Life Sentences: A Story of Discovery and Recovery (Afterward - Immigrant Stories)
Afterward - Immigrant Stories
When I started this book, I started at the beginning, tracing how my parents came to be together in Cranston, Rhode Island, in the United States of America in 1950. It’s a collection of immigrant stories. Nearly all of us has them.
Zachariah Ashworth and Sarah Corrigan
On a snowy day in January 1818, Captain James Watkinson commanded the ship James Monroe from New York to Liverpool, launching a new era in ocean “liners” built on the novel idea that “regularly scheduled” trips between the “new” and “old” worlds would be attractive to passengers. Previously, departure correlated with capacity: fill the ship with cargo and passengers, then set sail. The new Black Ball Line’s owners reasoned differently: regular schedules, combined with improved ship speed and an increasing number of passengers interested in the travel route, could be profitable. They were correct, and a new era of ocean liners was born.
Nine years later, Captain Watkinson was still sailing liners. The captain may have personally greeted the first Zachariah Ashworth and his mother, Johannah Ashworth, and his infant sister Elizabeth, as they embarked aboard the ship Hannibal, Watkinson’s new command, in the late summer of 1827 in Liverpool. Zachariah was three; his mother was twenty-one. If it existed, he likely did not share his mother’s anxiety about leaving her home at such a young age, perhaps never to return. Zachariah was one of 48 passengers on the voyage, which would take between 30-40 days to reach one of New York’s ports. These ports were loosely supervised by U.S. customs officials, but that did not guarantee safety as disembarking passengers often were prey to thieves or subject to other indignities. With good planning, however, Zachariah and his mother and sister would be welcomed by Zach’s father, George, instead.
Zachariah’s father had sailed into New York in September 1826. He was twenty-three. The Industrial Revolution was beginning, and his home borough of Rossendale in Lancashire, England, with an environment ideally suited for water-powered mechanization—the fuel of textiles—would grow five-fold during the revolution. But George decided to leave. He must have had different ideas: the revolution would come to the U.S. as well. After reuniting, Zach and his sister and parents made their way north to Lowell, Massachusetts, where the family would grow. By 1850, as recorded in the U.S. census by Assistant Marshal A.B. Wright on the 21st of August, the Ashworths were ten strong. And naturalized U.S. citizens as well, by virtue of George’s 1843 renunciation of his allegiance to Queen Victoria before his friends Benjamin Dean and John Brogdin, as well as the clerk of the Lowell Police Court. By law, the entire family became citizens when George did.
In Manchester, New Hampshire, on December 7, 1855, Zachariah, now 31 years old, married another immigrant, Sarah Corrigan, or perhaps Carragan, the records are inconsistent. She was born in Scotland, the daughter of Irish parents. A true “famine immigrant,” 16-year old Sarah travelled alone aboard the steamship Hugumm from Liverpool into New York in September 1852, along with 288 other passengers. On the ship’s manifest, she was listed as a dressmaker. Once arrived, she made her way to eastern New England. At the time of their marriage, Zach was working as a file cutter in Lowell, but either through necessity or wandering spirit, he moved between Lowell and Manchester and Warwick, Rhode Island as a file cutter or machinist or in “print works” or as a day laborer. During their travels, the couple had five children, only three of whom survived beyond the age of two: Joanna, named for her grandmother; Charles, named for an uncle; and the second Zachariah Ashworth. This Zachariah was born in 1874 in Apponaug Village in Warwick. Circumstances of the second Zachariah’s young life are not known except that he lost his father, the first Zachariah, at age 11 and his mother at age 12, after which he was probably raised by his sister, as records indicate they shared an address.
