The Carney ancestry of Karen Mattern's mother, Dorothea Whittington

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My Great-grandmother, Mary A. Carney Whittingham
By Karen Kasturi Mattern

As a child and young person I noticed how fond my mother, Dorothea (born 1906), and my grandmother Kate, (born 1882), seemed to be of my grandfather, Joseph Whittingham, born 1879. His colorized wedding photograph was displayed in our living room, and I always wondered about the beautiful dusky man whose photo stood next to my pale grandmother’s. My impression was that he might be Italian or Cuban – at least when I became an older child I wondered about that. (I think that, growing up in a racist society, I couldn’t help noticing the color difference between them).


JosephWhittingham, born 1879

This photo is black and white, but the one we had at home was more ‘umber’ colored, but it had clearly been ‘colorized.’

Mostly what impressed me about my grandfather was that he seemed to have no relatives. My mother and grandmother observed silences or fell into whispers when the subject of my grandfather arose if I was in the vicinity.

Over time, I picked up that my grandmother (Kate) and her mother-in-law Mary Carney (pronounced Corney by my grandmother) had been at odds. One bone of contention had had to do with being Irish. Kate was the descendant of Irish-American miners in the mountains of Pennsylvania, while Mary had (falsely) claimed to be Irish to disguise her non-standard English and….for some other purpose not yet clear to me. Once my mother Dorothea told me that I would not have liked her grandmother Mary because she was illiterate and ‘different.’ But, I said, she was foreign, right? She was Irish? My mother’s face froze and she abruptly left the room. Only later would I be able to piece the many small incidents, silences, cryptic remarks and so on together. Please bear with me as I try to tell this story succinctly.

When I reached my 50’s I realized that my mother had repeatedly said she’d tell me a secret about our family, but she never had. Now she was gone, and I felt almost compelled to discover this secret. Intuition, and various remembered ‘cryptic remarks’ led me to believe that the secret had something to do with my grandfather’s ancestry and possibly with ‘race.’ My mother had made various remarks to the effect that she was part native American and we had a traditional Lenape basket that was supposed to be very precious to my grandmother, and also some traditional textiles, but those seemed to be fairly commonly available in the 1950’s in Philadelphia where I grew up. While we had no ‘relatives’ on my grandfather’s side of the family, we did have a sort of ‘loosely-woven’ ‘clan’ of friends of the family, most of them ‘from the mountains’ and others ‘from the marshes,’ and some of these people looked Native American, with ‘copper’ skin tones for example.

I decided to search for Mary A. Carney Whittingham’s origins via Ancestry.com and I also resolved to take an autosomal DNA test to see if pursuing the topic of ethnicity were at all germane, and if so, in which direction?

I used a friend’s account at Ancestry.com to search for a Mary A. Carney born between 1832 and 1835 (my mother told me Mary was several years older than her husband Alfred Whittingham who was born in 1836). I searched Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and also searched Immigration databases. I knew her mother’s name was Louisa and I still at that point in time thought she was Irish. I came up with nothing.

Around the same time I took an autosomal DNA test with DNA Tribes. When I got the result, I actually phoned the company to tell them I thought they had sent me the wrong report. I was supposed to be Danish (my father), Irish and English (my mother’s parents – and I am blonde/light brown haired and blue-eyed - ) but I came up with a lot more Mediterranean and Levantine in my result with Morocco and Turkey at the top of the list! Specifically North and East African in terms of ‘deep ancestry.’ (As well as Polish – my father’s side) DNA Tribes also matches you with a ‘modern population’ and I matched at 800% with the population of Madeira – which is made up of European (including a large Jewish population, and my father was a Danish Jew), African and Native American stock, the latter coming into the island during the early slave- and sugar-trade days (about five hundred years ago. I was surprised to learn that Native Americans had been transplanted across the Atlantic as slaves!). DNA Tribes told me that among Caucasian people I was in the top 5% for African DNA, specifically from North and East Africa, both areas noted for their involvement in the piracy movement in the 1500s and 1600s. Well! Interesting, but not really part of my family’s ancestral story, as far as I knew.


Mary A. Carney Whittingham, born 1838

Looking at my great-grandmother Mary A. Carney Whittingham’s photograph I do not see a black person. She was born in 1832, which was just about when the slave populations of the south were increasing, so clearly she was not a product of that form of slavery. Prior to that era there were many indentured servants, both African and European, and many Free People of Color in the Delmarva area. However, with the coming of the Jim Crow Era, supposedly ‘One Drop’ of African ‘blood’ (dna) made you black – and my dna test seems to say that at least one drop was there!  But, relative to ‘Morocco’ my great-grandmother’s portrait shows her wearing a hand-made dress that a Moroccan acquaintance of mine (a former graduate student at UC Berkeley in Chemistry, and current owner of a Moroccan import store in Piedmont California) tells me is called ‘Moros’ style, meaning ‘Moorish’ style from Spain. She also wears a Spanish comb and a pewter brooch in the form of a key and door (this is an Islamic symbol and also apparently adopted by certain European ‘secret societies’). The brooch, combs and fan were kept by my mother along with some of her grandmother’s needlework, and I regularly handled them as a child. The brooch, in particular, was a favorite with me.

