Moran and Mary Ann Bushu's eleven children

When I was a girl attending Catholic schools in the 50s and 60s, I was told repeatedly by the nuns that one of every five girls had a vocation. This scared me no end because, as it happened, I was one of five girls, and I was pretty sure that my gorgeous older sisters weren't convent-bound and equally positive that my younger bratty sister was just not nun material. And I really didn't want to take the veil.

I guess, since I remember my trepidation 55 years later, that this was a deep concern of mine; denying a vocation was right up there with wearing patent leather shoes and french-kissing. Yikes! I was doomed. How lovely it would have been to know that I had five great-great-great aunts who did my time for me. Anyway, because I can now sleep at night, I shall tell their story, a story about a treasure hunt.

In mid-2012, after getting as much Wolf information as I could at the time, I turned my genealogical questions to the Bushu family. I had been given a major leg up by Lester Bushue whose own research supplied me with the names of many ancestors. But there were gaps, so I started to fill them in. And ran into serious obstacles. The people who were missing were five of Francis J. Bushu's sisters. And yes, we all know how much I HATE losing women. So I became a woman with a mission.

It has taken 2 1/2 years of persistent searching, but I have found the women. So here it is.

To recap: Michel Bourgeois 1782 immigrated to the US in 1827. One of his sons was Morand Bourgeois (who will be Moran Bushu from here on), born in Mertzen, Alsace, France in 1810. In 1838, Moran married Mary Ann Miller, age 17, and in the next 27 years they had eleven children.

Henry, 1839
Francis Joseph (Herbert A. Bushu's father) 1841
Ellen 1843
Angeline 1846
James 1848
Anna 1851
Martha 1854
Margaret 1856
Gertrude 1859
Mary Cecilia 1862
Ethel Clara 1865

Mary Ann died in 1865 (at 44) and in the mid 1870s, Moran made the long trip to Buck Township, Edgar County, Illinois, where he bought 240 acres of some of the best land in the country (according to Lester Bushue, for whom farm land is a passion.) It was there that Moran died in 1878. He's buried in St. Mary's cemetery in Paris, Illinois.

The children

My search for the men, Henry, Frank, and James, was fairly easy; they married well, were men of property and substance, and had the luck to appear in all sorts of formal documents. The women? Not so much. So I first got the men out of the way and then turned to the women. Margaret and Ellen married Mattingly men, and the Mattinglys are a very prominent family even today. They produced prodigious numbers of religious, procreated bountifully, and are reasonably easy to trace. If you're counting, this means I have three men and two women accounted for. But there were six more women to find.

I knew that there was one nun in the family, but I wasn't sure which of the women it was. By consulting with other family members, I eventually tracked her down (Cecilia or Sr. Helena). Once I found identified Cecilia, I spent a good deal of time searching websites and libraries until I happened upon the archives of the Columbus Diocese, which led me via a labyrinth I will not describe to two more nuns, Angie (Sr. Raymond) and Anna (Sr. Reginald). And then, while in Paris, Illinois seeking Moran's will, I came upon Ethel's will (which gave me Ethel), and that led me to Martha (Sr. Joseph Clare). But the last, Gertrude (Sr. Bernadine), involved a long, winding trail that didn't bring me home until earlier in 2015.

The following reports as much as I know about all eleven children and a little bit about the process of finding them all.

Henry was the first born, in 1839, and the first to leave. Listed in his father's house in 1860 as a cabinetmaker, by 1870 he had departed for Illinois. He married, and seems to have divorced, Mary Ann Robinson, the daughter of one of Edgar County's founders, Martin Robinson. Martin had married one of daughters of the first settler in Effingham County, Illinois (Frederick Brocket). It appears that when Brocket died, the Robinsons inherited his property, and by extension Henry who must have still been married at the time, according to The History of Effingham County (1883, p. 222). Lester Bushue told me that there's an old mill site on the Little Wabash near where he grew up that's called the Robinson mill. Information about when Henry married and divorced has eluded me to this point. When Morand died in 1878, Henry, minus Mary Ann, and his brother James took over Moran's 240 acres of farm. Henry is an interesting character. For a while he took responsibility for a young boy, Henry Hooker, the orphaned son of I'm not sure who. (Henry Hooker's sister, Ellen, was raised by James Bushu and his wife Cecilia Musselman). In his later years, Henry lived with his widowed sister Margaret Mattingly in Indiana. It was there that he died in 1903 at 64.

