Irene Killoran Schulien

I have written before about how fortunate I am, in my genealogical pursuits, to have come from the town of Lima, Ohio, where nearly every issue of the Lima News prior to 1977 is online.  Since both of my parents were born there, and their families lived there for several generations, the database is a goldmine.  When I am trying to solve a genealogical mystery regarding a family member, after I go to census records, birth records, and death indexes, I head straight for the Lima News database.  It's amazing how much I can piece together from newspaper articles.  There are marriage announcements, which generally list family members.  There are graduations, births, obituaries (which sometimes give you whole family trees), and other interesting tidbits, like who visited whom, who played baseball for the local teams, who attended what churches, who ran off to get married, who was hospitalized, who got arrested etc.

Yesterday, I was trying to find the birth and death dates of one woman who was not actually a biological relative, but who married my mom's favorite uncle, my Great Uncle Rod. Her name was Irene Killoran and, while I had actually met her and Rod a couple of times when I was a child, what interested me most were the stories my mother told me about Uncle Rod.  Since then, I've heard more stories from my cousin Tim, and I really wanted to see what I could find out about Irene who must have been a saint, from what I've heard about the antics of her husband Rod.

I knew Irene had been born before the year 1900 and I also knew she lived to be about 100, so I couldn't find her obituary in the Lima News, but I suspected I could find other clues about her.  As I searched through the database I began to piece together a picture of her family, and soon I was headed down a rabbit hole, determined to reconstruct this family that wasn't even related to me.  (That's how addictive genealogy can be.)

First, I found a story about the death of a sister, Esther Killoran, at the age of 22 from pneumonia, which seemed incredibly tragic. In that story, I discovered the names of all the siblings: Helen, William, John, Ralph, Esther, and of course, Irene.  From census records, I was able to confirm the names of the brothers and sisters.  Then I found a story about Irene's older brother William, who was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1922, and who performed Irene and Rod's marriage ceremony in 1942. Sadly, another story informed me that William died of a heart attack in 1948, at the age of 53, just a few months after he conducted the funeral service for his mother, Mary. She and her husband, James, who had died years earlier, were children of Irish immigrants. 

So as sad as it seemed that two of these children had died young, Esther at 22 and now William at 53, there was more tragedy to be discovered.  Irene's older brother John was a physician and in the course of being summoned to treat patients at the scene of an automobile accident, he stepped on a live electrical wire and was electrocuted in 1946. With this much tragedy in one family, I couldn't stop looking.  I wanted a happy ending: grandchildren who would carry on the family name and keep the memories alive, but there were few grandchildren.  As a priest, William had no children, and John had but one daughter.  I knew Rod and Irene didn't have children as they were in their forties when they married.  And Esther had died unmarried at the age of 22.  So I had to continue searching.  Two more siblings of Irene remained – her older sister Helen, and her younger brother Ralph.  I discovered that Helen married in 1923, just a year after her sister died, and had two children, one named after her deceased sister.  I found the marriage announcements for the two sisters and in both, their mother Helen is missing.  One girl is listed as being the daughter of Joseph E. Morris, the other is listed as the daughter of the late Joseph E. Morris and Helen Killoran Morris, but at the time of the wedding, there is also a stepmother named.  I searched for hours for a hint of what had happened to Helen.  Did she die?  Were they divorced?  But I found nothing.  I know at least one of the girls had children, but I lost the trail after I discovered that fact.  I don't know if the other daughter had children.

So I turned to Ralph, who apparently moved out of town and married.  However, once someone moved out of Lima, it was hit or miss on finding a story about them.  Sometimes the paper printed stories about former Lima residents, but usually only when a relative who still resided there gave the paper the information.  So I have lost the trail on Ralph Killoran.

It may seem odd that I wanted to discover more about a family that was not related to me, but genealogy buffs will understand.  Once you start reading stories about people, you feel you know them in some small way, and you want to find out, almost as if you were reading a novel, how it all turns out.  Sadly, I don't know how it all turned out. I know that two children of Irish immigrants married and had at least 6 children.  (Another story in the Lima News reported on the severe burning of a one year old son, so there may have been at least one child who did not live to adulthood.) I know that three of those children died as young or middle-aged adults.  But I don't know what happened to Ralph and Helen and I don't know if there were grandchildren other than the three girls I mentioned. 

But, aside from all the tragedy I discovered, I learned another thing.  I learned that Irene Killoran Schulien was a rarity in her family.  Born in 1898, she died in 1999, at the ripe old age of 101.