Katie O’Connor Sharmer: From Quincy to Sidney

Katie · 1863–1907 · Quincy, Massachusetts → Sidney, Nebraska

Catherine “Katie” O’Connor was the youngest of four daughters of two Irish immigrants, born in Quincy, south of Boston, in the middle of the Civil War. Her mother died before Katie was a year old; her father remarried, took the family west to Nebraska, and died there when she was seventeen. She married the old banker and cattleman of Sidney at twenty, was widowed at thirty-four with four children, and died at forty-three, when her son Joe, who wrote the letters on this site, was nine. This page gathers what the records tell us about her and her family, as far back as they go so far.

How she was found

The family remembered Katie as Irish, and in a sense she was: both her parents were born in Ireland. But Katie herself was born in Massachusetts. Her son Joe gave her birthplace as Ireland on his own marriage certificate in 1928, and since he lost her when he was nine, that is easy to understand. The records below, read together, tell the real story, and reach back one more generation to her grandparents in Ireland.

Her parents: Peter and Catherine

Peter Conner was born in Ireland, the son of a Martin Conner. His age wanders from record to record (31 in 1853, 35 in 1865, 45 in 1880), so he was born somewhere between about 1822 and 1835. Catherine Caldwell was the daughter of Mathew and Alice Caldwell, also of Ireland, and was about eighteen when she married Peter in Roxbury, just outside Boston, on 25 June 1853. These were the years just after the Great Famine, when tens of thousands of young Irish men and women landed in Boston.

Peter was a ropemaker, and the family followed the work. Their first daughter, Alice, was born on 2 October 1856 in Plymouth, home of the great Plymouth Cordage ropeworks; Anna followed about 1858, and Mary E. about 1861. By 1863 they were in Quincy, the granite town on the South Shore, where Peter was working as a laborer, and there Katie was born on 20 November 1863.

Less than a year later, on 1 November 1864, Katie’s mother died in neighbouring Braintree, aged 28. The town clerk recorded the cause as “unknown.” She left four little girls, the youngest not yet one.

Ellen and Lizzie

Peter soon married again. His second wife was Ellen Sheedy, an Irish girl of about twenty-five, and in the 1865 state census they are living in Braintree with Alice, Anna, Mary and Katie. On 7 December 1865 Ellen gave birth to Lizzie, Katie’s half-sister. It was Lizzie whom Joe met in Chicago in December 1937, “72 and a dead ringer for Mama” (A Dead Ringer for Mama). Ellen was the only mother Katie could remember, and it was “with her mother” that Katie’s obituary says she came to Sidney.

West to Nebraska

Sometime in the 1870s the family went west along the Union Pacific. In the 1880 census Peter O’Connor, Irish, “works in marble shop” in Fremont, Nebraska, with Ella (Ellen), Annie, 20, and Lizzie, 13. A stone mason from Quincy, where granite quarrying and cutting was the great industry, could find the same work in Fremont’s marble and monument shops. Katie, meanwhile, was three hundred miles further west in Sidney, living with her eldest sister Alice.

Peter died the next year, on 9 September 1881, and is buried in Calvary Cemetery, Fremont (Find a Grave index). Katie was seventeen. Ellen, now a widow, joined the girls in Sidney; the Nebraska census of 1885 there lists an Ellen Connors, 50, born in Ireland, living as “mother” with a young couple named Jacob and Lizzie and their baby son, which may be Ellen with Lizzie and Jacob Heintz.

From the family

The records bear the story out remarkably well. “White lung” is silicosis, the scarring of the lungs caused by breathing the fine dust of granite and other stone, and it killed a great many Quincy quarrymen and stonecutters. Peter, recorded as a laborer in Quincy in 1863 and as a worker in a marble shop in Fremont in 1880, died there in September 1881, the year after the census. The one detail the records complicate is the soldiers: Katie’s eldest sister Alice was already married to Frederick Nirk, who had enlisted at Fort Sidney in 1879. The family may have remembered him as something other than a soldier, or the marriage may have taken place before he joined up.

A photograph of Peter

Among the family’s photographs is a small card portrait of a bearded working man in a soft hat. On the back, in a later hand: “This may be your father Joe Sharmer II’s mother’s father. If so his last name was O’Conner. No one is sure of identity.” The card was made by A. C. Hull of Main Street, Fremont, Nebraska, very likely the same Arundel C. Hull whose 1868 photograph of Sidney appears on Joseph’s page. Now that we know Katie’s father lived and died in Fremont, the family’s guess looks very likely to be right: this is almost certainly Peter O’Connor, taken in the last years of his life.

Her sisters

Alice (born 2 October 1856, Plymouth) married Frederick Nirk, a soldier who enlisted at Fort Sidney in July 1879. In June 1880, with Frederick away, she was keeping house in Sidney with thirteen-year-old Katie. Her son, born that September, was named Sidney Frederick Nirk, and two daughters followed, Kate and Eleanor. Alice later went to California, married John Higgins at Santa Monica on Christmas Day 1894, and died in Los Angeles on 10 June 1921. Her death record names her parents as “Patrick” O’Connor and Kate Caldwell.

