David was the second son of Evans and Esther and was born in 1825 in Donegal, Ireland – he is in the 1841 Scottish Census as a “Collier” aged sixteen. The next recorded event in his life was his marriage on 18 August 1850 to Margaret “Maggie” Quinn in Glasgow. Maggie was of Irish parents but was born in Glasgow.
David and Maggie had two children, David (1849) and Evans (1851), in Glasgow before they decided to move to North America. They moved around 1854-55 and settled in New York State for a few years where Esther (1855) and Sarah Jane (1857) were born. They then moved to Canada where they had four more children – Margaret (1860), John (1861), Richard (1863) and Mary (1865). By 1870 they had moved back to the US to Bay City, Michigan where their final child, William was born in 1871. The complete family of nine children with partners can be seen here.
From the limited information I have been able to obtain, David had a variety of jobs including Collier, Labourer Gas Work, Fireman, Labourer and Engineer. The last recorded role he had was that of Engineer from the Michigan 1870 Census.
I have not been able to find any documentation confirming David’s date of death but from data available and other family trees it would seem that about 1873 is the most likely date. David lived a bit longer than his two younger brothers but still died at the relatively young age of forty-eight.
Maggie outlived David by thirty-four years when she died at age eight-two on 17 February 1907. Her cause of death was recorded as “senility”. In her later years Maggie lived with her daughter Margaret who was married to Cornelius O’Neil – Margaret was the informant on her death certificate.
David and Maggie’s children had mixed fortune in life :
- Richard suffered from epilepsy and sadly died at the age of seventeen in Pontiac Asylum on 22 December 1880.
- Esther married Benjamin McIntyre, a farmer, on 1 July 1876 at the age of twenty and went on to have two children – Charles (1880) and William (1887). She died early at the age of thirty-three on 11 August 1899.
- Margaret married Cornelius O’Neil on 27 December 1877 and went on to have three daughters – Marion Alice (1880), Cornelia Margaret (1882) and Harriet Eulalia (1890). Margaret lived to the ripe old age of eighty-five and died on 17 February 1946. She outlived her husband Cornelius by almost thirty years. He died on 13 June 1916.
- Sarah Jane married Walter Mitchell Gardner, a widower, on 29 September 1884 and went on to have three children – Walter Swain (1885), Mary Eulalia (1896) and Lawrence Abbott (1896). Sarah Jane lived to a very good age of eighty-two and died on 29 March 1940. Walter died at the age of seventy-six on 19 November 1923.
- Mary – I have not been able to find a lot of information on Mary. She was born in Canada in 1865 and according to an 1886 City Directories entry was working as a teacher in Bay City, Michigan. She was living with her widowed mother, Maggie, and her two brothers. John and William. Unfortunately, my trail of her has gone cold after this event.
- William married Martha Ellis on 18 December 1891 and then married Nettie Beard in 1907. There is no record of what happened to his first marriage or of any children being born in either marriage. He had various jobs including Auditor, Commercial Manager and Salesman and died at the age of fifty-seven on 6 May 1928.
- Evans married Bridgette Maher on 13 July 1876 in Bay City, Michigan. They had six children – Harriett (1876), John Evans (1879), Thomas (1883), Walter Alfred (1886), Mary Adella (1888) and Edward Luke (1897). Evans was a marine engineer working on the Great Lakes and became Vice President of Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association. He died at the age of sixty-nine on 9 December 1920, one year before the death of his wife Bridgette.
- The two remaining sons, David and John, led interesting lives and since I have managed to gather some reasonable information on their lives, I have decide to dedicate a separate section to each of them. John’s story can found at this page while David’s incredible life can found here.