I was
surprised when I learned that I was not the only member of my family who lived
in California. My great granduncle Richard Corbett was a ship's carpenter who
had preceded the Corbett family, my great-grandfather Dominick, his widowed
mother Anastasia and big brother Patrick to the US. They were settled in Taunton,
Massachusetts by 1855 where Patrick and Dominick followed the trade of carpenter.
They appear in the 1855 state census. However brother Richard is not with
them in either the 1855 or 1865 state census or the 1860 US census when they
were joined by three other siblings, Johanna, Ellen and William.
Two ads posted
in the Boston Pilot
http://infowanted.bc.edu/ gave me information allowing me to trace the family back to
their place of origin in both Ireland and the US and recover baptism records for my great
grandfather and some of his siblings. Richard was baptized March 21, 1830 in
the parish of Oning and Templelorm, Fiddown, Kilkenny. His family was living nearby in Turkstown,
Kilkenny when he was a young man. That town had a ship building business run by
the Dwan brothers who lived on the same property as the Corbetts. Perhaps Richard and his brothers gained their carpentry
skills working in it. He also may have experienced the lure of the sea since
vessels could come up the Suire river from the seaport of Waterford as far as
this small town.
The ads note that he
“followed the sea for some years” . He had arrived in the US “some years before”.
I believe that based on that information
Richard appears on a passenger list, a carpenter coming into NYC on the
Siddons Jan 6, 1851. Did he jump ship there and decide to travel to the gold
fields influenced by the many ads for travel there and stories of quick riches?
If so It is possible he is the R. Corbett listed on one of the ships heading
for the Isthmus of Panama (where passengers crossed on foot or riding donkeys
to meet a ship on the other side to head to California.) 1849 gold had been discovered
and a "gold fever" seized many miners seeking to hit it rich. Ads
like this one in newspapers promised a
swift journey instead of the long one round the tip of South America or the
long and arduous one across the US by wagon. All the family knew was that he had arrived and was working in San Francisco when they wrote the ad looking for him in June 1855.
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| San Francisco early 1850's |
If Richard signed on
as a ship’s carpenter (on the Siddons or another) to get free passage, he might have taken the much
longer and more dangerous passage via Cape Horn. Whichever way he traveled Richard
apparently reached San Francisco between 1852 and 53 and wrote to his family. He is not listed in the California State census of 1852. By the time he arrived in San
Francisco the nearby fields were overcrowded and not producing the prodigious
amounts of gold that they had in the early days. He
lost no time heading north – perhaps by stage coach
or coastal boat for northern California writing from Shasta Co to his family that
he was heading from Shasta to Yreka in Siskyou co. In June of 1855 the family
was trying to get in touch with Richard and referred to his letter of May 1854.
This much the family knew when his brother Patrick tried again to find him in
another ad in 1857 searching for him in Yreka.They had evidently had at least two letters from him - the original from San Francisco and a later one from Shasta.
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| Stage Yreka California |
Gold was discovered in Yreka in 1851 at a spot called
"Thompson's Dry Diggins". Miners poured into the town which was
called Shasta Butte City. Residents found this confusing with the town of
Shasta, in Shasta County, so the name was changed. Joaquin Miller described Yreka during 1853-54
as a bustling place with "...a tide of people up and down and across other
streets, as strong as if in New York". More stage lines used the town for
a stage stop than any other community in the state. The Deadwood district of Siskiyou included the towns of
Liberty, Sawyers Bar. The miners produced a steady stream of gold until late in
the 19
th century.
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| The rugged area on the California Oregon border |
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| Chinese andCaucasian miners in No California |
In the 1860 census for the Deadwood district in the town of Liberty there is a Richard Corbett of about the
right age living with three other miners. All are Irish ranging in age from 33-22 and each has a total of $250 in property. In that census the miners are mostly
living in groups of less than 10 grouped perhaps by language. There are men
from all over the US and from Europe. The town is predominately male and young. Large groups of Chinese miners are also
listed, sometimes only listed by one name or only "Chinaman" and one age
for all in the group. They were perhaps 1/3 of the population. Only 3 Chinese women appear none of them married.
There are only 13 families in the town 7 of whom have about 24 children between them in the 14 page census. Women and children
are a definite minority. For the most part the census taker didn't bother to total them correctly in the tally at the end of the page. A recent widow runs a hotel with her California born children, the youngest of which is only a year. There must have been enough of school age children for a schoolhouse since one of the women is listed as a schoolteacher. All of the other white women are married most of them to miners.
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| Rare woman at a mining site |
Those who run a business such as a hotel, a stable or a blacksmith shop, are considerably better off than the average miner like Richard with real estate and personal property worth $1000 to $10,000. The wealthiest persons in town are the lone lawyer, merchants and hotel owners. The presence of many Irish like Richard led to the location of Catholic places of worship at Liberty and Sawyers dating from the mid 1850’s. There are two other Corbet(t) in town: a Mike also from Ireland and a William born in Massachusetts. If they were related to Richard they are not living with him.
Since there were no other ads
by his family one wonders if they were hearing from him by this time or had
given up hope of finding him? Unfortunately the correspondence did not survive
the death of his older brother Patrick around 1870 or his mother in 1873. His younger
brother Dominick, my great grandfather was in New London, Connecticut in 1860,
later moving to Vermont and fighting in the Civil War as a ship's carpenter in the Union Navy. He married in Vermont in
1867. My grandmother had little memory of her father who died in 1877 and never
mentioned an uncle or her grandmother Anastasia. Dominick had named her older
sister Anastasia “Annie” but evidently she didn’t know the connection.
Dominick named his his only son, John
Richard,
after his father and Richard
after the long lost brother.
.jpg) |
| John R. Corbett nephew |
Richard does not appear on any of the Voter Rolls for California but then again he may not have become a citizen. Richard’s who appear in 1870 and 1880 in US census in California are not likely matches because age is too far off and most live far south of where he was in 1860. There is a Roger Corbett who settled in the Liberty area and is buried in the Catholic cemetary of Sawyer's Bar but he is younger and born in 1844 in Massachusetts. There are Army enlistment records for several Richard Corbetts, from Kilkenny who served in the 1860-1875 period. Is one of them Richard? In the 1870 census for Boise, Idaho there is listed a Richard Corbett, born in Ireland, about the right age, now a US citizen, working as a miner. It makes sense that Richard would follow the mining lure still hoping to “strike it rich”.
So where is Richard? Even what I have discovered shows me that he was a person who liked adventure and was a risk taker.
It is possible
that Richard died before he was 50 as did his father and three of his four
brothers. There appears that some congenital defect – perhaps heart trouble
plagued these men. No record of death has been found in Idaho but their death
records start in 1890.A search of California death records also came up a blank.record.
http://www.cajuncountry.org/st-martinville.php
.jpg)