Laurel remembers one of Katie’s sisters, whom she thought was Alice, living in San Diego in the early 1900s, married to a man named Barthelmess, with a son photographed in a “San Diego Rowing Club” sweater with crossed oars. The records found so far put Alice in Los Angeles as Mrs. John Higgins, so this may be a different sister. Anna and Mary are both still unaccounted for. If Laurel finds the photo, it may settle which one.

Anna, or Annie (born about 1858), was with her father and stepmother in Fremont in 1880. Mary E. (born about 1861) has not yet been found after 1865. Lizzie (born 7 December 1865, Braintree), Katie’s half-sister, married Jacob Heintz, Joseph Sharmer’s best friend; the two of them witnessed Katie’s wedding in 1884, and they later raised a large family in Chicago.

Wife, mother and widow

On 10 November 1884 Kate Conner, “19,” married Joseph Sharmer, 52, one of the founders of the Sidney Exchange Bank. How they met isn’t recorded. Loren Avey, the Cheyenne County historian who helped Laurel with the family’s genealogy, once suggested an idea she had never heard from anyone else: that Katie may have worked after hours cleaning at the bank, and met Joseph there. It is a guess, but a plausible one for a young woman whose father had died three years before. She was in fact nearly 21: her obituary (and the modern memorial stone that follows it) gives her birth as 26 November 1865, and the 1900 census as November 1864, but the Quincy register, written at the time, says 20 November 1863.

Katie and Joseph had four children: Laura in December 1885, Kathryn on 26 September 1887, Josephine “Dodie” on 22 November 1889, and, after so long that they had given the name Josephine to a daughter, Joseph on 10 November 1897. In March 1893 Joseph and Katie signed a note for $150 together (A Note for $150, 1893). Joseph died of stomach cancer on 14 June 1898, when Joe was seven months old. His will, signed the day before he died, left everything to Katie and declared the “Sharmer cattle” hers (Uncle Joe’s Will, 1898).

In the 1900 census Katie is the head of her own household, a widow of 35 who owned her home outright, with her occupation written as “capitalist,” living on what Joseph had left. Her obituary paints a harder picture, of a woman “left a widow with four children, with scant supply of this World’s goods,” who “battled ever bravely.” She was a devout member of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church and a leading officer of the Ladies of the Maccabees, a women’s benefit society.

April 1907

Katie died on Thursday morning, 11 April 1907, at 43. Her daughter Kathryn was away at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Omaha and was brought home by Mother Leo and Sister Mary Agatha. The funeral was held at St. Patrick’s at ten the next morning. The Sidney Telegraph wrote that “never in the history of Sidney did a death occur under more distressing circumstances or attended with more general sorrow.” The school paper noted that Joseph, in the 3rd grade, and Josephine, in the 10th, “are now left without father or mother.” Like her own mother, Katie left children too young to remember her well.

The Omaha Daily Bee carried the news from Sidney the next day and gives the cause: she died “of pneumonia and heart failure after only a few days’ illness,” having “resided in Sidney nearly twenty-five years,” and “was loved by everybody.”

“Ave Maria”

The family doesn’t record which “Ave Maria” was sung, but in 1907 the most likely is the Bach–Gounod setting: Charles Gounod’s melody laid over the first prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, the “Ave Maria” most often sung with organ at Catholic funerals of the time. Here it is as it would have sounded in a church like St. Patrick’s, for soprano with organ and violin.

The records hint at the mix of faiths Laurel describes. Katie’s parents, Irish immigrants, were married in 1853 not by a priest but by the pastor of the Methodist Episcopal church in Roxbury; yet Katie herself lived and died a devout Catholic, as did her daughter Dodie and Dodie’s children, while her daughters Laura and Kathryn became Protestants.

Read both obituaries in full. After her death the children were scattered among relatives; by 1910 Joe, twelve, was living in Denver with his eldest sister Laura and her husband Myron Sager. The family remembers it as an escape: Joe told Ruby that Joseph’s former business partners meant to put the children in a convent home and take Katie’s estate, and that Laura and Myron married and took the younger ones to Denver on a night train (A Night Train to Denver). Her obituary announced the funeral but said nothing about her burial, and with the children leaving Sidney so quickly the family never knew for sure where she was laid to rest. About 2011 her granddaughter Laurel had a stone placed for her beside Joseph’s in Greenwood Cemetery, calling her “beloved wife, mother and grandmother.”

