Ancestors

Emily Schunt O'Brien

Emily was born on 9 April 1875 in Switzerland. The date comes from the petition for citizenship her husband filed in 1931. Her first language was German. The same petition types her birthplace as "Nado-bals, Switzerland", which matches no Swiss place as written. A passenger list of 1931 gives "Kt. Beone", most likely Kanton Bern with one letter wrong. The list of the ship that brought her back to America in 1924 says it plainly: she was born at Berne, Switzerland. Three clerks wrote her maiden name three ways: Schunt in the Irish birth register of her daughter in 1911, Smith in the New York record of her marriage in 1906, and a name that reads like Schunette in a New York census of 1905. Smith is how a New York clerk would write the Swiss Schmid or Schmidt. In the Irish register the word read as Schunt can as well be read Schmit, since the letters are the same run of strokes. So her maiden name was probably Schmid or Schmidt, though no record spells it out plainly.

She first crossed to the United States in 1893, when she was about eighteen. By the summer of 1905 she had been in America twelve years and was in domestic service in the town of Mount Pleasant, Westchester County, New York, a farming and estate country about thirty miles north of New York City. The state census taken on 1 June 1905 lists her as a servant, 30, born in Switzerland, in the household of Luther G. Billings, 62. With him lived his wife Laura B., 59, and their son Luther G. Jr., 27, a lawyer. Two other servants lived in. One was an American girl of eighteen. The other was John O'Brien, 29, born in Ireland, who had been in the country one year.

Emily and John married on 5 May 1906 at Pleasantville, the village inside the town of Mount Pleasant. The State of New York recorded the marriage as certificate 8626 of 1906, and its list of that year's marriages enters the bride as Emily Smith. She was 31, and so was he.

Within five years they had moved to his home town, Callan in County Kilkenny, Ireland. Callan is a small market town in the south of Ireland, about ten miles south west of the city of Kilkenny. On census night, 2 April 1911, Emily, 36, and John, 35, were living at house 13 in Prologue, a street of Callan. She was a Roman Catholic, could read and write, and was still working as a cook in domestic service. They had been married five years and had no children.

By September they had moved to Green Street, Callan. There on 20 September 1911 Emily gave birth to her only known child, a daughter, Margaret. A month later, on 20 October, Emily went to the registrar herself and signed the entry as Emily O'Brien, mother, of Green Street. The registrar wrote her maiden name as Schunt.

The family stayed in Callan for thirteen years. In August 1924 the three of them went back to America together. They sailed from Cobh on 23 August 1924 on the Samaria and landed at Boston on 30 August. On the ship's list Emily is a housekeeper of 50, married, able to read and write English, entered as Irish by nationality, with her last home in Callan and her destination New York City. Like her husband and daughter, she named as her nearest relative in Ireland her father-in-law, John O'Brien of Green View, Callan. The second sheet of the list adds what the immigration inspector saw and asked. Emily was five feet tall, with a fresh complexion, white hair and brown eyes, and she had $50 with her. She had lived in New York for seventeen years before, until 1911. Her immigration visa had been issued at Dublin on 1 August 1924, number 1758, and the clerk marked it Swiss. All three of them were going to join John Smith of West Cornwall, Litchfield County, Connecticut.

A Swiss-born man named John F. Smith lived near West Cornwall in those years. He was born in February 1877, came to America in 1896, and was living in New Haven in 1900 with his wife Alice, also Swiss. By 1920 he was in Litchfield County, and in 1930 and 1940 he was in the town of Sharon, next to Cornwall, a widower. He had been a poultry farmer, and he died at his home in West Cornwall on 18 March 1946, aged 69. He is probably the John Smith the family was going to. A Swiss Smith taking in the family, when Emily had married under the name Smith, suggests he may have been her kin, but no record says how they were related.

John's declaration of intention, sworn in February 1926, says his wife was then living in Ireland, but the ship's list shows her landing with him.

By the spring of 1925 the family was living in New Haven, Connecticut. On 12 April 1930 the census found them in the twelfth ward of the city, renting for $20 a month. John, 55, was a labourer in the building trade. Emily, 55, was keeping house, and the census taker wrote German as her mother tongue. Margaret, 18, was a clerk in a department store. Both parents told the census they had married at 31.

John became an American citizen in 1931, and that summer the three of them went back to Ireland on a visit. Margaret, a citizen through her father, held a United States passport issued on 25 June 1931. Emily was still a foreign national, so before leaving she obtained a permit to re-enter, issued at Washington on 11 July 1931. They sailed home from Cobh on 2 October 1931 on the President Roosevelt. On the ship's list of aliens Emily is a housewife of 58, able to read and write English, British by nationality through her husband, Swiss by birth, born in Switzerland, with her permanent home in New Haven. John and Margaret appear above her, entered as American citizens.

Emily later moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and she was living there by 1935. On 2 February 1938 the United States District Court at Philadelphia admitted her as a citizen. She gave her age as 64 and her address as 3406 Fairmount Avenue, and she signed the certificate card Emily O'Brien.

The census of April 1940 found her in the twenty fourth ward of Philadelphia, at the house she had lived in since 1935. She was the head of the household, 65, married, and born in Switzerland. She worked 44 hours a week as a bottler at a distillery, had worked all 52 weeks of 1939, and had earned $850 that year. Her daughter Margaret, 28 and single, kept the house. John was not living with them, and what became of him after 1931 is not known. What became of Emily after 1940 is not known either.

Margaret married Stephen M. Lastinec in New Jersey in 1943, as Margaret O'Brien, and died in New Jersey in 1995. Her Social Security number had been issued in Pennsylvania, where she was living with her mother in 1940.

If Emily Schunt O'Brien is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Emily Schunt O'Brien (b. 1875)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/emily-schunt-o-brien-1875-69b5f4.