He was fortunate that his grandfather George was a successful and generous man. In his will, George Ashworth took care in distributing his estate, after paying his debts and funeral expenses: he left “six-sevenths” of his estate in equal shares to six children—Sager Ashworth, Charles Ashworth, Elizabeth Ashworth, Mary Stevens, Alice Dudley, and Nellie Hawes; separately, he also left one-seventh to his daughter Sarah J. Grand of Boston, taking great pains it seems to protect this portion of his legacy from speculation, poor decisions, or perhaps, Sarah’s husband, Charles Grand, as all proceeds to Sarah were to be held “in trust for her, and to be properly invested, and the income and profits therefrom to be paid to her semi-annually or more frequently if my said executors [Sager Ashworth and Albion Dudley] deem it necessary for her support.” Before dividing his estate in sevenths, however, he set aside a sum of $600 each for three grandchildren, Joanna “Annie” [McGeough] Ashworth, the second Zachariah Ashworth [my great grandfather] and Charles Ashworth, the offspring of his predeceased son, the first Zachariah, “late of Apponuag in the State of Rhode Island.” If his uncles invested the $600 well, the second Zachariah received a modest inheritance from his grandfather when he turned 21. In 1900, then, Zach was 26 and living with his sister and her family, the McGeoughs, in Cranston, on Nichols Street. One year later he married the 31-year-old widow Margaret (Mulvaney) Nelson, adopting, in all but name, her three children; the couple would have three more children, beginning with the third Zachariah, my maternal grandfather, in 1903.
Margaret Mulvaney
Margaret Theresa Mulvaney was born in the east of Ireland, north of Dublin, where the Hill of Tara rises over County Meath, to Anne Brady and her husband Patrick Mulvaney, on June 6, 1869. The county and its hill, which lent its name to Margaret Mitchell’s famed plantation in Gone with The Wind, is the legendary seat of the High King of Ireland, but for Margaret, it was a brief waypoint. When she was infant in 1869 or 1870, Margaret left Ireland, immigrating to the United States. How she travelled, and with whom, is a mystery for no passenger lists remain with her family’s names, but in 1875, at age 5, she is living as a “scholar” with her parents and siblings at 27 McKenna Street in Providence. Her course over the next decade is unclear. Her family suffered the tragic deaths of two young children in 1877, six months apart: four-year old Mary in August and three-year old Matthew in November. Then, the family as a group is conspicuously absent from the 1880 Federal Census and the 1885 Rhode Island State Census. Margaret emerges again with her marriage to Thomas Francis Nelson on October 7, 1887, and again with the birth of her children, William in 1888, Anna in 1891 and Joseph in 1893. Two years later, she was widowed in tragic circumstances.
In 1895, in the early afternoon of March 8, a great explosion shook the serene confines of College Street in Providence, just below Brown University’s “Quiet Green.” Heard nearly a mile away, the concussion sent cobble stones and railway timber hurling through the air. Windows in the immediate vicinity were shattered. One cobble flew in the air, landing inches from two little girls descending the hill. “A farmer was thrown into a feint,” according to the reporter who chronicled the event in a front-page story of the Sunday edition of The Providence Journal newspaper. One piece of timber projected two city blocks to land in the upper floor of “Dr Hall’s Church,” as the First Unitarian Church of Providence was called at the time. A family was dining in their home fronting the explosion, but no one was injured by the flying glass as all of the home’s windows shattered. A loaded streetcar had just descended the hill but none of its passengers experienced any harm, only shock. In fact, the only injuries sustained in the blast were to a sparrow, whose nest in a bird house in a yard of a College Street home was crushed by a large branch that had been broken off the trunk by a timber projectile from the blast, and Thomas Nelson. Both injuries were fatal. Nelson was an employee of the Union Street Railway Company working a short distance from the explosion as a coupler for the newly installed streetcar counterweight system on College Street. A spark from the counterweight cable conduit caused the ignition of an undiscovered underground gas buildup, from a leaking gas main or an accumulation of sewer gas. In either case, a missile from the blast hit Nelson over his right eye crushing his skull. A doctor on the scene did not hold much hope for Nelson, but the injured main was rushed to the Rhode Island Hospital where he died the next day. In a letter to the editor of the Journal, an “East Sider” expressed regret on behalf of all East Siders, “especially those who ride the College Hill cars,” for Nelson’s “sudden [death in such an] unexpected manner,” [and] “praised Nelson for being “careful, faithful, pleasant and agreeable at all times.” Further, the letter suggested the Journal start a fund for Nelson’s widow, Margaret (Mulvaney) Nelson, and her three children, the oldest of whom was 7.
