October 2008

This month’s edition continues our coverage in the life of Annie
in the Jerrems Family Mystery Series.

Notice the tie-in between the stories.

The reason for this article.

This is one of a series of articles about people who
form part of the Jerrems family’s history. It is an outline
of the story of Mark Healy’s grandmother Annie
(“Ann”) Letitia Jerrems. It is only intended to be an
outline suitable for inclusion in the Newsletter, I have
a lot more information for readers who may wish to
follow it up. For the sake of simplicity I will refer to her
in this article as “Ann“.”

My apologies to Jerrems Journal subscriber Mark
Healy for not running this article earlier; he gave
me information for the article a few years back.

Ann’s previous appearance in the Journal

Readers will remember that there was an article
about Ann’s schooling at the Ogontz School for
Young
Ladies in the September 2008 edition of the
Journal.
Also there were photos of her son and grandson (both
named Mark Healy) in the December 2006
edition.

Ann’s Early Life

Ann was the sixth child (and third daughter) of
William
George Jerrems l and his wife Mary (nee Mary
Nicholl). Readers may remember that William
George
was born in Gainsborough in England and migrated
with his family to Australia in 1859. William later
married Mary Nicholl and the couple had four children
in Australia, two in England and one (Donald,
the
grandfather of our Editor) in Chicago. Significantly,
William and Mary’s family formed the base for most of
the families in the US who now have the surname
Jerrems.

Born in England in 1882, according to her Death
Certificate, Ann (as she became known) was named
after two of her mother’s sisters.

Ann’s family moved to Chicago from England in late
1882 or in 1883. Her father became a very successful
businessman, having taken over much of his father-in-
law’s tailoring business of “Nicoll the Tailor”, a chain
of tailoring stores spread throughout most of the US.

Ann accompanied her family on trips to Europe on a
number of occasions.

Three of Ann’s four brothers received a University
education (the fourth, William, chose to leave school
at the age of 15). Ann’s latter-days education was at
the Ogontz School, with her final year at the
School in
1903.

Ann marries Marquette Healy

Ann married Marquette (“Mark”) Ambrose Healy
(born
in 1884 in Illinois) in 1907 at the comparatively late
age (for those days) of 25. There were obviously
things she wanted to do like travelling and mixing with
friends before she settled down. A handsome couple,
in due course Ann and Mark had 3 children,
Mary
Patricia Healy (born in 1908), Marquette Healy
Jr (born
in 1909) and Vincent Jerrems Healy (born in
1918).
They lived until 1928 in Chicago.

Incidentally, Ann’s husband Marquette was
probably
named after the famous French Jesuit explorer Father
Jacques Marquette. He was the first person to follow
the Mississippi River from its source most of the way
down towards its mouth, in the mid 1600s.

I mention this particularly because the picturesque
name “Marquette” has been carried down for 2 more
generations after appearing “out of the blue” (it had
not been used in earlier Jerrems or Healy
generations). All 3 men were known as “Mark”.

Ann’s father-in-law was Patrick Joseph Healy
(needless to say he was born in Ireland) who was co-
founder of the company of Lyon & Healy,
famous for
making musical instruments and reputedly
the largest
instrument maker in the world at the time. I have
written a separate article about this company, which
has a fascinating history.

Mark and Ann lived in comfortable circumstances in
Chicago (or perhaps one might say, as comfortably as
one could live in Chicago, with its notorious winters).
In summer they spent time at a house on Lake
Geneva in Wisconsin to the north and in winter they
escaped to a house in Pasadena in sunny California
on the west coast.

To be fair to Chicago, it was at that stage the second
largest city (second only to New York) in the US and
had a thriving business community. The business
district was modern, having been rebuilt after the
massive Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Financial Position

Mark worked in the family business, which was
flourishing.

As would be expected, Mark and Ann were
financially
well off in these years. In the 1910 Census in Chicago
they are shown to have a cook, a nanny (no doubt to
keep their infant son Marquette in line) and a
chauffeur. In the 1920 Census, when they were
holidaying in January in Pasadena, California, they
had an entourage of 4 servants. This was a record
number of servants for the Jerrems family. All of Ann’s
brothers and sisters had one or two servants, but only
Ann had four.

The number of servants they took to Pasadena also
indicates that the family stayed there for an extended
winter holiday, not surprising in view of the time taken
to travel there.

The train journey from Chicago to Pasadena would
have taken almost 3 days if they travelled non-stop (for
the benefit of Australian readers, the distance from
Chicago to Pasadena is similar to the distance from
Sydney to Perth).

The Pasadena house they rented was close to a
house owned by Ann’s older sisters Helen and
Mae,
indicating that Ann kept in contact with all of the family.
Three of her four brothers (Alexander Nicholl,
Arthur
Wallace and Donald Edwin) lived in Chicago,
where
she would have been able to see them at any time for
the rest of the year.

