her early life as a settler in the Louisiana Territory.  At the time of the photo, she was living in Davenport with her son, Joseph and his wife Mary, as well as several of their children, including my dad’s grandmother, Eleanor Motier Keating (who was 2 years old in 1871).   Here is the text that goes with the photograph:  “An economic depression in the East had caused heavy immigration into the former territor of Haute-Louisiane (Missouri), newly acquired from France. The new settlements had pushed farther and farther into the ancestral bunting grounds of the Indians, thus provoking their uprisings and retaliatory raids. At Portage des Sioux, the Indians told the French men and women that their lives w...