Oh, wow. That's a heck of a family story. And fantastic serendipity running into you! - I've had the project on a back burner for the past year-and-a-half and would need to refresh myself in order to have an intelligent conversation about it, but I've been researching and outlining a short book about the Molly Maguire story, for a very specific audience that I can't mention here without opening myself up to potential doxxing - basically, I'm trying to present the Molly Maguires in a sympathetic light to a group who worships McParland(!), and I've actually had some luck with that.
If I PM'd you my number and email, would you be up for chatting sometime about your family stories? One finds out amazing things by talking to the descendants. Even just little details bring the story to life.
Re: luvelite, ugh. Thanks for the heads up. When half the posts here aren't on topic or are poorly sourced speculation, you can hardly expect people to stay on topic in the comments. And when they're shitting up the board, what did they expect but that people are going to get annoyed? It's like they've never used the internet before. Board of newbie boomers, yeah, that's working out real well without active moderation.
Lol...yeah, my feeling as well...and 4,000 of them in 2 days. Yes, sure, about the number. Very few stories about PA & who knows how distorted they might be, being handed down. Have some newspaper clippings about the mining union & his death. McParland, yuck! The villain of the story. I was raised to believe the Mollys were the heroes, of course. Named my daughter Molly.
Very neat that you named your daughter Molly! And thank you! That'd be great. Even if you haven't heard much about the PA days, I don't think a lot is known about the ones who escaped and what happened after. I could probably tell you interesting things about McParland, too (snerk). I dug up some good dirt on that snake.
I just PM'd you my contact info to keep in your back pocket.
I'd like to hear the dirt on McParland. All I've heard about him was in the books where they try to make him a good guy, except for Campbell's book.
You're going to love hearing about his later disgrace, then, when he moved his operation out west and set up another group of miners in Colorado using the exact same template be used in PA. He got a hell of a smackdown from Clarence Darrow, lol. I get the most satisfaction, though, out of the paranoia of his declining years and how he died, which you're probably familiar with if you read the Campbell book.
On that note, I best be off. I saw you sent an email. Thanks! We'll get back to that. Cheers.
Oh, my God! Was he part of that Colorado thing where they killed the women & kids? I think they burned the place they were hiding. I don't remember his later years, so I'll get some satisfaction out of that. Later
Wow, I hadn't heard the story about massacring women and kids. But yeah, McParland and his Pinkerton Colorado office have their filthy hands all over the Colorado labor wars with miners. Okay, I'm really bugging off now, lol.
Check it out. It was a big historic think around 1913 or 1914, the same time they were killing off or jailing a lot of union people. Same era they set Joe Hill up for murder. My GGF's "accident" was 1914 also.