Daniel Francis McCormack

Daniel Francis McCormack was born to a farming family in Prince Edward Island in 1846 .. to Michael McCormack and his wife Margaret Ann. His parents were Scottish Catholics ..mxing with others like them who sometimes were Scottish ancestried but born in Ireland. His Prince Edward Island was still called Saint John's Isle by many English speaking French and his parents generations .. it had been Ile St. Jean to the French before 1755, then anglicized .. and then after 1790, named Prince Edward Island for King George III's younger brother Edward, the Duke of Brunswick.

Today, PEI as emigrants and natives call it, has a population for its whole province of 134,000; but in the 1860's filling with more immigrant farmers and the large famiies of earlier ones .. it was getting pretty crowded. Michael McCorack farmed with his family; and owned his land but cold not readily buy more for himself or his many sons. Same too for another Michael McCormack in a neighboring township or lot. Their sons emigrated elsewhere in Canada - its great plains - or to the USA or Australia and New Zealand. Canada became a separate country - a Dominion in 1867 .. taxes went up too .. and post Irish-Scottish Highland farm famines brought more people. Also by that time, having either joined the US Navy in the Civil War (one was mustered out for a heart murmer in the post-war US Navy of San Franciso) or gone to sea, Daniel became a sailor. He arrived in Boston in 1867, a sailor, and could have also just worked passage from PEI; and decided to immigrate and stay. America then was a walk-over or sail for most Canadian immigrants.

Taking a street car up from the harbor, he settled in in the Dorchester area near Grove Hill and Upham Corner. A Scottish ancestried Catholic from Canada, he found blacksmithing work in Dorchester and gained the means to open and own his own shop. Six years ater arriving in Boston, he married Caroline May .. they lived on Columbia Street at his shop in Dorchester.

They would have 13 children, 11 survived. The death of one his children prompted his purchase of a burial plot in Holy Hood Cemetery .. then being developed for Catholics from Forest Hill Cemetery.

Daniel F. McCormack increased in prosperity joined the middle class, and was able to buy land .. tough and over-priced for him in PEI. A good blacksmith, he owned and managed a few livery stables in the West Roxbury & Dorchester area; and undeveloped property sold for homes in Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain & Mattapan, alone and with partners. Even in 1920, he styled himself a simple 'horseshoer' in the Boston Business Directory. Most of his children survived him, and married. His daughter Elizabeth McCormack opened a millinery shop and married a William G. Clinton. His American born German-Irish ancestied wife Caroline died in 1910, but he outlived her fro 26 more years.

When he died, after the depression in 1936, he was living at 24 Wellington Hill Street, in the Clarendon section of Mattapan .. had long joined the automobile age and used to drive a Hupmobile. He's in the Mattapan telephone directory for that period, and his death attestation by daughter Elizabeth lists him in his styling as a real estate businessman. His obituary, appropriate and modest is in the Boston Globe for 1936 .. a devout Roman Catholic, he died after easter Sunday services. Of his sons, only James McCormack had sons by his six children. His other boys all had daughters.

Daniel F. McCormack is buried with his wife Caroline, and other members of hs family in HolyHood Cemtery in Brookline, Masachusetts off Sachem Way.