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Willis-Donnahue Family History
This is my dad's family story. Well, not my dad's or even his dad's—neither of them was into family history and had no stories to tell me. My mom never got a straight answer from either of them about where they came from. But now comes the Internet, with quite a few surprises that my mom would have loved to know. And my dad. And "Ace".
An Old Story
I'll start with some ancient history. Many of the branches of the Willis tree go back to the early settlement of County Wexford, following the conquest of Ireland by William the Conqueror (circa 1066). Two families that were part of the Norman invasion were the Sinnotts ('De Synot' when they lived in Normandy) and the Hores (as in hoarfrost, signifying a person with grey hair, aged).
It wasn't all rose petals and cheering crowds with these invasions. The Norman armies conquered Ireland by means of brutal warfare, and those on the winning side were rewarded by taking ownership of parts of the conquered land. The Sinnots and Hores must have distinguished themselves in battle because they received many thousands of acres of Irish land.
Incidentally, the name 'Willis' is tied to William the Conqueror's conquest of England and Ireland, and there's a family coat of arms.
Except for royals and warriors, there are few reliable relics from the lives of my ancestors outside census records, military archives and lists of gravesites. Many critical and heroic and tragic events in all these lives have been lost to us because we don’t preserve our forebears’ life stories in any sort of formal and respectful tradition.
Here's some pompous verbosity from a member of the Sinnott family about his ancestors (the Irish are known for their poetry, not their grammar or spelling)...
Sir Walter Sinnott, a son of that noble family of Sinnott of Somersetshire, came over to Ireland with Richard de Clare, commonly called Strongbow, in the year 1170, in the reign of Henry the Second, with the commission of Captain or Knight, and being a gallant officer the said Sir Henry, for his good services, granted the said Sir Walter large estate territory in the County of Wexford, in the Kingdom of Ireland, containing several thousand acres adjoining the town and Harbour of Wexford and river Slaney, extending about eight miles long by about five miles width, now called Sinnottsland or Sinnottstown, after said family, which they held peaceable possesion until the reign of King Charles the First, when Ireland was invaded by the Usurper Cromwell, who dispossessed them of their lands and castles, which they had held for five hundred years.
Colonel David Sinnott was then Governor of the Town of Wexford and bravely opposed Cromwell whilst a man stood by his side, but at lenght, being overpowered by superior numbers, was obliged to surrender, with loss of the town, also his own property, and also two of his brothers who nobly fought and fell in the siege, they being betrayed by John De Stafford, who was Governor of one of the Castles outside the Town, and who opened the gates for Cromwell' s Troops to march in.
In the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1649-53), the Irish lost Wexford to Oliver Cromwell's army, and David Sinnott, who lead the defense, was hanged. The Sinnotts lost all their land and treasure. To this day Cromwell is hated by the Irish.
At that time Elizabeth Sinnott was married to William Hore and their daughter Rebecca Ann married into the Coram family in England. (When families had power, they kept the power by inter-marrying.)
Sir Walter Sinnott (My 18th great-grandfather)
After Rebecca Ann's generation it's Corams down the family tree for the next 200 years. Many branches of the Coram family emigrated to this continent well before the Revolutionary War. My grandfather's line of Corams stayed in Devon, England, until about 1800 when Joseph Coram and Mary Ann Fairchild (my 5th great grand-parents) emigrated to St. John, New Brunswick, Canada.
That branch of the family remained in New Brunswick for the next hundred years until my great grandparents, John Willis and Elizabeth Jane Coram, along with my then-infant grandfather, moved to New York City.
From New Brunswick to New York
Ace had five older sisters and two older brothers all born in New Brunswick. His younger sisters, Marion and May, were born in New York, which means the family's move from Canada happened when
Ace was at most two years old.
Ace's mother, Elizabeth Jane Coram Willis, died when he was six. We were told that Elizabeth died in an influenza epidemic and the presumption is that Ace's father, John, wasn't able to care for all the children. I can't find any information about John except his death date, but the story is that after their mother's death, having to choose between life in an orphanage or life on the street, the children all chose the street. Ace and his three closest sisters, the youngest of the siblings, agreed to stick together and support each other.