Francis Joseph will be treated in depth in another essay, but here's a short bio. Born in 1841, he married Agatha Burkey in 1866, and the family moved to Edgar County, Illinois in 1874. He and Agatha had 9 children. (Frank and Agatha produced almost twice as many children as the rest of his siblings combined. In his later years he was a prominent man in Mattoon, Illinois. It will be fun sharing with everyone what I've learned about him and Agatha. Stay tuned.) Frank died in October of 1922 at 81, and Agatha followed him quickly in January of 1923.

The third child was Ellen, born in 1843 and probably named for her godmother and (probable) grandmother Eleanor Hierholzer. On Jan 31, 1865,  Ellen married Samuel Mattingly, who was a marrying man. (She was Samuel's second wife, and after Ellen died in 1892 at 49, Samuel married a third time.) For a time, her sister Cecilia lived with them; she appears in their household in the 1880 census. Also in the 1880 census is a 10 year old boy, Gerome McKiney. (I think Samuel Mattingly was the son of Michael Mattingly and Honora Durbin. Michael had a daughter Nora who married Charles McKiney. It makes sense that Gerome is Nora and Charles' son, making him Samuel's nephew. Whew!) It doesn't appear Ellen had children, at least none that were living at the time of the censuses.

The fourth child is Angeline and she, along with her younger sister Anna, gave me my first clue that this was no ordinary Catholic family. In August of 1871, Angie entered St. Mary of the Springs convent in Columbus, Ohio. (St. Mary's had begun life in Somerset, Ohio, home to the Bourgeois families). She received her habit in late 1871, and she took her vows in November, 1872, assuming the name Sr. Raymond. Shortly thereafter she was sent to Lancaster, Ohio to help open a school there. Life at these early outposts was hard, and conditions were less than optimal. In 1885, thirteen years after her profession of faith, Sr. Raymond Bushu died at 39.

James Bushu was born in 1848. He departed for Illinois in 1874 and worked as a farmhand until Moran moved to Edgar County and bought land. After Moran died, Moran's daughters and son Frank deeded their shares of the farm to James and Henry. James was a very successful farmer, so much so that he merited his own biographical entry in Volume Two of the Portrait and Biographical Album of Vermillion and Edgar Counties, published in 1889. James and Henry raised cattle, hogs, and horses. James married Cecilia Musselman in January of 1878. They had no children but helped raised Ellen Hooker, Henry (Harry) Hooker, and Frank Musselman, perhaps Cecilia's brother. James is the source of the tale that his mother, Mary Ann Miller, was the granddaughter of a German count. He lived a long, prosperous life and enjoyed considerable success, serving as County Supervisor and School Director. He died in 1936 at 88, Cecilia in 1939.

Anna is the sixth child, born in 1851. Though younger than her sister Angeline, she preceded her to St. Mary of the Springs, entering the convent in November of 1869, receiving the habit in February of 1870, and professing vows in February of 1871, taking the name of Sr. Reginald. Annie died at 30, in 1881, leaving everything to the convent. Henry was executor. Both she and her sister are buried in the cemetery at St. Mary of the Springs.*

The seventh child is Martha, born in 1855. Martha joined the Sisters of Providence in Viga, Indiana in 1881. By then, the family had moved to Edgar County, and Viga was much closer than Columbus, Ohio.  She took her vows in 1884, assuming the name of Sr. Joseph Clare. I have a handwritten note that describes Sr. Joseph as having a "quiet, retiring disposition, silent and faithful to duty. She did not show much tact for teaching and at various times was employed in domestic duties." It appears that she may have been assigned a ministry in someplace other than the Viga convent, as when she developed TB, she "came home to die" in 1907 at 52. The note goes on to comment on her leaving her inheritance to the community, noting that "she made her will in favor of the community and insisted on her family abiding by its contents." At the time the undated, unsigned note was written, James had paid the first installment.

