Searching for Charlie Fagan

I set out for the past to find a Brooklyn boy

I'd never heard of Charles Fagan until I saw his name on the 1900 census, City of New York, Borough of Brooklyn, Ward 21. I was researching the McNally line of my maternal grandmother's family.

Charlie was listed as the grandson of the Head of Household, Catherine McNally. She was 75 years old and a widow. The family's address was 21 Walworth Street, Brooklyn, New York, on the edge of Bed-Stuy, practically Williamsburg by today's map. She had six children: two sons and four daughters. Two married daughters and their families lived at 25 Walworth Street. Her married son and his family were up the block on Spencer Street. 

Living with Catherine were her 50-year-old unmarried son and 7-year-old Charlie. He was the lone Fagan, and this caught my attention. Two other McNally daughters were on previous censuses but not on 1900 or any subsequent census, and I guessed one of them was probably Charlie's mother and that she had been married to his father. The McNallys were Catholic. The family would not have likely raised a child born out of wedlock. Not openly. Hidden among a married aunt or uncle's children? Sure. But he would have had their surname. Charles Fagan could have actually been a cousin's child, a great-nephew, the orphaned child of a friend and called grandson even though it was not literally true.

For weeks, I searched records on Ancestry.com and FindMyPast, piecing together Charlie's life through birth, death, marriage certificates, censuses, and newspaper articles. This kind of research is nonsequential, or it is the way I do it. Following the hints that pop up is like watching lights coming on in random rooms.

I discovered that Charlie Fagan is indeed a McNally, my 1st cousin 3x removed. I can't say when the memory chain broke, only that it did, and his story was lost to my branch of the family. After many wrong turns and rabbit holes, if a full portrait is not possible, I had at least a timeline of Charlie’s life.

Charles Edward Fagan was born in Brooklyn, New York on October 14, 1893, to Charles Sylvester Fagan and Susan McNally Fagan. (he is not a junior; the caption in the photo at the top of this post is incorrect).

Susan was the fourth daughter and youngest child of Catherine and Edward McNally, both of whom were born in Ireland. Susan was born in Brooklyn in March of 1863, six months after her father’s death. She is my 2nd great-grandaunt. I am directly descended from her older brother. 

At the time of their marriage in 1888, Charles S., was thirty, and Susan was twenty-seven. Like many New York brides and grooms whose marriage certificates I've seen, they lived at the same address, 21 Walworth Street. Unusually for my family in this era, the McNallys owned their house. I’m guessing Charles S. was their boarder, to use the language of the day. It’s unlikely (very, I think) that he and Susan were living together as a couple before marriage—in the same house as her mother and brother.

Marriage Certificate of Susan McNally and Charles S. Fagan

On July 12, 1896, Susan died of a ruptured uterus/peritonitis and asthenia (weakness or lack of energy). She was ill for two days, and her place of death was her home. She was thirty-three years old. Charlie was two and he was her only child.

Six years after Susan's death, in 1902, Charles S. remarried. At the time of his second marriage, Charles S. was living in Jersey City, but after the wedding, he moved into his new wife's home at 102 Steuben Street, a fifteen-minute walk from the McNallys. He and Mary Britton Fagan welcomed a son in 1903. 

In 1905, Charlie is nowhere to be found. He is not listed on the census with the Fagans nor with his grandmother, Catherine, or any McNally. That June, Charlie was eleven years old. The enumerator’s error, probably. Yet it's tempting to graft symbolism onto this–the boy who left his lifelong home to live with his father and stepmother, not counted as a member of either family. 

Whatever the reality, by 1910, Charlie was in residence at Steuben Street with his father, stepmother, and six-year-old brother, Aloysius, per that census. Mary Fagan is listed as having two sons. Charlie was 17 years old and a clerk in a grocery store. He no longer attended school. 

On the 1915 census, Charlie's occupation was vaguely "driver," but by the age of twenty-three, he was a conductor on the Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT) at the Flatbush depot. This is the occupation on his draft card, dated June 5, 1917.

I closed my eyes when I saw that date. Please let him have lived. Strange, yes, since his life was over long ago, whenever and however it happened. And yet. Did Charlie serve in World War I? If he went, did he survive? I hoped.

Draft Card page 1

Draft Card page 2

Charlie was drafted in December 1917 and sailed for France on April 13, 1918.

Private Fagan served as a Wagoner in the 306th Infantry Supply Company. On September 3, 1918 he wrote a letter home telling his parents not to worry about him. 

Two days later, he was killed by a shell along with fourteen other men (The Standard Union, June 5, 1921). In this same article, the infantry's chaplain, Rev. Thomas J. Dunne, is quoted: 

"Fagan was one of my best lads, true, loyal, pious, and full of love for his own at home. He often took care of my 'holy mass kit' and followed me wherever I went. I buried him where he fell, in a place called "Dead Man's Gully, Vauxcere, about two miles from the Aisne River and some forty miles north of Chateau Thiery."

Mary Fagan, his stepmother, received the telegram telling of his death.

In June of 1921, Charlie’s body was returned to Brooklyn. A funeral was held at his home on Steuben Street and a requiem mass was held at the Fagans’ church, St. Patrick’s Catholic Church on Kent and Willoughby Avenues (The Standard Union, June 4, 1921). 

But to go back.

In the February 23, 1919 edition of The Standard Union, in the obituary section, there is an notice about a requiem mass in honor of Private Charles Fagan, a son of Charles and the late Susan McNally Fagan. The mass had been held the previous day at St. Louis Church on Ellery Street.

There are several newspaper articles about Charlie. This is the only one that mentions Susan. Certainly, a McNally placed it. St. Louis was their parish. His bachelor uncle Owen? His aunt, Catherine McNally Crane? They were the only siblings of Susan's still alive in 1919. One of his fourteen first cousins? Maybe. But Catherine Crane is my guess.

I wonder at the timing. This notice was placed just months after the war ended and in holiday-less February (Valentine's Day aside), far off from the first anniversary of Charlie's death and also not near his October birthday.

Perhaps the McNallys were hurt that Susan was not acknowledged when Charlie was killed. I don't mean they were angry at the Fagans, who, of course, were not writing the newspaper articles. The McNallys’ notice does mention Charlie's father and his brother. I’ll never know what prompted the mass, but I believe that with it, McNallys were saying, hey, he was Susan's first. She loved him. We loved him, too and we miss him.

Epilogue

Catherine McNally, Charlie's grandmother, died on October 7, 1906.

Mary Britton Fagan died of pneumonia on October 28, 1918.

Charles S. Fagan died in 1928.

Aloysius S. Fagan became a chauffeur for a publishing company. He married and had two children. He died in 1982. 

Saint Patrick’s, the church where the Fagans held Charlie’s funeral, is set to be demolished to make room for an apartment building.

St. Louis, the McNally’s parish, closed in 1946.

Henry McNally, Susan’s older brother, and his wife, Emma, had six children. Their son, Joseph, is my great-grandfather, my maternal grandmother’s father. Joseph McNally and Charlie Fagan were first cousins. My grandmother was four when Charlie died. See my post on here about Edna.