Subsequently there was a dispute among the boys and Ace's two brothers, William and John, left the City and moved to New Jersey. Times were tough and Ace looked to the military for steady employment to support his sisters. (I knew two of my great aunts when I was very young and they were very old. I remember them as two-fisted beer drinkers who could cuss like sailors. They were tough ladies!)
World War I
Ace enlisted in the U.S. Army when he was 17 and under-age, and actually spent some time in the service before he was caught and discharged. This is the record of his second enlistment in the Army Reserve in 1913 at the age of 18. The United States engaged in the war in June of 1917; Ace had been activated two months previously.
His Army records show his birthplace as New York City. He was born in Canada, and he must have lied to get around citizenship restrictions.
Ace was activated as a private, was promoted to corporal the following month, promoted to sergeant 36 days after that (on the day of his wedding to my grandmother), and then promoted to first sergeant on October 15, 1917. He went from Private to First Sergeant in six months.
He served in France beginning May 21, 1918 and was wounded “slightly” on June 29. He was honorably discharged as an enlisted man on September 29, 1918 to accept his commission as an officer. This promotion to commissioned officer on the battlefield is a very rare occurrence. It usually happens when all the officers in a unit have been killed and the highest ranking surviving non-commissioned officer (known as a mustang) is then commissioned to lead the unit.
As a mustang 2nd Lieutenant in the Infantry, Ace was involved in battles in the Argonne Forest. Here's a brief description of that engagement:
Commanding US troops was General Pershing. Responsible for the logistics was Colonel George Marshall. The American offensive began on September 26th, 1918 North of Verdun. It began like all World War I battles with a massive artillery attack. The American forces had mixed results in the first stage of the battle that lasted until October 3rd. German resistance was strong, but the sheer numbers of the Americans slowly forced the German back. Meanwhile the French and British troops to the North were having similar success, slow but steady advances. By the end of the second stage of the battle which lasted from October 6th to 26th the American forces had advanced over 10 miles and cleared the Argonne Forest.
In the final stage of the battle which lasted until the Armistice of November 11, 1918 American forces advanced on Metz, while French forces conquered the goal of the campaign: Sedan. The Americans suffered 192,000 casualties in the battle including 26,277 killed. The French suffered 70,000 casualties, while the Germans had 126,000 casualties among them 56,000 prisoners.
This is Ace’s 1919 Army discharge document (predecessor to today's DD Form 214).
Note in the discharge document that Ace declared zero percent disability. I remember as a kid wanting to sit by his left side at the dinner table so I could watch pieces of shrapnel moving in his hand and arm. His body was still riddled with steel shards 35 years after the war, but he refused to be characterized as a disabled veteran.
In no way to I recount any of this as a way to glorify warfare. Just the opposite—in my experience war is hell, and I take this opportunity to point out what this man went through just to make it home to care for his family as honorably as he could.
One odd bit of family history: My dad always signed his name Richard E. Willis Jr., 'Junior' because he thought his middle name, “Edward”, was the same as his father's—both of them used only the middle initial in their signatures. Dad learned from Ace shortly before Ace died that their middle names were different, but Dad somehow thought his father’s middle name was “Edmond”. The discharge document above is the only evidence of what the “E” really stood for. Ace's mother had honored her own mother, Deborah Emerson.
Life In New York
When Dad was growing up his family lived in a series of rented apartments in Manhattan and Long Island City, Queens. But by the time I came along my grandparents had settled in a second-floor apartment in a brownstone at 2880 Bailey Avenue in The Bronx, between the Harlem River and the Jerome Park Reservoir. Below is what the building looks like today. Not very much has changed in over a half century.
They also owned a summer bungalow at 46 Tamarack Road in Rocky Point, Suffolk County, Long Island. The house has been considerably gentrified from when I knew it in the 1950s before the old folks had indoor plumbing.
This is what it looks like today…
Ace died on March 27 (coincidentally, my dad’s birthday) in 1975 in his home at Rocky Point. After Ace's death Dad prepared his estate for sale, and in the process found a bookkeeper's
journal in a desk drawer with Ace's handwriting throughout. The account of how
Dad figured out what Ace had been up to is in my story
Ace & Uncle Frank.
