John Alexander, Sir John A, John, Johnny, Dad, Da, Daddy. The Big Guy, Ye Big Hoser.
My father, John Alexander Moran (6 September 1934-14 March 2013), in an early-1960s, “Mad Men”-era photograph. He’s the tall, dark, and handsome young rogue at the far left:
John Alexander Moran, far left, early 1960s.
Lahey cousin in the background. As always, and of course.
After moving from Perth to Ottawa when she was about 16 years old, my mother attended two Ottawa schools: 1). Notre Dame Convent School (south side of Gloucester Street,near Metcalfe), where she completed high school; and 2). The Ottawa Teacher’s College (northeast corner of Elgin and Lisgar Streets).
This is my mother’s class at The Ottawa Teacher’s College. I believe it was taken in 1960 or 1961. My mother (Catherine Frances McGlade, 1939-2012) is in the back row, first from the left.
Ottawa Teacher’s College, ca. 1961
Note the variations in skirt length in the above photo. This looks like the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s!
On the back of the photograph are some autographs of her fellow students:
I should have posted these photos on 26 December 2013: fifty years later.
My parents were married (at Our Lady of Fatima, Ottawa) on Boxing Day, 1963.
Wedding recessional, Our Lady of Fatima, 26 December 1963.
Signing the register at Our Lady of Fatima, Ottawa. 26 December 1963.
December 26, 1963: John Alexander Moran and Catherine Frances McGlade
Well, I am biased, of course (I mean, obviously), but these photos, taken before I was born, seem to lend support to my recollections that my mother had a smile that could light up a room, and that my father was a bit of a handsome young rogue in his day.
John Alexander Moran, 6 September 1934-14 March 2013
Catherine Frances McGlade, 10 October 1939-22 December 1912
If you’re on Facebook and you’re interested in Ottawa local history, you should definitely subscribe to “Lost Ottawa,” which bills itself as “a Facebook research community devoted to images of Ottawa and the Outouais up to the year 2000.”
I have to say that, much as I enjoy seeing “Lost Ottawa” images turn up in my Facebook feed, I sometimes find it rather depressing. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ottawa lost so many of its beautiful older (19th- to early 20th-century) buildings to “progress,” and “development,” and ugly, utilitarian, Stalinist-style architecture.
Okay, “Stalinist-style” is admittedly a tad hyperbolic, but still. It is sad to see what Ottawa has lost of its built environment, through lack of respect for/attention to the principles of sane and sound historic preservation. No, we cannot save every building, and some older buildings are probably not worth saving. But this does not mean that we should tear down any old building whatsoever, in order to make way for the construction of yet another condo complex. And yes, times change, and the original purposes of older buildings become obsolete. But from this concession to the imperatives of change, it absolutely does not follow that older buildings are, by definition, useless obstacles to the realization of contemporary needs and goals. Many older buildings can and should be refurbished to meet new purposes, instead of bulldozed into the ground to make way for soulless concrete blocks.
Anyone with a Facebook account can join “Lost Ottawa” by clicking “Like” on its front page.
William Henry Killeen (1857-1904) was a son of Denis Benjamin Killeen and Ellen O’Brien, and a grandson of Denis Killeen and Mary Ahearn. In November 1885, he married Lucy Armstrong (1863-1956), a daughter of James Armstrong and Bridget Kelly, and a granddaughter of Joseph Armstrong and Catherine Smith.
Lucy Armstrong was the first cousin of my 2x-great-grandfather John Lahey (1837-1899). And Lucy Armstrong’s first husband William Henry Killeen was the nephew of John Lahey’s wife, my 2x-great-grandmother Margaret Jane Killeen (1835-1913). From the “Relationship Calculator” function at the family history database (Ottawa Valley Irish: A Genealogy Database), the relationships can be depicted like so:
Relationship between Lucy Armstrong and John Lahey
Relationship between William Henry Killeen and Margaret Jane Killeen
Courtesy of one of their descendants, here is a wonderful photograph of William Henry Killeen and Lucy Armstrong, with the first six of their nine known children:
William Killeen and Lucy Armstrong and family, ca. 1896
I believe this photograph was taken in 1896 or 1897. And I have to love the stylized backdrops of 19th-century studio portraits. This family lived and farmed at Sebastopol, in Renfrew Co., Ontario, Canada. But from the background of the above photograph, you might think they dwelled amidst the ruins of ancient Tuscany! or something like that.
William Henry Killeen died in August 1904, leaving his wife Lucy Armstrong a widow with nine children. About five years later (in May 1909), Lucy Armstrong Killeen married Albert Austin Massey, a British Home Child who was about twenty years her junior. The family moved out west, to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Albert Austin Massey fought with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War I, as did at least one of his stepsons, Francis Joseph Killeen.
Or probably not quite 2 years old. My mother was born 10 October 1939, and I’m guessing this photo was taken in the summer of 1941. So she would have been about 21 or 22 months old here.
This photograph was taken at Mississippi Lake, Carleton Place, Lanark County, Ontario, where my mother’s family had a summer cottage.
My mother Catherine Frances [McGlade] Moran (10 October 1939 – 22 December 2012), with my maternal grandmother Delia Lucie [Derouin] McGlade (18 July 1902 – 13 January 1999):
Delia Lucie Derouin (1902-1999) with Catherine Frances McGlade (1939-2012)
My mother was the youngest of six children, all born between April 1932 and October 1939. So my grandmother, pictured above in 1941, gave birth to 6 children in the space of 7.5 years! No twins; no multiple births. She was a force of nature, was Nana Dee. And she lived to be 96.5 years. Sadly, my mother did not enjoy the kind of longevity that her own mother had achieved. She died at the age of 73, of a particularly virulent form of (invasive lobular) breast cancer.
