A Partial Tree - part 2

As little as I know of my mother’s ancestry, I know even less of my father’s parents. Dad's mother Catherine Fahey died of cancer at the age of 60 having borne 17 children. I think she just wore out. My grandfather Andrew Fahey worked as a constable in my dad’s home town of Bay Bulls.

After leaving Tor Bay, my sister and I drove to Bay Bulls and inquired at the local bar if anyone knew of the Fahey’s who lived there many years ago. The bar manager, Anthony O’Brien said as a boy he knew Constable Fahey.

 “He was a huge man...6 foot six, with a size 14 shoe. He could pick you up by the scruff of your neck,” he said.

Before leaving Newfoundland, we stopped at the Drayton Hotel, owned by my Aunt Genevieve. We learned Marconi sent his first wire to Ireland from her hotel. Aunt Gen had been deceased for four years but when we inquired at the desk the clerk said, “Ask that fellow over there in the bar. He’s an old timer.” The grizzled bewhiskered “Old Timer” told us Aunt Genevieve’s daughter Mary had married a man named Laws. We looked in the telephone book and found our cousin Mary and her husband Jim Laws. Mary completed the story of my father’s parents.

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Grandfather Fahey, an interesting character, joined the Queens Constabulary as a young man and remained in that capacity until his retirement 43 years later. Considerably taller than most men in the province of Newfoundland, he stood six feet two inches, (not 6'6" as Anthony O’Brien said), As strong as a bull, he inspired fear in all who saw him. They gave him the respect his office demanded.

He never carried a weapon and kept the peace merely by his size or occasionally kicking a troublemaker in the back side. As constable, he also functioned as customs agent, game warden, court prosecutor as well as policeman. Being employed by the state, he could not own property so he put the family residence in his wife Catherine’s name, who willed it back to him after her death of cancer at age sixty.

 

Catherine (Fardy) Fahey

 After Grandfather Fahey retired in 1924, he became a farmer on a 20-acre piece of land in Kilbride. When his horse broke loose, he chased it in his Model T Ford, tied the horse to the car and brought it back to the barn. When grandmother died in 1922, grandfather looked around for another wife and found a widow named Lucy Renough. Their short lived marriage ended one night at the supper table when Lucy slumped into her dinner plate and died of a heart attack. After the death of his second wife, grandfather hired a live-in housekeeper. Being a very proper man, a retired constable no less, grandfather said it didn’t look respectable to have a woman living under the same roof without benefit of marriage so my seventy-year old grandfather married his twenty-eight year old housekeeper, Katie.

He professed it to be a marriage of convenience, but I wonder about that. After all, he had fathered 17 children with my grandmother. At any rate, that doomed marriage came to an abrupt end when he caught his young wife with a young man in his Model T in the barn. He ran them both off his property. He never divorced Katie but remained separated from her for the rest of his life. He died in 1937 at age 80. What a guy!