How this unlikely couple, the second Zachariah and the widowed Margaret Nelson, came to marry is an unanswered question. It is certain Zachariah was aware of the explosion as it was front page news in the largest newspaper in Providence. Perhaps Zachariah had intimate knowledge of the fatal conditions extant on the hill where the accident occurred. On that day or a short time later, he was an employee of the railway company that operated the streetcar on which Thomas Nelson worked (years later, he would become a streetcar operator himself, eerily assuming Thomas’ profession). In 1895, Zachariah was a piper or steamfitter, which means he understood the causes of the explosion, and even a view as to the liabilities. Possibly, he felt personally responsible: had he helped construct the faulty conduit for the counter-weight cable that arced, igniting the leaking gas? After an appropriate period, then, to atone for his role in her situation, Zachariah sought out and married Margaret, agreeing to care for the Nelson children as his own. In this neat narrative, my maternal grandfather, the third Zachariah, the son of the second Zachariah and Margaret Mulvaney, is a product of penance. And of chance, the unfortunate chance of a massive explosion.
Margaret McCaughey and Patrick McNulty
In May of 1887 16-year old Margaret McCaughey, along with her older sister Bridget, emigrated from Ireland aboard the S.S. Ethiopia, an Anchor Line steamship that sailed from Glasgow, Scotland. These McCaugheys hailed from Fivemiletown in County Tyrone, the largest of the six counties comprising what is now Northern Ireland. At the time, there was no formal partition of the island, only sectarian strife smoldering, waiting for more fuel. The sisters probably traveled in a third-class birth, or steerage, with 300 other passengers, for 10-15 days at the Ethiopia’s top speed of 13 knots. Disembarking on the eastern tip of Manhattan at the South Street harbor, the immigrants would have been transferred for processing to Castle Garden in Battery Park where New York State’s Emigrant Landing Depot was located, before Ellis Island became the standard bearer for immigrant disembarkation. After a time, the sisters made their way to Providence, perhaps to meet relatives or friends or because they heard prospects were good in the booming mill towns of New England. It was here, in Providence, that Margaret married Patrick Joseph McNulty, my great grandfather, on September 22, 1892.
Patrick was from County Mayo, near Galway, on the west coast of Ireland. It would later be called the Irish Free State and then simply Ireland again. Patrick arrived 18 months earlier than Margaret, on October 16, 1886, at the age of 18, into Boston aboard the Cunard Line’s S.S. Cephalonia, a newer, faster ship than Ethiopia. His would have been a shorter journey than Margaret’s but he had to share his third-class accommodations with 1500 persons. Four years later, on November 24, 1890, Patrick “absolutely and entirely renounce[d] and abjure[d] all allegiance” to Queen Victoria, becoming a U.S. citizen. Based on the Naturalization Act of 1855, Margaret would have become naturalized when she married Patrick in 1892. Marriage was one of the only means for a female immigrant to gain naturalization status as courts simply failed to recognize the need to hear naturalization requests by women, particularly in light of the 1855 act granting women citizenship as soon as their husband gained it. Shortly after their marriage, the couple purchased a three-story tenement home at 31 Ayrault Street in the Smith Hill section of Providence and had three children: Rose Anna in 1894; Margaret in 1896; and Veronica in 1900. Margaret, the couple’s middle daughter, was my maternal grandmother. In 1904, Patrick died, leaving Margaret with the three young girls. Circumstances of his premature death are unclear. He was a file grinder, which, according to some historians, was a treacherous, albeit well-paid profession. This may account for both his death at the age of 36 as well as the couple’s ability to buy their home. Many file grinders failed to live beyond thirty years, owing to a high occurrence of lung disease, presumably from the fine metal filings and dust they inhaled during their work, hour-after-hour, day-after-day. Others were injured by grinding stones that shattered on a regular basis, typically multiple times per day.
On their own, the widow Margaret and her three daughters fared well. Moving first to Marshall Street on Federal Hill, and then to Baker Street in the Elmwood section of Providence, where two of the daughters, my mother’s aunts, would stay their entire life. Margaret purchased each of the multi-family houses in which they lived. For a time, she worked as a laundress “on her own account,” according to the census, until her daughters began to work, first supplementing and then replacing the household income. Daughter Ann [Rose Anna] was the first to go work as an operator for the American Telegraph and Telephone Company; she was followed by daughters Margaret and Ronnie [Veronica] when they reached the proper age. By 1920, the three McNulty daughters worked, and their mother kept house. It was at the telephone company, that the McNulty women met Dorothy Merrill, a fellow operator, subsequent supervisor, sometime nemesis, and my future maternal step-grandmother. For more than twenty years, then, since Patrick’s death, the McNulty women lived together, at first reconciling their grief at the loss of a husband and father, then making ends meet in a single-parent home, then as a mother and daughters navigating the travails of adolescence and young adulthood, and then as a watchful middle-aged mom and maturing daughters, first into young women and then slightly older women, who were content, or not, as spinsters at ages 33, 31 and 27. For daughter Margaret, this would change in January 1927, when my maternal grandparents, Margaret McNulty and the third Zachariah, a first and second generation American, respectively, married.
