The Gaspé Connection

The Adams - O'Toole Family, ca. 1900 - Top (L to R): Raymond, Barbery,
Albert, Gertrude, Gregory, Margaret; Bottom (L to R): Ambrosine,
Mother Eleanor Ellen (nee Adams), Patrick, Elizabeth, Father Andrew O'Toole

This is my Gaspé family. The young woman standing at the far right of this photograph is my grandmother, Margaret O’Toole. She was about 20 years old when it was taken in Alpena, Michigan, around 1900. With her are nine of her ten siblings, posed with my great-grandfather Andrew O’Toole, seated just below Margaret, and my great-grandmother, Eleanor Adams, seated second from left.

They left their home in Gaspé for Alpena, Michigan in 1881. Over a period of about 10 years – from 1875 to 1885 – Andrew, Eleanor and several of the O’Toole brothers from that rugged, windswept peninsula emigrated to the United States. Most of them settled in Alpena.

My Dad spent his early childhood in upstate New York, where the Delaney clan lived. Margaret, his mother, had married William Delaney, a feisty Irishman who, like many in his family, worked in the tanneries. Dad's first years were spent in Gowanda, NY, then the family moved to Endicott, NY, home of Endicott-Johnson shoes. Bill Delaney died when my father was nine. Dad didn’t talk much about his childhood, but in rare moments he reminisced with his siblings about the summers he spent in Alpena with all those many cousins from his mother's side of the family.

This photo of the O’Tooles was among the family papers I inherited from my parents. I knew very little about this side of the family. One story, however, hung in the back of my mind’s closet like a worn oilskin coat: one of my ancestors from this family and her teen-aged son had survived a shipwreck off the coast of Gaspé in the 1800s.

  

My parents didn’t have much information about this story. What was the name of the ship? What year did it come aground? Where, exactly? What was the name of the relative who survived? Her son? How was she related to our family? They had few clues, except that my grandmother had been born in Gaspe. And by the time they began looking, anyone who would have known anything about it was long dead.

Determined to ferret out some evidence of the survivors and document their story, my parents made the trek up to Gaspé in the 1970s to seek out church records that would confirm their identity. There were told that the church that they thought would have kept the records had burned and all records were destroyed. They came home empty-handed.

My father died in 2007. Mother in 2011. They died without ever having solved the mystery of the shipwreck's survivors. 

I came across the photo of the O'Tooles sometime after my mother's death. The shipwreck story pushed its way to the front of my mind. The puzzle began to haunt me. So nine months ago, I began preparations for my own journey to the Gaspé Peninsula – “la Gaspésie.” Over the winter, I did Internet research on the Adams - O’Toole line, compiling a family tree of some 900+ members. I made contact with several distant relatives from that branch who are doing research on their own ancestors. Little by little, the story of the family has begun to fall into place.

In early June, I leave for Gaspé. I am getting close, very close, to finding the answers that my parents were seeking so long ago. Perhaps someday soon I can report the full story of my ancestor, her child, the shipwreck, and how all that is connected to the people in this photograph. 

.