Katie’s family

Grandparents	Martin Conner, of Ireland (father of Peter) Mathew Caldwell and Alice, of Ireland (parents of Catherine)
Parents	Peter Conner (O’Connor), born Ireland, died Fremont, Nebraska, 9 September 1881 Catherine Caldwell, born Ireland about 1836, died Braintree, Massachusetts, 1 November 1864
Sisters	Alice (1856–1921), Mrs. Frederick Nirk, later Mrs. John Higgins Anna or Annie (about 1858) Mary E. (about 1861)
Stepmother	Ellen Sheedy, born Ireland about 1838
Half-sister	Lizzie (born 7 December 1865), Mrs. Jacob Heintz
Husband	Joseph Sharmer I (1829–1898)
Children	Laura, Kathryn, Josephine “Dodie”, Joseph

Timeline

25 June 1853	Peter Conner, son of Martin, marries Catherine Caldwell (“Calver”) in Roxbury, Massachusetts
2 October 1856	Sister Alice born in Plymouth
About 1858	Sister Anna born
About 1861	Sister Mary E. born
20 November 1863	Catherine “Katie” Connor born in Quincy
1 November 1864	Her mother, Catherine, dies in Braintree, aged 28
1865	Peter remarries, to Ellen Sheedy; the family is in Braintree
7 December 1865	Half-sister Lizzie born in Braintree
1870s	The family moves west to Nebraska
June 1880	Peter in Fremont, working in a marble shop; Katie, 13, at school in Sidney with her sister Alice
9 September 1881	Peter O’Connor dies in Fremont
10 November 1884	Katie marries Joseph Sharmer in Sidney
1885–1897	Laura, Kathryn, Josephine and Joseph born
14 June 1898	Joseph Sharmer dies; Katie is left a widow at 34
28 June 1900	Census: head of her own household in Sidney, “capitalist”
11 April 1907	Dies in Sidney, aged 43; funeral at the Catholic church the next day

The records

Record	What it says	Link
Marriage, Roxbury, 1853	Peter Conner, 31, ropemaker, son of Martin; Catherine Calver, 18; both born Ireland	Index
Birth, Plymouth, 1856	Alice Conner, 2 October; parents Peter and Catharine	Index
Birth register, Quincy, 1863	Catherine Connor, 20 November; parents Peter and Catherine (Caldwell), both born Ireland	Index
Death register, Braintree, 1864	Catherine Conner, 28, 1 November; parents Mathew Caldwell and Alice	Index
State census, Braintree, 1865	Peter, Ellen, Alice, Anna, Mary E. and Catharine Connors	Index
Birth, Braintree, 1865	Lizzie Conner, 7 December; parents Peter Conner and Ellen Shedy	Index
Census, Fremont, 1880	Peter O’Connor, marble shop; Ella; Annie; Lizzie	Index
Census, Sidney, 1880	Alice Nirk, 31, and Katie Conner, 13	Index
Find a Grave, Fremont	Peter O’Connor, died 9 September 1881, Calvary Cemetery	Index
Marriage, Sidney, 1884	Kate Conner, 19, born Quincy; parents Peter Conner and Kate Caldwell	Index
Census, Sidney, 1900	Catherine Sharmer, widow, head, capitalist, owns home	Index
Obituary and school notice, 1907	Sidney Telegraph, 12 April 1907	On this site
Find a Grave, Sidney	Catherine “Katie” O’Connor Sharmer	Memorial
Death, Los Angeles, 1921	Alice Higgins, 63; parents “Patrick” O’Connor and Kate Caldwell	Index
Marriage of her son, San Francisco, 1928	Joe gives his mother as Kathryn O’Connor, born Ireland	Index

Still to find

• Where Katie was actually buried in April 1907. Greenwood Cemetery’s interment list (City of Sidney) records Joseph in Block A, Lot 10, but has no entry for Katie. Leads: her 1907 Nebraska death certificate (state registration began in 1904; copies from Nebraska Vital Records), the burial register of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, and the old Catholic burial ground 2½ miles east of Sidney, south of Highway 30, for which no index is online
• Which of Katie’s sisters married a Barthelmess and lived in San Diego in the early 1900s, and what became of Anna and Mary
• Katie’s probate file in Cheyenne County (1907), and any guardianship papers for her younger children, which could confirm or correct the family story of the move to Denver
• Where in Ireland the Conners and the Caldwells came from. Peter’s burial record at Calvary Cemetery in Fremont, or a Catholic register in Massachusetts, may name a county or parish
• Peter’s own mother’s name, and Alice Caldwell’s maiden name
• The marriage of Peter Conner and Ellen Sheedy, about 1865
• What became of Anna and Mary E.
• Ellen’s later life and burial, and whether the Ellen Connors in Sidney in 1885 is her
• Katie’s Catholic baptism in Quincy, which would give her godparents
• Proof that the man in the Hull photograph is Peter

Picture credits: portrait of Katie and the Hull card portrait, family photographs. Headstone photographs: Joseph Sharmer IV. Obituary and school notice: Sidney newspapers, 1907, copies posted on Find a Grave. Birth, marriage and death registers: Massachusetts State Vital Records, via FamilySearch. Census pages: U.S. National Archives, via FamilySearch. If you are a descendant of Peter and Catherine Conner, of Alice Nirk Higgins, or of Lizzie and Jacob Heintz, please share a memory.