Malvina Dufault and Paul Ethier
Malvina Dufault and Paul Ethier, my paternal great-grandparents, met in the small village in which they were born. In fact, for a time, Malvina and Paul grew up in each other’s shadows. In the 1871 Canadian census, the Ethiers and Dufaults are recorded as the 123rd and 130th families (of 224) in the 106th and 111th houses—literal neighbors. Three years later, he 21 and she 17, Malvina and Paul married in the municipality of Saint-Aimé Parish, in St. Victoire de Sorel, Quebec, in 1874. In 2000, the Saint-Aimé Parish population was 523. It is a place steeped in French-Canadian culture and remains 100% French-speaking today, not unusual for the region—its website does not have an English translation option. Both Malvina and Paul were 5th generation French-Canadians, their ancestors predating British conquest and reaching back to the period of New France, the name given Canada when the French first arrived, and nearly to the founding of Quebec City. They were steeped in the culture as well, but the allure of booming industry in the U.S. was powerful. So, they travelled, embarking on a three-decade journey between their home in Canada and waypoints in New England, one of which was Biddeford, Maine. Despite the back-and-forth nature of their journey, eventually they emigrated, settling in the northwest section of Rhode Island.
Biddeford has a long history, beginning in 1616; it is one of the oldest European settlements in the United States, even older than the more-storied 1620 landing in Plymouth, Massachusetts. For more than 200 years it was a sleepy, coastal town, exporting fish and lumber. Then, propelled by the industrial revolution and the beneficial geography of the Sacco River, Biddeford’s economy grew rapidly during the latter 18th and early 19th centuries, beginning with water-powered mills making textiles and leather-goods, developing with grain production, and eventually encompassing granite quarries. The Sacco River and Bay were the dual engines that moved the goods. Between 1840 and 1850, population exploded by 140%, attracting immigrant labor from Ireland, as well as the French-Canadians of Quebec. Incorporated as a city in 1855, Biddeford grew steadily for nearly 100 years, but it shared the fate of most New England mill towns in the latter part of the 20th century, a slow decline caused by less expensive labor in other regions and countries and productivity enhancements requiring less labor overall. While still booming, though, in 1878, Biddeford’s immigrants included Paul and Malvina Ethier with their infant son Pierre. But the city did not grasp them firmly, and their initial stay was short-lived. Over the course of the next two decades, most of their 13 children were born in Canada, but three would be born on their return to Biddeford, including my paternal grandmother, Marie Delima “Della” Ethier on October 17, 1897. After she was born, Paul and Malvina moved from Maine to Woonsocket, RI, to be with their son, but they made a final Canadian trip in 1907, perhaps in the wake of Paul’s father’s death. They immigrated permanently to the U.S. in 1910, via the Port of St. Albans in Vermont. Paul and Malvina, along with their blue-eyed children, Leona, Paul, Damas and Della, entered with $400 and a plan to return to Woonsocket where their son Joseph had settled as a weaver.
From Woonsocket, Della and my great-grandparents would move a short way to Burrillville, RI, returning, by the time of the 1925 census, to 47 Wood Avenue, Woonsocket. Burrillville is a town in Providence County, encompassing several small villages, among which are Harrisville and Pascoag, my grandfather’s childhood homes. It’s during my great grandparents’ time in Burrillville and Woonsocket that Marie Delima “Della” Ethier met James Edward Maguire.
Mary Anne Sheehan and William Maguire
When I was young, my aunt would tell me that her father did not talk much about his parents. She implied it was a subject my grandfather avoided. This was incongruous to me. To the extent I knew him, which was limited, for I was young when he died, I knew my grandfather to be a talker. He had the “gift of gab,” as the Irish say. I evidenced this as a child. I was also told it. And as proof, sometimes my aunt would pull out an old newspaper featuring a photograph of my grandfather kissing the Barney Stone in Ireland, an act fabled to impart said gabbing gift. I lacked the precociousness to doubt this proof. I suppose it made sense to me as a child. As a young boy, I’m not sure I cared. About the gabbing. About its origins. Or about my grandfather’s uncharacteristic silence regarding his parents. Other things occupied me. I was a kid. But this is how our personal history—our family history—can be lost: stories fail to pass between generations. Often the younger generation is not listening or is not ready to listen (or when they are ready, it is too late), but in my grandfather’s case, he relegated his family’s past to a bin whose contents, apparently in his opinion, were not worth sharing.