Mark took over the presidency of Lyon & Healy in 1921
but sold the company in 1928, one year before the
start of the Great Depression. This exit from a
vulnerable area of the business world (would you buy
a musical instrument if you could barely feed your
family?) would have reduced the financial effect of the
Depression on the family. By way of contrast, Ann’s
four brothers were not so fortunate. They were badly
hit by the Great Depression and their tailoring empire,
which they had taken over from their father in the early
1900s, collapsed.

The Family leaves Chicago.

Mark and Ann were able to use part of the proceeds of
the sale of the company to leave Chicago and buy a
ranch in Arizona, where they lived until the mid 1930s.
They then moved to California, where they lived for the
rest of their lives. Ann died in 1970 at the considerable
age of 88, outliving her husband and 6 siblings by a
large margin.

To briefly round off the story, sadly two of Mark and
Ann’s 3 children (Patricia and Mark) died in the early
1940s. This left Vincent as sole survivor of the three
children, and he married Patricia, coincidentally
bearing the same Christian name as his sister (the
repetition of names can be confusing, can’t it). Finally,
to cap off the repetitions, Vincent (who died in 1982)
and Patricia had 2 sons, Vincent Jerrems Healy
(“Vince”) born in 1944 and Marquette Ambrose Healy
(“Mark”) born in 1948.

It sounds like an Army tank, doesn’t it, with models
Mark 1, Mark 2 and Mark 3.

Photographs

Fortunately we have some photographs of the family.
In one charming photograph we have (from left to
right) Ann, Mark 1, a dashing Vincent in his Air Force
uniform, and his wife-to-be Patricia. The picture was
taken in about 1942 at the family’s Balboa beach
house in Newport Beach, California.

In another photo (taken in the early 1930s) we have a
debonair Mark 2 standing in front of his sleek Auburn
roadster. Finally, in an interesting contrast, we have a
photo taken several years ago showing Mark 3
standing in front of his fire truck.

Finale

So there you have it. An outline of Ann’s life. A happy
life on the whole, tinged with the sadness of losing
two of her three children in their adult years.

I managed to locate her grandchildren Mark and
Vince, who filled in some of the gaps for me and gave
me the photos.

I was particularly interested in locating Mark and Vince
because of the dearth of information on Ann’s
generation. The only other person of her generation
known by living people is her older brother William
George ll.

Remember the long-misplaced letter submitted by
Charles W. “Chick” Keller, Overland Park, KS in
September’s edition?

It started off:

“We moved recently and last night I was cleaning out a
file cabinet and came accross a file I don’t think I had
ever seen before. I think we picked the file up when my
mother Sydney Ann Jerrems died.

The letter was written by William G Jerrems (my
grandfather) on Sept 22, 1943 and was written to Betty
Wright Rizzo, daughter of Marjorie Jerrems Wright
Teasdale. ”

We promised a revisit with comments by Ray.

The letter published in the September edition of the
Jerrems Journal was a real “find” and clears up some
outstanding mysteries.

The writer of the letter was William George
Jerrems ll, the first son of William George Jerrems l
and Mary Jerrems referred to in the previous
article. In other words he was, coincidentally, Annie’s
oldest brother.

The letter has a number of interesting references
(quoted below), to which I have added my comments:

1. “You once asked if the Jerrems family had a
coat of arms. It has. I had a copy of it, but it
became lost in my frequent moves.”
Comment: This is the oldest reference we
have to a coat of arms. I have heard it referred to
elsewhere but nobody has found it.

2. “The Jerrems family were French
Huguenots“. Comment: This statement
is particularly interesting because I had heard the
same story, probably handed down from my great
grandfather Charles. Assuming that William George ll
heard it from his father (Charles’s brother) then this
account (corroborating the account I had heard) goes
back to the mid 1800s. This makes it highly likely that
it is correct.

3. “In 1811 he was important enough to issue his own
silver coins“. Comment: I had
previously researched these coins and have prepared
an article about them.

4. “His mother was Elizabeth Jephson, daughter of a
county squire and Magistrate”. Comment:
Elizabeth’s maiden name was in fact Jepson.
Her father was a surgeon (confirmed by records at the
time), but he could also have been at the same time a
Justice of the Peace who was called upon from time
to time to sit in a local court.

5. “Your grandfather Jerrems shipped as a cabin boy
on a sailing vessel from Hull, England in 1856 and
arrived in Australia nine months later.”
Comment: This probably explains (as I have
suspected) that two of the older boys (William and
Edwin) could have come out to Melbourne several
years before their mother. The trip would not have
taken 9 months, but the mystery is who looked after
them when they came out? Probably the father, a
difficult task without his wife.

6. “He married Mary Nicoll on Christmas day
1869 (note maybe 1867?)”. Comment: Their
first son William George ll was born in 1869,
so 1867 would have been the correct year of their
marriage.

7. “We came to the US in 1875, lived in Brooklyn and
Philadelphia and went to England in 1877”.
Comment: This shows that the family went
directly from Australia to the US (something I
suspected), then to England, after which they returned
to the US in late 1882 after Annie was born.
They would have travelled by ship from Australia to
San Francisco and then taken a train to the east coast
(the line from San Francisco was opened in 1869).