Ancestors

Dr. Fitzwilliam Dalrymple

Fitzwilliam Dalrymple was born in County Limerick, Ireland. He was probably born in 1859; one obituary gives his age at death as sixty, which would put his birth about 1862. His father was James Dalrymple, a Scottish landscape architect.

He came to New York young enough to go to school there. One notice of his death says he "was educated in the public schools of this city." He then went back across the Atlantic to Dublin and studied medicine at Trinity College, the university of Dublin. He returned "to finish his medical training at Bellevue Hospital," the great public hospital of New York City. In the autumn of 1886 he was registered to vote from Bellevue Hospital itself, listed among the men living there in the city's 30th election district. He took his medical degree at the Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1889, at about thirty. The New York University alumni catalogue of 1908, which absorbed that college, gives a different account of his schooling: "b. Limerick, Ire., 1858; St. Thomas Coll., Ire., 79."

He practiced in New York for several years. In the New York state census of February 1892 an F. W. Dalrymple, 34, born in Ireland, was living at Moriah, in Essex County, the iron-mining district on Lake Champlain, and a Lillie Dalrymple, born about 1862, was listed beside him. That was very probably the doctor and his new wife. The medical register for 1889-90 lists him at 2005 Seventh Avenue, with office hours from 8 to 11 in the morning and 5 to 8 in the evening. About 1891 he moved to New Rochelle, in Westchester County, and made his home there for the rest of his life. His son, Fitzwilliam Jr., was born there on 4 January 1893.

On 7 September 1891 he married Lillian F. at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He gave his age as thirty-three and she gave hers as thirty. She was Lillian Fay, though the marriage records spell her surname Fhey and They. The move to New Rochelle came the same year, and their son Fitzwilliam was born there in January 1893. The 1905 New York state census found the three of them in New Rochelle's second ward: Fitzwilliam, born in Ireland in 1859, his wife Lillian F., and their son.

In New Rochelle he was connected with the New Rochelle Hospital. At one time he was the city's health officer and its police surgeon. One obituary called him an "alienist and diagnostician." An alienist was the period's word for a physician who treated mental illness and gave evidence on a person's sanity. He belonged to the Westchester County and New Rochelle medical societies, to the Celtic Medical Society of New York, a society of Irish-American physicians, and to the New Rochelle Rowing Club, and was "an expert golfer and swimmer."

He was the attending physician at the New Rochelle hospital in the summer of 1897, when a swindler calling himself Dr. Dudley came to his door with a story about a servant who needed an operation. In August 1899 he nearly drowned in Echo Bay chasing his little boy's toy sailboat, and two men in a skiff pulled him out. In the First World War he was one of the New Rochelle physicians who examined the city's drafted men without pay. On Thanksgiving eve 1906 he complained to the police about a drunk man laid asleep beside a live pig in a saloon window, and then told the justice he would pay the man's fine himself.

He died on 25 October 1922 at his home, 14 Beauchamp Place, New Rochelle, after a long illness. His funeral mass was said at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in New Rochelle, and the burial was private. He left his wife and one son, then a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve's aviation corps. He is buried at Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, where his son was buried eighteen years later.

If Dr. Fitzwilliam Dalrymple is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Dr. Fitzwilliam Dalrymple (1859-1922)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/dr-fitzwilliam-dalrymple-1859-1922-7fce39.