Number eight is Margaret, born in 1856, and she did NOT enter the convent. Instead, she married another Mattingly man, James, in 1880, with whom she had four children: Mary Gertrude, Francis, Claude, and Ralph Joseph. In 1890 James died in Tipton, Indiana, not long after Margaret delivered her fourth child in May of 1888.  In 1900, Margaret was still living in Tipton, and her brother Henry was with her. Some time after Henry's death in 1905, Margaret and three children moved to Otney, Colorado, not far from Pueblo. My guess is she had tuberculosis and was hoping to recover her health in the mountain air. There she died in 1912 at 56; she was buried in Tipton, Indiana.

The ninth baby is Gertrude, my will 'o the wisp. Gertrude was born in 1859. She appeared in the 1860 and 1870 censuses living at home, she quit-claimed her share of her father's estate to James and Henry in 1878 when Moran died, and then vanished. I spent almost two years looking for this woman in censuses, marriage records, death records, everywhere. Nothing. And then one day, on a whim, noting that Gertrude was a very unusual name in that era, I decided to do a wild card search. Such a search is risky; it meant that I entered the name "Gertrude" and her birth year, 1859, into Ancestry's search box for the 1880 census. I got 15 hits and one of them was for Gertrude Bushne in Washington, Kentucky.  She was Sr. Bernadine at St. Catherine of Sienna Convent in Bardstown, KY. And we actually know a bit about her. She entered the novitiate in 1878 (about 2 weeks before her father died), and took her vows in March of 1880. She was elected Prioress of the Congregation in 1897 and served until 1900. During her administration, the convent, grounds, and chapel were beautified. Shortly after she died, in 1903 at age 44*, the convent burned. When they rebuilt, they dedicated a set of windows over the organ in the choir to her. They're gorgeous. So was Gertrude.

Mary Cecilia, born in 1862 is the tenth child and our fifth nun. Ordained in 1885 as Sr. Helena at the Congregation of the Holy Cross convent (now St. Mary's at Notre Dame), Cecilia is the one nun we knew about, probably because she lived a long, productive life. When she celebrated her 75th anniversary with the convent (at 98) the Indianapolis Star published a lovely piece about her. She taught all over the country, knew Fr. Edward Sorin who founded Notre Dame, and served on the staff at St. John's Hospital in Anderson, Indiana. Sr. Helena died at 103, in 1965.

Moran and Mary Ann's last baby, number eleven, was Ethel Clare, born in 1865. Shortly after Ethel's birth, Mary Ann died, quite possibly as a result of complications during or after birth. Ethel did not have the long life that Cecilia enjoyed; she died in 1898, at age 33. She never married, but she left a critical legacy. In her will, she left her watch to Ellen Hooker, her clothes, cape, shoes and cloak to Maggie Steiner, and $150 to a Sr. Joseph Clare in a convent in Indiana, a bequest that started me on the search that ended with five sister Sisters. Five nuns who "paid it forward," so that I don't have to feel guilty to have fallen in love with a mortal man.  Thank you, Sisters!


*I shouldn't do this, but I will. I have this image of young Anna entering the convent and her beloved older sister joining her so they can be together. Perhaps they both shared a desire for the convent, but Angie, as the older daughter, was responsible for the little ones once Mary Ann died, so Anna entered the novitiate ahead of her sister. But as soon as she is able, Angie, too, joins the convent, only to be sent off to Lancaster shortly after taking vows. So the two sisters' dream of serving together crashes, first by separation and then by death.
I won't explain how I know this, but our great-great-grandfather Moran and his wife Mary Ann were deeply religious. Moran subscribed to the Catholic Telegraph Register and in the mid-late 1800s, that's a very big deal. So imagine how this religious family with five nuns would have reacted to Henry's divorce. Oy!
I can't help being struck by the huge variation in life expectancies. The men live into their 70s or 80s; the women, with the exception of Cecilia, all die before they're 60, most before 50. At some point, I shall have to investigate that.