Well, my next angle of inquiry was to try to relate ‘Morocco’ with Ireland. I found out that historically there has been a lot of contact between these two nations, mostly via the piracy trade. I wondered how I could possibly trace any genealogy that way, and around that time I came across a book “Othello’s Children in the New World,” written by a professor at BereaCollege in Kentucky, Jose Pimienta, whom I eventually contacted and we had a few phone conversations.

Jose told me that there was a group known as the Delaware Moors who had a diaspora in Philadelphia and South Jersey. (I remembered that some people were whispered to be ‘Moors’ during my growing-up years in Philadelphia. I had always been curious about the Moors as a child, and would ask my mother about them. Her response was simply to silence me, so I gave up asking.)

After talking with Jose, I looked at the Mitsawokett site and found a Mary A. Carney, born after 1831, mother’s name Louisa, father’s name John. (Mary Carney’s eldest son was named John, which leads me to believe her father’s name was probably John).

So, I felt encouraged by this! At last I’d found a Mary A. Carney, born during the right time-frame and whose mother’s name was Louisa. She came from an area not far from Philadelphia, so this seemed like a quite likely lead. However, I didn’t know how to search for her any farther.

Then I got the bright idea to look at her husband’s Civil War Pension file. I thought there might be some more definitive information there, like a birth-date and place on Mary. When the Civil War Pension Deposition arrived in the mail it was over 100 pages long! Why?

Keeping the story simple, the next paragraph after this one relates to things my mother told me directly about her grandmother, so I think of these as things I ‘know’ about Mary A. Carney Whittingham. After that, I will go through the things in the Civil War Pension deposition that I believe are false, things Mary lied about in order to get the pension. (By the way, my great-grandfather Alfred Whittingham had some difficulty securing the pension in the first place, despite having lost his leg in the battle of Antietam while carrying the colors. Apparently my great-grandmother let the pension lapse immediately after Alfred’s death in 1897, ostensibly because of depression, which may be true. But perhaps she realized a few years later that she needed the pension to bring up her remaining two sons on her own.) Based on non-verbal experiences with my mother, I think one of the things she felt uncomfortable and somewhat ashamed of in relation to Mary was that Mary lied about so many things: her age, her origins, and other things I will describe below. Also, the name ‘Carney’ never appears anywhere in the deposition. Personally, I think that was her main secret.)

We forget today just how desperate people who were trying to ‘pass’ as white – or even to pass as ‘Irish’ – were to conceal their ‘non-white’ status. ‘Non-white,’ ‘colored’ or ‘mulatto’ did not necessarily mean black, as you know. In Delaware, for example, Indians (Native Americans) were nearly always listed on the census as mulatto. And we forget today that in antebellum Delaware non-white people had restricted rights, i.e., could not testify in court although they could be tried and sentenced in courts; could not vote; could not enter certain business premises; and had to attend separate schools.

Here are the things I ‘know’ about Mary Carney: my great-grandmother was several years older than her husband who was born in 1836. (His family have extensive records going back beyond the first US Census). Her mother's name was Louisa – I know this because my mother told me that her father felt it was ‘fate’ when he fell in love with my grandmother Kate because her middle name was Louise, and his mother Mary’s mother’s name was Louisa.(A bit confusing, but it makes sense, and these are the kind of silly little things that do impress people – pure fate!  kind of sweet) She was illiterate and could not write, and had had to practice signing her name so that she could fool the pension examiner into thinking her literate. (My grandmother must have told my mother, Dorothea, this, as Dorothea would have been too young to remember.) More about the Civil War Pension deposition later. I also knew that she had claimed to be Irish but wasn't really. She did not speak standard English and she hoped to fool people by pretending to be Irish. I still have a beautiful Irish Chain quilt that she made by hand in the 1880’s, because, as she told my mother, she ‘owed a debt to Ireland.' I know that Mary sold the house she and her husband owned in the mountains and bought two nearly adjoining houses on Myrtlewood Street in Philadelphia, one of which she operated as a boarding house. I also knew that she had lost her two daughters, Ella and Laura, in a drowning accident in a mountain creek, and that she herself had had to move into a boarding house at the end of her life, into one small room, and had 'died very poor.' (I could say more about this, but that gets into the personal problems between my grandmother Kate and my great-grandmother Mary). I also know that she was unusually short in stature and perceived by my mother as ‘very different.’

