The Sullivan Family

My research on the Sullivan family is still rather incomplete. The family came from Ireland on both sides, although I do not know when or where from they immigrated. More detailed detective work will benefit our knowledge of how this puzzle piece fits with that of the Donahue family. My knowledge of the family is outlined below.

Hannah Catherine (Sullivan) Donahue, my great x 2 grandmother, married Dennis Edward Donahue in about 1887. She was bout 23 years old at the time and her family farmed close by. Because both were first generation Irish-Americans, the likely had many things in common. Looking at the map of farms in High Forest, Olmstead MN from 1896, many Sullivan farms surround the Donahue estate. These could be Hannah’s brothers and uncles.

Hannah’s parents, Edward Sullivan and Winnifred Ann Murphy both immigrated from Ireland and settled in Olmstead, Minnesota. I believe that they came to the US through the port at New York, and the 1875 Minnesota state census indicates that their eldest son, Patrick, was born in New York in about 1856. I can imagine that they would have met and married not long before that date.

The same census also gives an indication about the path the Sullivan family took to make it to Minnesota: their second son, Thomas, was born in Ohio in 1861, meaning that sometime between 1856 and the birth of Thomas, the family began to move west. By the time that their 3rd child, Michael, was born in 1863, they had arrived in Minnesota. The following five children: Edward Jr. (1865), Hannah (1864), Mary (1869), Julia (1871) & Maggie (1873) were born where they lived in Olmstead.

Five years after the state census, an 1880 USA federal census confirms this, and shows the eldest boys working as farm hands to their father. Strangely, Edward’s wife is called Nancy. I cannot be sure as to whether she is a new wife or the same woman.

I have yet to have researched where the siblings ended up after Hannah married Dennis Edward Donahue and moved out of the Sullivan home. Contributions to this research are welcome.