Unfortunately, I have very little information about my paternal grandmother, Catherine Donnahue, whom I knew as “Grandma”, and who was called "Katie" by her parents and "Kitty" by her sibs.
One difficulty in researching the family history is that all I know about Grandma's parents is that her mother, Anne Lawless, was born in Ireland on April 14, 1864 and married John Donahue
sometime before 1890. Anne and John must have emigrated before 1890 because their first child, Rose, was born that year in New York City.
In the 1900 US Federal Census Anne appears at age 35 as a widow with four children living in Rosendale, Ulster County, New York, about 50 miles north of the City.
The 1910 Federal Census notes that the family was living on Nicholas Avenue in Manhattan. In addition to Anne, the census included Rose (20 at the time, listed as a department store saleslady),
Elizabeth (17, clerk in a mail order department) and Catherine (my Grandma, 16 at the time, bookkeeper in a department store).
In the documents I've seen in this country's records, Grandma’s first name is spelled at least four different ways: Kathryn (the name on her marriage and death certificates), Catherine, Katherine and Katharyn. And her last name, Donnahue, was changed to Donahue in some records. Of her siblings, Rose and Elizabeth kept the double 'n'. Her younger sibs (Anna, Peter and John) dropped the second 'n' as had their father.
What I remember most about Grandma is her generous smile and her expertise at Irish “cuisine” (overcooked chicken noodle soup, lumpy mashed potatoes, mixed pared fruit preserved in sloe gin, and lots of butter on everything).
Grandma died on June 13, 1960 in Rocky Point. This is her certificate of eligibility for burial in a national cemetery:
Early Years
My dad was born on March 27, 1920 in Manhattan. His only sibling, Francis Xavior was born 14 months later in Astoria in Queens. I knew very little about my Uncle Frank, but he turned out to be a fascinating character, as I recount in the other half of my story Ace & Uncle Frank.
Dad was in the fifth graduating class at Power Memorial Academy, an all-boys Catholic high school in the Lincoln Square area of Manhattan. For its size Power Memorial was an athletic powerhouse; listed among its distinguished athletes are NBA Hall of Famers Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Chris Mullin. As a freshman Dad was a starting pitcher on the varsity baseball team.
Being a good Irish mother, Grandma believed having a priest in the family would be her ticket to heaven, and I'm guessing she saw Dad as her only chance (for further explanation see Ace & Uncle Frank). Dad attended a minor seminary, St. Charles College, in Catonsville, Maryland but transferred to St. Joseph College in Dunwoodie, New York, where he earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy.
My parents met in the summer after their senior year in college. They each had volunteered as counselors in a camp for underprivileged children. I'm guessing Mom taught swimming and horseback riding, two life-long passions of hers. Dad was a natural teacher and mentor; I can see him hanging out with kids and maybe telling stories around a campfire. In any event, during that summer of '42 a flame was lit between the two of them that burned bright for over fifty years.
World War II
Pearl Harbor had been attacked the previous December, and after graduation Dad enlisted in the Army. Mom's parents were concerned that enlisted man's pay was insufficient to support their daughter and a family, so Mom and Dad committed to marrying if and only if Dad became an officer. (That was their story but I've always had my doubts about the if-and-only-if part.)
In April of 1943 Dad began Officer Candidate School (OCS) at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, home of the Army Signal Corps. He joined the 26th class of the USASCOCS.
OCS was brutal; Dad lost 40 pounds in the course of the 17-week training, but he persevered through to the last day, August 11, 1943. Mom attended his graduation ceremony on that day, and she said the tension was palpable the whole morning. Would Dad be commissioned an officer? Would they be married?
Not everyone would qualify. OCS policy required that at the closing ceremony, regardless of outcome, each trainee would receive a rolled piece of paper tied with a ribbon, not to be opened until after the ceremony. Those who failed OCS would receive a blank sheet and would return to enlisted ranks; those who passed received their commission. When Mom caught up with Dad after the ceremony on that morning their future was on the line. They unrolled his scroll together.