About the pension: The examiner was particularly interested in Mary’s claim to be the widow of a person named John Madden. There was no record of his death – nor was there any record of their marriage! But without a death certificate, the examiner held that Mary was still legally married to John Madden at the time she claimed to be married to my great grandfather Alfred and therefore did not deserve the pension. At first Mary tried to argue that she was a widow when she married Alfred and also tried to persuade the examiner that Alfred’s parents were Quaker. Alfred’s great-grandparents may have still been Quaker, and his distant ancestors were Quakers, some of them even among the First Proprietors of Philadelphia (Quakers who had bought land directly from William Penn), which ought to have garnered respectability for Mary. She hoped, I think, to place herself above suspicion by claiming direct descent from Philadelphia’s Quaker founders. According to Neshaminy Presbyterian Church records, however, Alfred’s immediate ancestors (grandparents) became Presbyterians around the turn of the century (18th to 19th century), and he himself was Methodist-Episcopal.

My great-grandfather had been mustered out of the Civil War after losing his leg at Antietam. He’d then found employment in Weissport Pennsylvania, his hometown, as a County Clerk, an elected position. Several years later, he met Mary, a widow with a little girl, Ella, and a baby son, John. She had come from Scranton, where she was employed in a saloon, although she didn’t tell him that, just that she was a widow looking for housekeeping work. In the pension it is stated by Mary herself that Alfred asked her to keep their relationship a secret until after an upcoming election, but she revealed in casual conversation around town that they had set up housekeeping, at which point he did take a house with her and lived with her openly. Mary describes this herself in the deposition. His family shunned him after that (according to a deposition taken from Alfred’s widowed sister-in-law), which must mean that there was something that was seen as not respectable about her. Perhaps they thought she had been a prostitute, or that she was not quite white – such a big deal in those days, more significant than today. And as far as I can tell, a few years later, Alfred no longer had employment as County Clerk, which must mean he was not re-elected, and he then applied to a former commanding officer for help in obtaining his Civil War Pension.

It’s embarrassing to have to recount – but there are no descendants other than myself to be embarrassed – that later in the pension deposition, Mary finally admitted that she was never married to John Madden, that he was an after-hours visitor to her room above the saloon. She doesn’t say so, but it would appear that he was the father of Ella. Later, she took work at the local fire chief’s home. While the chief’s wife was dying, she was employed to care for her and do the housekeeping, but she also seemed to believe that the fire chief was going to marry her after his wife’s death. She describes all this later on in the deposition. Instead, after she was no longer needed in that home, she was taken by the owner of the saloon to live in a lumber camp in up-state Pennsylvania for some time, after which she showed up in Weissport, with her new baby boy, as the Widow Madden.

Her story in the pension deposition was that she had originally been the poor daughter of an Irish immigrant who’d died and left her with a step-father who abandoned her. In my opinion, this is a story that she hoped would garner sympathy and make it believable that she spoke non-standard English. (Not really believable, least of all, because foreign-born children pick up standard English very quickly). However, this story would certainly have been believable to me if I hadn’t heard from my mother’s own lips that Mary was not Irish (despite the surname Carney), that she ‘owed a debt to Ireland’ (because she used Ireland to make her way in the world), that she lied about her age and apparently was something of a piece of work. I certainly don’t think she was a ‘bad person,’ just someone ambitious to find a better life, which indeed she did find with my great-grandfather. They lived together for the rest of his life and had five children together. Sadly, all of her children except for my grandfather Joseph pre-deceased her. Joseph’s older brother William died at age 25 of pneumonia. She seemed consistently to play on people’s sympathies as a good, deserving person who had had much misfortune, yet at the same time she seems to have been quite a good little businesswoman, especially considering the fact that she was illiterate. (More on that below).

Mary claimed in the deposition that all of her children were baptized Catholics (but her son Joseph later converted to Catholicism to marry Katie which would seem tosupport givingthe lie to Mary's claim that all her children were baptized Catholics), but in those days the Catholic Church would not reveal any records to the government, so the pension examiner was never able to check that officially – although he tried! My mother told me that Mary instructed someone (probably Joseph) to write the names of all the children along with dates in different colored inks, varying the handwriting slightly, to fool the Pension Examiner into thinking that they had kept a list of baptisms in a family bible. My mother seemed quite offended by this, but she did tell me! And you can imagine my surprise when this list turned up in the Civil War Pension Deposition! However, there was no Catholic family Bible, no rosary, no holy cards, nothing Catholic at all that came down to me from Mary, only her Islamic key and door brooch and her Spanish combs and fan, and her needlework, all of which featured geometric patterns.