152 West 124th Street, Harlem, NYC (behind tree),
where Margaret McQuade Bunyon died at age 27.
Often, stories to be told can originate from within your own family. Novelists often borrow from their families and friends to create characters and stories. For years, I've been looking for traces of information about my mother's Irish branch of the family that settled in New York City in the late 1800s. It's not easy to sort out vital records in America’s most populated city. Little or nothing found its way to the pages of Manhattan newspapers. There were just too many people a century ago. You had to be wealthy or notorious to be deemed worthy of so much as an obituary. My family was neither and a chance at wealth was passed up in the name of love. My McQuade and Bunyon ancestors were just immigrants struggling to make a living in Irish Harlem at a time when Irish Catholics were not welcomed everywhere.
This was 126th St. at 7th Ave, NYC, in 1910, two blocks from the apartment building where
Joseph and Margaret (McQuade) Bunyon lived with my grandmother Helen until she was 7.
In 1919, my protestant grandfather, Fred J. Davis of Altoona, was recovering in a military hospital in New York City for months after being wounded twice on French battlefields during WWI, the second time a machine gun cut him down. He would have lost a leg had he not threatened the life of a surgeon who was all too eager to amputate. It was at the hospital in New York where he met and married my Catholic grandmother, Helen Bunyon. Helen was a young nurse, not yet 17 years old, helping seriously wounded soldiers transferred from Europe. When my grandfather awoke in the hospital, Helen was standing over him in her white uniform. My grandfather told my mother he thought he had died and Helen was an angel. She was very beautiful, with hair down to the middle of her back when it wasn’t tied up in a bun. I can’t even imagine the grief when my grandmother died in 1933 at age 30, of a staph infection following an operation for a thyroid tumor at an Altoona Hospital. In the middle of the Depression, after years of being denied benefits by the Veterans Bureau, and with five children, my grandfather loses the love of his life and the woman who brought him back to life following the war. Their love story is an excellent basis for a novel some day.
They married soon after Davis was discharged from the hospital. To my Welsh Davis family, after five generations in Maryland and Pennsylvania, a Protestant marrying a Catholic was not a big deal. But, to native Irish Catholics, fleeing hunger and war with Protestants in Ireland, it was a very big deal. Helen's parents were both dead, her mother when she was 7 and her father before that. Helen's aunt, who raised Helen, according to family oral history, is said to have married into a family that owned a chain of jewelry stores around New York City. When Helen married my grandfather, she was disinherited. Love has a tradition in my family of coming before money and I’ve never sensed any bias against any religion in my family. In fact, few people know that I was confirmed in the Catholic Church, but it’s a long story as to why I am not a practicing Catholic. Perhaps if Helen had remained close to her family's religious beliefs, she wouldn't have married my grandfather. That would have erased everyone who followed—my mother, me, my children, grandchildren, etc.
Because my grandmother died when my mother was 5 years old, repeating history her mother suffered as a child, much was lost in learning more about the Bunyons and McQuades. Then yesterday, after discovering the City of New York held family records in its archives, I received the 1910 death certificate of my great-grandmother, Margaret McQuade Bunyon after 20 years of searching. "Chronic Alcoholic Gastritis," the coroner concluded. She was 27 years old. What that means is, whether from stress, an infection, or excessive alcohol consumption, she most likely suffered a painful death from a bleeding ulcer. Life was tough in Harlem for a poor Irish immigrant mother raising a young child and trying to make ends meet. The circumstances of Margaret’s death were never known until this past week, so it was a shocking revelation as to how she died so young. In family history, I've learned not to judge or make comparisons to subsequent generations. I will never know what life was like in the context of early 20th century in an already crowded city and being an ethnicity among the unwanted. I see Margaret as family, just as if she was alive today. In a way, when we research our families, our ancestors do live again. For a writer, every document, clipping, photograph, or oral tradition is another chapter in their tale. Imagining the rest is left to our own ability to visualize the past as best we can.
There is still little known about my great-grandfather, Joseph Bunyon. Oral tradition traces him back to the grandfather of John Bunyan (1628-1688), author of one of the most prolific books in history, The Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan, a nonconformist and a writer, both personally familiar traits, encourage me to believe the link could be true. Like Bunyan, who was imprisoned in England for preaching the "wrong" religious doctrine, having the attitude we'd rather go to jail than compromise our principles, is intrinsic on all sides of my family tree. However, any connection has yet to be documented. That gap should be closed as soon as I find records on Joseph. My cousin believes she’s found records on Joseph. Joseph was in the Army during the Spanish American War and was discharged a month before he married my great-grandmother. The Bunyan family tree has been extensively researched over the centuries. Plugging in my branch to the right tree is yet to be done, but centuries of stories wait for confirmation. Finding Margaret’s grave will also be difficult. She was buried at Calvary in Queens, the primary cemetery for Catholics in 1910. There are three million burials at Calvary. Online grave finders list 67,000 Calvary burials, at most, but not my great-grandmother.
Because Margaret’s death certificate recorded that she died at home, I now have the 1910 home address for her and my 7-year-old grandmother, Helen—152 West 124th Street, Manhattan. Most of New York City has been photographed by Google Maps. Sure enough, the original apartment building is still there. Today, it’s a five-story, rent-controlled co-op with a leaky roof and directly across the street from the loading entrance of the African American Studio Museum in Harlem. When I look up at that building, I don’t see just another meaningless, red brick building. I see the ghosts of my family locked in a struggle with life and tragedy. [see photos]