The paper contained orders. Dad had received his commission. Three days later, on August 14, 1943, Mom and Dad were married.
For the rest of 1943 and well into 1944, Dad went through a series of courses in decoding German and Italian encrypted messages. Because he was highly proficient in Latin, Dad took to French and Italian easily, and it didn't take him long to learn German.
The Army had appropriated several country clubs in eastern states and turned them into secured training sites. Dad's training required that he spend time in several of those sites to become proficient in the several areas of expertise required for his MOS (military occupational specialty) which had to do with decoding enemy transmissions in various languages.
By mid-1944 the end of the war in Europe was in sight. So the Army, in its infinite wisdom, re-directed Dad to the Pacific where he knew none of the languages nor any of the enemy code techniques.
Island invasions are extraordinarily complex, requiring a great deal of coordination between branches of the service, and the timing of execution is critical. Hence the need for a high degree of communication. Dad, an Army officer trained in communication and decryption, found himself pretty much an essential part of the Navy.
As flagship, the Ingham commanded a series of island invasions from February 1945 through August of that year, including attacks on the Bataan Peninsula of Luzon and on the islands of Corregidor, Panay, Negros and Balut.
The war ended with the surrender of Japan on August 14, 1945, Mom and Dad's second wedding anniversary. But Dad was stuck in the middle of the Pacific and I, whom he had never met, was already four months old and living with Mom at her parents' house.
I was a chubby baby and many of the photos were of me on my belly trying to do a push-up, often on a blanket outside during the summer. I had fat creases in my arms above and below my elbows. Dad never said a word to Mom, but looking at my pictures and not knowing anything about baby fat, he thought I had four elbows. When he got home Mom thought it was strange that the first thing he did when he saw me was to make sure each of my arms bent properly at only one joint.
This was a hard time to be separated from loved ones when the rest of the world was celebrating the end of hostilities. To make matters worse, by the time the Ingham got to San Francisco and Dad was able to take a train across country to New York, it was close to Christmas and he was out of a job. Because Dad made it back to New York so much later that almost everyone else in the war, all the good jobs had been taken.
Building The Dream
Over the next few years he took on a bunch of odd jobs—among them teaching at Power Memorial (his old high school), selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, officiating sports, and selling advertising for a weekly Jewish newspaper in Manhattan's Garment District.
That last job was particularly challenging: here he was, a 25-year-old red-headed Irish Catholic selling newspaper advertising to wizened old Jewish wholesalers. Three things Dad learned from that experience: how to haggle from a postion of advantage, how to sell honestly and courageously and patiently, and how to tell jokes with a Yiddish accent. (Unfortunately for us kids, his joke-telling never grew old. He'd continuously practice on us, his captive audience.)
Because the wartime economy was rapidly transitioning to peacetime industry, there were many pockets of opportunity for the sharp-witted. Though practically penniless, Mom and Dad wanted to buy a new car, had put down money to secure the purchase of a Chevrolet, and were told they'd get one on the next shipment.
Several trips to the showroom resulted in nothing more than promises that their car was on its way from the factory. The problem was that radios were a luxury option in post-war cars, but my parents considered a radio to be an extravagance and declined the option. The dealership was making considerable profit selling radios, so they kept delaying delivery of a radio-less car to my folks.
Finally Mom and Dad spotted a truckload of new Chevrolets headed for the dealership. They followed it and demanded that they be given one of the cars still on the trailer. The dealer couldn't deny them, so they ended up driving off the lot in their brand new Chevrolet Fleetmaster Sport Coupe (with radio).
Just a few days later they were stopped by a Dutch businessman who offered them an outrageous wad of cash for the car. He told them he was on his way back to Europe where there were no new cars being built, and he was willing to pay whatever it took to be able to ship this particular car back home.
My folks took the Dutchman's very generous offer and turned right around and used the cash to make a down payment on one of the first Levitt houses on Long Island, the house I grew up in on Harvard Street in Carle Place.