My father at age 15.
I believe this photo was taken in the Gatineaus. My grandfather worked for the Gatineau Power Company; and for at least a couple of years, when my dad was a teenager, the family lived in company housing in the Gatineau region. “But how did you get to school?” I once asked my father (I knew he had gone to school in Ottawa, at St. Patrick’s College [which was a high school, btw]). “Oh, I got there,” he replied. “But how?” I persisted. My dad claimed he used to hitchhike.
John Alexander Moran, age 15
The romance of my father’s childhood: the strictness of the adults (parents, priests, and various other guardians and caretakers), combined with the freedom they accorded him (‘you hitchhiked to school?!’). As a child, I was fascinated by this apparently paradoxical mixture of repression and liberty (which was typical of a working-class Irish Catholic upbringing in the 1930s and 1940s, I’m pretty sure): the strictness sounded like something from another era, but so too did the freedom. And my father’s memories of his childhood, as recounted by him to me and my sisters, are now a part of the memories of my own childhood.
When it comes to family history research, I’m all about evidence-based standards of genealogy (exhaustive searches; careful assessment of sources; accurate citation; and so on and so forth). But it’s the romance of the family stories that led me to the research in the first place.
This is a wonderful group photo, taken, I presume, on the steps of a school.
I only wish I knew which school.
My dad is in the second row, third from the left (here indicated with a blue arrow — which I’ve only inserted on a digital copy, of course! not on the original photo). He appears to have a lump on his forehead: perhaps as the result of a fight?
John Alexander Moran (1934-2013) in a group (presumably school) photo. Late 1940s?
My father grew up in a working-class Irish and French neighbourhood of Ottawa (Mechanicsville). As children, my sisters and I used to thrill to his stories of “the street”: of street violence, and of street “smarts,” and of a seemingly anarchic, parental-free zone that we could only imagine in our dreams. To hear my dad tell the tale, apparently he and his classmates once threw an English teacher off the bridge into the Rideau Canal! (but did that really happen? er, I don’t know). Well, no doubt he embroidered and exaggerated for rhetorical effect: he always loved a good story. But of his ridiculously strict (by today’s standards) Catholic education, my dad was always dead serious and crystal clear: “We were but savages, and the priests meant to civilize us, and that was the only way out” (out of poverty, and mindless tribalism; and out of lace doilies on the arms of an ugly settee in a small, still, close room; and out of Mechanicsville).
The boy in the front row, second from the left, looks like a Lahey cousin with whom my father grew up, with whom he was especially close; but who knows?
My father attended St. Patrick’s College, Ottawa for secondary school (high school), from roughly 1947 or 1948 to 1952 or 1953 (I don’t have the exact dates, though I probably could, and perhaps should, figure this out). For the later years of his elementary education (grades 7 and 8?), he was at St. Malachy’s.
Did your father attend St. Pat’s, Ottawa? Or, perhaps, St. Malachy’s? Do you see him in this photograph?
UPDATE (6 August 2013): The boy in the front row, second from the left, is indeed the Lahey cousin (a son of Clifford Lahey and Stella McDonnell) with whom my father grew up. This cousin’s daughter is almost certain that this photo was taken in front of St. Pat’s, but is going to ask her father.
UPDATE (15 August 2013): The above photo was taken in front of St. Patrick’s, school year 1947-48.
John Vallely was a son of Michael Vallely and Mary Ryan. He was born in Lanark Co., Ontario in 1861, and emigrated to Grand Forks, North Dakota about 1882. In 1889 he married another Canadian emigrant to North Dakota: Anna Lillian (“Lila”) Moran (1861-1915), daughter of Alexander Michael Moran and Mary Ann Leavy.
This photograph comes from Clement A. Lounsberry’s North Dakota History and People: Outlines of American History, vol. 3 (Chicago: The S.J. Clark Pub. Co., 1917), which I discovered through a google search.
John Vallely (1861-1935)
Local, regional, and state histories will often provide useful biographical information about prominent (male) citizens, and will occasionally even supply a photograph. The biographical coverage of such histories is typically skewed toward businessmen, politicians, and other local worthies, and is therefore extremely unrepresentative of the area’s population as a whole (no labourers; no humble farmers; and almost no women).
John Alexander Moran, Ottawa, early 1960s
My dad loved life; and family; and food; and drink; and song: he loved life, he loved it all.
He had a big heart. And he loved life: he loved it all.
As a younger man, when he was hale and hearty, he had a beautiful singing voice too. And he knew so many songs!
He taught us some of the old Irish ballads, and some of the newer Irish tunes too (yes, I can sing ‘The Dutchman’ from start to finish, without a cheat sheet: thanks, Dad!), and some Canadian folk songs, and a couple of dear old French Canadian numbers, as well. He taught us to always have a ‘party piece’ or two with which to entertain the company.
Here his voice had weakened, and he couldn’t remember all the lyrics, so my sister got the lyrics up through google, but he had trouble reading them from the screen. But as sick as he was here, he was game, he was ready to sing, and still his voice rings true.
So here he is, loving life while dying of cancer, singing “The Jolly Tinker.”1. He loved life; and family; and song: he just loved it all.