A family photograph shows an austere family with dour, suspicious, or even angry, expressions. Of the five people in the picture, the adults seem the least threatening, with Mary, my great-grandmother, looking particularly disbelieving, and great grandfather William appearing neutral toward the photographer, and perhaps a bit proud and protective of his family. The children’s countenances are, in contrast, nearly hostile. My grandfather’s steely gaze conveys antagonism combined with a passivity screaming “I will exact my revenge for having been subjected to this moment,” while his younger brother, my grand-uncle, William appears to be growling. It does not help that both boys’ heads have been shaved and they are dressed in dark, wool outfits, offering a resemblance to escapees from a home for juvenile delinquents. Sarah, one of my grandfather’s older sisters, stands at the center of the photo, her head tilted to one side, her hair braided and tied with a bow, with an in-charge expression. Two older children, Rosella and Nellie, are missing from the picture, perhaps working at the mill when the photo was taken. While both insightful and deceiving, a picture offers only an instant of truth, and extrapolating beyond that is an exercise full of faith and uncertainty. But this photograph, combined with my grandfather’s reluctance to discuss his childhood and his parents, exposes the rough hue of his upbringing. It is conspicuous for its absence of comfort. When I knew him, my grandfather was a happy older man. Imagining his childhood filled with anger as revealed in the picture is difficult and unpleasant, though not inconceivable. For I have learned some of the history that was not passed on.
William Maguire became a weaver after immigrating to the U.S. as a young man in 1877 and settling in Burrillville. With the industrial revolution, Burrillville experienced an economic boom similar to Biddeford’s, and like Biddeford, by 1877, the textile mills of Burrillville and Woonsocket had been attracting French-Canadian and Irish migrants for decades. They came in search of steady employment and steady lives. Born to James Maguire and Bridget Boyne in County Tyrone, in Northern Ireland, around 1860, William was one of these Irish migrants. The jewel of Burrillville’s industry was Harris Mills, for which the village of Harrisville is named. Harris Mills was a cotton mill in the fashion of the first ever textile mill in the United States in nearby Pawtucket, the historic Slater Mill. The mill evolved and grew over decades, changing management and ownership, adding structures, experiencing destructive fire, and confronting a host of new competition, to become the headquarters of the Stillwater Worsted Company, the largest company in Burrillville. The clock tower of the Stillwater Worsted Company still stands as a landmark in Harrisville. Textiles were even more significant to the larger city of Woonsocket, which, at its height, had scores of textile mills, and in the middle of the 19th century, was one of the largest textile manufacturing centers in the U.S. As pressure from southern cotton manufacturing emerged, one mayor of Woonsocket traveled to Europe, seeking investors, focusing on France, to convince European textile industrialists of the benefit of Woonsocket, and he was so successful that a part of Woonsocket’s textile industry became known as the French mills. Despite this foreign influx, the industry would not survive the trauma of The Great Depression. Even accounting for war production, New England textiles suffered a long, slow decline until the vast majority of the mills were destroyed by fire or renovated for alternative uses, though some still stand along the “mighty Blackstone River” as historic monuments of the Golden Age of New England textiles. Escaping his famine-wrought home, William Maguire came to New England, presumably, to take advantage of this Golden Age. In Burrillville, he met Mary Anne Sheehan.