Dad remained in sales his entire career, settling on the prestige of selling college textbooks for Prentice-Hall, "The World's Leading Education Publisher". He was very good at what he did, became very well known in New York academe, and in 1958 took an offer to go to work for a smaller publisher, Richard D. Irwin. He was so successful in the new company that three years into it he was promoted to Vice President of Sales, which required that he move to headquarters in a suburb of Chicago. That was in 1961.
Several years after that, the Irwin company was sold to Dow Jones whose CEO at the time, Warren Phillips, took a liking to Dad and made him an offer: they wanted to start a Canadian subsidiary, and they wanted Dad to head it up. Dad had all the tools: he was smart, ambitious, good at sales, and he spoke French fluently. One condition was that Canadians had to buy into the idea of having a U.S. subsidiary on their soil. Relations between U.S. industrialists and Canadian nationalists were lukewarm at best.
One of Dad's early tests was to fly to Quebec City and make a presentation in French at an academic symposium there. The audience was polite but critical; he got a lot of strange looks and thought it was the subject matter he had chosen. It was only after he finished his talk and was being debriefed by a professor that he was told that his French was too good—it was French French, not Quebecois French. Sort of like speaking the King's English in Brooklyn.
Word got back to Dow Jones that the Canadians were duly impressed that an American English-speaker would come up to "enemy territory" and give a smart talk on Canadian business opportunities in their tongue.
Dad got his dream job.
He set up an office/warehouse in Georgetown, Ontario and he and Mom had a house built in Nobleton, about 25 miles away. Several years later they bought property above the hamlet of Terra Cotta on the Credit River and built their dream home, where Mom could have a barn and pasture for horses, and a pool for her daily swim.
Dilemmas
Sometime in the 70's a problem arose with the Canadian government. The Pierre Trudeau administration, riding on a popular wave of nationalism, chose Time Magazine and Dad's company as test cases for new laws requiring the content of publications be predominantly Canadian in origin. In Time's case they wanted all advertisements to be for Canadian products and services; in Dad's company's case they wanted all business cases, examples, etc. in textbooks to be about Canadian companies and Canadian laws.
Time Magazine refused to bend, closed their Canadian subsidiary, and from then on shipped American editions of the magazine to Canada with American advertising. Dad saw a way to use the law to gain competitive advantage in Canada and so went along with the government's requirement.
The government continued to harass him though: they required that half the members of his board of directors be Canadian citizens. He complied. Then they upped the requirement to 70%, and he complied.
Then finally they made it a requirement that all members of the board be Canadian, and Dad had a dilemma: close the business or renounce his U.S. citizenship. He chose the latter because he had employed dozens of Canadians who would have lost their jobs if he closed shop. To save them from their own government he became a Canadian citizen.
Dad faced a series of physical adversities in the 1980's, and while I'm not sure of the chronology I do know that he suffered these setbacks:
- He was diagnosed with prostate cancer and was treated with surgery and hormones.
- He was diabetic and that caused complications in his cardiovascular system.
- Once when climbing the basement stairs he lost all sensation in his legs, fell backwards down the stairs, and broke a couple of vertebrae.
He once told me a morbidly funny story about his mental state during all this...
Unbeknownst to Mom, one day he had decided, screw it all, he wasn't gonna take his insulin anymore. For a couple of hours after he made his decision he was feeling OK so he walked down the drive to the road to get the mail. On his way back he started to weave like a drunk.
Mom saw him from their bedroom window on the second floor, and knowing something was wrong she ran downstairs and out the door. When she caught him, she grabbed his collar and pulled him close to smell his breath. She knew from the sweetness what he was up to.
In Dad's own words, "Son, I'd never seen your mother so angry. I was scared. She went into the garage, came out with an axe, and proceeded to chop down all forty apple trees we'd just planted. I knew I was in trouble."
On another occasion, in 1988 our families were vacationing in Cancún. In the moment, Mom was down walking on the beach, Dad was up on the veranda of our villa, and I was behind him watching him watching Mom. Suddenly there was a noticeable shift in his affect, a sort of shudder, and I asked him what had just happened. He said, "I was just thinking, I have to die first, because she can live without me, but I could never live without her."
Dad died on August 20, 1992, of cancer. Mom lived on for another 20 years.
