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![]() This is one of several fascinating tales I have found on the pages of old newspapers in an era when reporters freely exercised dramatic license to add flair to stories that often were short on facts, long on unanswered questions and read like dime store novels. Yet I have no doubt this story is essentially true. Unfortunately, I have found no subsequent story that might have filled the many holes that exist in the newspaper account that follows. |
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This strange tale became even stranger, in my mind, at least, when I came across William McLaughlin's obituary in the Syracuse Journal of Friday, October 23, 1914: |
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What jumps out is that William McLaughlin and his wife, Anna Conroy, had other children, two of whom are mentioned in the obituary, though they were (I think) conspicuously absent in the 1910 story about their father's return. In all, William and Ann McLaughlin had seven children. Whether Mrs. McLaughlin was pregnant with the seventh child when her husband disappeared is an unanswered question. But for sure son James and a daughter, Genevieve, were alive when their father left. Son William supposedly was born in 1891, the year his father left. Perhaps his wife's pregnancy hadn't yet been discovered. Still, the couple had at least two children at home when William McLaughlin deserted his family. As far as I can tell, their four children who died were all daughters – Ellen, Mary, Louise and Sara. (Genevieve would die at age 19 in 1907, three years before her father's return.) The 1910 newspaper article says William and Ann McLaughlin also lost a boy named Arthur, but the only Arthur McLaughlin I have found so far with Skaneateles connections was William's nephew, the son of Dennis McLaughlin. It's possible William also had a son named Arthur who died at the age of three, but his name is not listed among those buried in the family plot. Another slight complication: daughter Genevieve was three years old in 1891. So unless Genevieve and Arthur were twins ... Contrary to what was reported in the newspaper article, it's extremely unlikely that Mrs. James McLaughlin Jr. accompanied her husband to Pennsylvania to find the missing brother. By 1910, James McLaughlin Jr. and his wife, the former Mary Jane O'Neil, had been separated for many years. She, in fact, had been declared incompetent and was subject of a long, unpleasant legal battle over the terms of a separation agreement her husband had signed. The idea attributed to James McLaughlin Jr. in the 1910 article that his brother might have gone to England also seems incredibly far-fetched. The Skaneateles Press seemed to mention the comings and goings of every resident in the late 1800s; I've seen nothing about William McLaughlin traveling to England on company business, though others in the family made the trip a few times. Also, I can't help but wonder how William's wife and sons felt. They had moved from Skaneateles to Fulton before 1900. At that point, Mrs. McLaughlin and everyone who knew her (with the possible exception of her brother-in-law James) considered her a widow. She apparently lived an active, independent life afterward, which makes me think her reunion with her long-lost husband was awkward and strained, to say the least. Their reunion in Fulton lasted four years before William McLaughlin died. — JACK MAJOR |
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