Taking Paris Green

My brother and I have been actively researching our family tree for a long time now.  Getting any information earlier than our g-g grandparents has been nearly impossible as we are descended primarily from Irish immigrants.  Unfortunately, almost all of the records acquired by the Public Record Office of Ireland before 1922 were destroyed by fire and explosion at the beginning of the Irish Civil War in June 1922. As a result, the material now held by the National Archives dates mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries. This huge hole in ancestral records has led to some fruitless searches to date.

One of these fruitless searches has been my quest.to find out the name of my paternal g-grandmother Mary Carey Creahan's mother. I ordered g-grandmother Mary's death certificate from the Pennsylvania Department of Vital Records a few years ago, but they came up empty.  This was surprising as we know her birth and death dates because she's buried with most of my.paternal relatives in the North and South Cemetery in Tobyhanna, PA.

About a month ago, I was doing some research on Ancestry.com and discovered that they've just posted Pennsylvania Death Certificates from 1906 - 1924, which is in the year range that g-grandmother Mary Creahan died. I found death certificates in this database for several relatives which contained some pretty sad information.  One of them was Mary Creahan's son Martin, Jr., who died at 26 years old from septicemia as a result of an abdominal injury that he sustained from a fall. Martin, Jr. died in March 1912 and g-grandmother Mary's death followed 8 months later in November 1912.   

I tried several traditional methods to search this database for Mary's death certificate to no avail, so I ended up resorting to more brute force methods.  The database contains 2,477,238 records, so I finally ended up filtering out everything except the month of November, year 1912 and female gender, which pared the results down to a "mere" 282,324 records.  There wasn't a lot of rhyme and reason in these results, but I started looking through all of the records in hopes that I'd find her. My persistence finally paid off when I saw a garbled looking name and location of death and opened the record.  Once I opened it, I knew that it was her record.

The certificate was completed by Dr George Rhodes, who was the town doctor for Tobyhanna at that time.  No offense to Dr. Rhodes but his writing was terrible, which fully explains why the record was transcribed so badly!  Fortunately, I'm pretty good at reading bad writing.  Once I looked the certificate over more closely, I got a good feel for Dr. Rhode's writing.  What I found was so shocking that I had to read it three times to make sure that I wasn't seeing things!

The "Medical Certificate of Death" portion of the certificate provides the following directions to the physician completing it:

State the Disease Causing Death; or in deaths from Violent Causes, state (1) Means of Injury; and (2) whether Accidental, Suicidal, or Homicidal.  In this spot, Dr. Rhodes clearly wrote "Suicidal". Under the "Contributory (Secondary)" cause he wrote "Taking Paris Green".  I had to read this several times, all of the time wondering what the hell is Paris Green?  A Google search told me that Paris Green was a common name for an extremely toxic blue green chemical with four main uses: pigment, animal poison (mostly rodenticide), insecticide, and blue colorant for fireworks. Here's what the container looked like:

Paris Green

This discovery has lead to many questions in my mind.  Why did my g-grandmother take her own life?  How did my father and aunt not know anything about this?  Did my grandmother Julia Creahan West and her siblings know how she died?  My grandmother was 22 years old and her brother Pete was 24 at the time and they were both living at home when this happened. How could they not know?  According to her death certificate, Dr. Rhodes last saw her alive on the day that she died and that she passed away at 1 PM.  This means that somebody at the house knew that she was dying because they got Dr. Rhodes to come to the house, unless Mary called him herself. 

I've scoured the newspapers of that time and there isn't an obituary or any mention of her death. However, it is notable that she's buried with the family in their plot at the North & South Cemetery, which is a Catholic cemetery. Prior to 1983, the Church denied funeral rites for suicide cases. In Catholic cemeteries, excommunicates, suicides and the like were buried in a grave that was located well away from others.  This strongly leads me to believe that my g-grandmother's suicide was kept a secret.


I've tried to see things like she would at the time in order to better understand why she wanted to die.  The 1910 Census for Coolbaugh, Monroe Pennsylvania (Tobyhanna) reveals that she had 12 children and that only 5 were living at the time of the Census. I know for a fact that five of these children were not infants when they died because they're buried in the North & South Cemetery.  Here's a list of their names and ages at death:  

• Thomas Francis - 3 years old
• Michael - 8 years old
• Thomas H. - 9 years old
• John - 25 years old
• Martin - 26 years old

According to family oral history, the other two children were twins who died in infancy, for a total of 7 children preceding their parents in death, which is beyond tragic!  More family oral history has it that another house that the family lived in on the same property burned down and two boys died in the fire.  According the the family gravestone at the North and South Cemetery, Michael and Thomas H. died in 1883 within one day of each other, which makes this story somewhat believable. I've looked all over the newspapers from that time and have found nothing to date on the fire or their deaths.  I hope that I'll find something one day that will shed more light on what happened to them.

Here's a picture of the Creahan family gravestone at the North and South Cemetery:

Creahan Family Gravestone at the North and South Cemetery

Mary was 62 years old when she died, which was 6 years past the life expectancy for women during those days.  I'm sure that she had to work very hard around the house and there likely wasn't much money.  All of this aside, she had just lost another son in March of that year and he was only 26 years old.  According to his death certificate, Martin had his accident on February 5, 1912 and was treated by Dr. Rhodes up until March 20, 1912, the day before he died.  Mary must have taken care of him during that time.

I honestly believe that Martin's death put my g-grandmother over the edge.  I can't even imagine losing any of my children, let alone 7 of them!  It must have been so terrible for her and my g-grandfather Martin!  God, please bless my g-grandmother!  Please give her a special place with you in heaven!

04/11/2015 Update

I happened upon my g-grandmother's obituary from the Scranton Republican last week:

Mary Carey Creahan Obituary in the Scranton Republican, Wednesday, November 20, 1912, Page 19

It's not surprising that it doesn't mention how she died.  However, this obituary has revealed that only my Uncle Pete lived at home when she died, and since he worked for the Railroad, it's likely that he wasn't at the house when it happened.  This leads me to believe that the way she died was not shared with her children.


10/1/2016 Update





We took a vacation over the Labor Day Weekend and visited my Aunt and sister in Tobyhanna.  We had great visits with my sister and her husband at their home and an enjoyable Lunch with my Aunt and sister at Bailey's Rib and Steak House in Mt. Pocono, PA.  After Lunch, we went to my Aunt's house for cake and coffee and some move visiting. My Aunt had promised me that she'd find the tin type picture that she had in her attic of g-grandmother Mary Carey Creahan.  She went to look in the attic, but it was too hot and she couldn't find it.  

Around a week later, a large envelope arrived for me in the mail from my Aunt.  I was dancing with excitement as I made my way back inside with the mail!  I opened the envelope and found the beautiful tin type picture of my g-grandmother!  She was quite a striking looking woman!  Here is her picture:

G-Grandmother Mary Carey Creahan circa 1870