Mary Anne is the most enigmatic of my great grandparents. She joined the Irish diaspora in northwest Rhode Island after immigrating into New York in 1880. Five years later on December 28, 1885, when she was 27, she married William Maguire in St. Patrick’s Church in Harrisville, which the “happy couple intend[ed] to make their home,” according to the January 1st announcement in the Burrillville Gazette. Mary Sheehan was born in County Westmeath, Ireland, beyond the pale, either to Peter and Bridget Sheenan, based on her and William’s official marriage certificate, or John Sheehan and Mary Clark, based on her official death certificate; her surname is different in the two records as well. The inconsistent parentage is inexplicable, but the surname discrepancy is likely a transcription error, though I have found nothing in her own handwriting to offer clarification on the spelling. In my family’s trove of photographs, however, there is one of a man bearing an uncanny resemblance to my older brother Tim. When I first saw it, in fact, I wondered if it was Tim posed in a period setting, the type of photograph a tourist might acquire at a museum or carnival. My in-laws and I took one in Gettysburg once, gussied up in our antebellum attire. The trove photo was taken at Bertherman Photography on Westminster Street in Providence and on the reverse, it is signed and dated: J. F. Sheehan, May 1904.
He is a healthy-appearing middle-aged man in a well-worn three-piece pinstripe suit striking a casual pose in an imposing, ornate, uncomfortable-looking, wooden chair. His hair is greying and receding from a high forehead while his dark mustache stands out against his pale complexion. J.F. Sheehan had a broad nose—one that has been called a “Maguire nose” but must now be attributed to the Sheehans—and ample ears. And his eyes are, at once, serene and piercing. He most certainly is a blood-relation of mine. I surmise based on J. F. Sheehan’s appearance he might be Mary’s younger brother or nephew, though he bears scant resemblance to her based on the one photo I have; the contemporaneous signature, however, leads me to conclude Sheehan is the correct surname. As for Mary’s parents, my great, great grandparents, I am resigned to the unknown: Peter and Bridget or John and Mary.
William and Mary, the “happy couple,” ended their first decade of marriage in a decidedly unhappy way. On June 11, 1896, having “no means of support,” William entered a state infirmary, probably the Almshouse on the site of the current Adult Correctional Institution in Cranston, Rhode Island. According to admission records, he was also lame and intemperate.
That there was a connection between William’s disability, his drinking and his lack of means seems obvious, but how they are related is not clear. An accident could lead to loss of employment, which has a well-worn relation to intemperance. Alternatively, excessive drink could result in an accident, leaving a laborer disabled. Whatever the case, it is unlikely the condition had a sudden onset and the family probably faced a chronic and growing struggle, both to feed and house themselves and to manage William’s condition. The burden must have fallen heavily on Mary and her three daughters, Rosella (7), Nellie (5) and Sarah (3). William’s release after six weeks may have been viewed with mixed blessings by the family, but he seems to have righted himself with steady employment by 1900. My grandfather, James Edward, was born nine months after William’s discharge from the Almshouse.
For the next two decades, the Maguires lived on Chapel Street in the “Harris and Donnelly Houses in the Harrisville District,” which was mill housing, and when old enough, each member of the family worked in the mills. By 1910, this included Rosella, Nellie and Sarah; by 1920, it included younger William, born in 1902. Mary stayed home to “maintain the house.” Curiously, my grandfather did not go to work in the mills. James Edward’s first recorded job was a “helper” to a baker; then as an Assistant Foreman in a machine shop and then a postal clerk, a 50-year job from which he retired. To the extent my grandfather did have animus toward his childhood life, this avoidance of mill work—the family profession, as it were—may have been one of its manifestations. Animus probably preceded avoidance, though. In the family photo, James appears to exhibit anger at a young age. In another, adolescent photo with his brother, he seems disdainful or indifferent, perhaps normal for an adolescent. In yet another, his high school photo, he seems aloof. It is possible the family’s environment exacted a heavy emotional toll on everyone involved.
While William had steady employment and avoided for more than twenty years the State infirmary, his disability and propensity to drink would have been a challenge for the family, and for James in particular, if William directed his anger toward his eldest son. After two decades, the family’s situation quickly changed: William was again admitted to the State Infirmary in March 1919, staying for more than a year. His condition for admittance was listed as “poverty.” After release in August 2020, he was admitted a final time in May 1921 for “senility” and “amputation of left leg.” He died in the infirmary in December 1921. It is reasonable to question whether these final two years were more, or less, challenging for my grandfather and his family. Was William’s absence while infirm a relief or a burden? I am compelled to conclude it was a relief, however emotional the process may have been for those involved, especially Mary, my great grandmother, who would live another 20 years with her daughters and grandchildren. For my grandfather, who was 24 at the time, his father’s passing allowed him to draw a cloak over the early part of his life and look to the future, which was, literally and ironically, at a mill.