Chapter also available in PDF
DAY FAMILY ORIGIN STORY
1819-2019
by John Joseph (Jack) Fritscher, PhD.,
a Seanachie of Clan Ó Deághaidh,
at the 1920s desk of his grandfather
Bartholomew Day, III (1887-1954)
who gave it in 1948 to his mother
Virginia Day Fritscher (1919-2004)
who gave it to him in 2001
Farmers, Judges, Teachers, Wives,
Authors, Priests, Veterans, and Postmasters
The past is prologue and context is everything.
John Tyrrell Day, son of Bartholomew Day (aka Dey aka O’Dea aka Ó’Deághaidh) and Margaret Tyrrell (aka Terrell), was born near the town of Fethard in Tipperary in 1819 exactly one hundred years before the birth of his grandniece, Virginia Claire Day Fritscher, in Kampsville in 1919. He left the hard times of the Potato Famine in Ireland in 1849 to join the California Gold Rush announced in January 1848. He bought a ticket to sail across the Atlantic on one of the coffin ships, on which by average one in five passengers died, taking three weeks to reach New Orleans where many Irish entered America. Before heading west, he traveled by steamboat from New Orleans to St. Louis, paying five dollars for the six-day trip up the Mississippi following Irish immigration patterns to look for business opportunities. After wintering in St. Louis and Hamburg, Illinois, where parcels of land were for sale, he joined a wagon train that took nearly six months to make the 3000-mile trek across the plains to San Francisco and the gold fields of California.
The immigrant from a small island nation occupied by the British braved becoming a pioneer of a large continent discovering itself. He endured the California Trail that opened a rugged route to wagon trains during the 1840s, heading to San Francisco whose population of 200 in 1846 had boomed to 36,000 by his arrival in 1850. Striking it rich enough as a prospector, he returned east sailing out of San Francisco and around Cape Horn to New Orleans. It was a voyage of four to five months, but he was not about to repeat the cross-country hardship of a wagon train. He had little choice. At that time, stagecoach travel, one-way, at 24-hours a day for 28 days, would not begin until 1861, and transcontinental railroads until 1869. In the early 1850s when the population of a thousand English settlers in Calhoun County boomed to 3200 with the arrival of German and Irish immigrants, his success allowed him to buy several large tracts of land near Hamburg in Irish Hollow with strategic access to transportation on the Mississippi which became an even more vital highway during the Civil War. In Calhoun County in 1850, farmland in Hamburg cost around five dollars an acre increasing to ten dollars in 1860, to nineteen in 1870 when he married, and to twenty-seven when he died in 1888.
He settled in as a farmer and orchardist who put down his roots and sold his produce north to Peoria, locally to Jacksonville, and down river to St. Louis where thousands out of a population of 160,000 were dying in a cholera pandemic that lasted from 1852 to 1860 at the same time St. Louis, populated by Catholic Irish and German immigrants, was divided on the issues of slavery and abolition, but remained in the Union. He had arrived seasoned by the mass death of the Famine and the politics of the Famine Rebellion against British landowners that took place near his home in Tipperary in 1848 when revolution swept Europe. During the Famine from 1845-1849, a million Irish were starved to death, and another million Irish, including him, left the island. His mother’s family, the Catholic Tyrrells of Westmeath, had been fighting the Protestant British occupiers since the time of the first Queen Elizabeth.
Because Tipperary is only 130 miles from Ireland’s sacred burial cairn Newgrange that at 5000-years-old predates Stonehenge and the Pyramids, the new colonist may have appreciated the ancient burial mounds on the land he bought in the fertile delta between the Mississippi and the Illinois rivers known as the “Nile of North America.” Calhoun County as a peninsula becomes virtually an island like Ireland when frequent flooding closes the bridges and ferries isolating the residents. The first known white men to contact the indigenous people were the explorers Father Marquette and Louis Joliet who recorded landing in 1673 near what would become Kampsville. They were followed in 1680 by the French fur-trader and explorer Lasalle. Because trappers, mountain men, and arrowhead collectors had been trafficking ever since around this ancient Indian Territory, he may have learned from the cracker-barrel tales of local migratory history and myth that his was just the most recent generation to be living on the site of the oldest civilization in North America—settled consistently for over 9,000 years by native peoples whose prehistoric aboriginal culture and burial mounds would in the 1970s rise to fame worldwide as the largest archeological dig in North America.
Settling into a forested Indian hunting ground of wilderness and underbrush teeming with wolves and rattlesnakes and wild turkey and deer, he would have learned from local lore that the first white settler, an Acadian French trapper known only as O’Neal, lived there from 1801 to his death in 1842. He would have known that the peaceful local Illinois tribe was decimated by the Iroquois around the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, just as the explorers Lewis and Clark barged by on their keelboat in 1804. After the aggrieved tribe signed a piece of paper in 1816 giving their land to the United States government, they were overcome when the State of Illinois—founded in 1818 and named after their tribe—renamed their homeland “Calhoun County” in 1825, causing them to retreat west to reservations managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs founded by the War Department in 1824, making the formerly sovereign native peoples wards of the government.
In 1819, five families of pioneer whites immigrated into the area, settling near the only structure, an Indian trading post. The first apple trees were planted and the first ferry was launched. The last few visible Indians were exiled westward by 1835, fifteen years before John T. Day, the colonist immigrant from an occupied country, found himself caught up, perhaps with a certain judge-like empathy, occupying a county whose ancient civilization could not survive his. In the sweep of history’s ironies and erasures, as cultures rise and fall, he could not have predicted that a century later the very Kampsville postoffice where his nephew, Bartholomew (Bart/Batty) Day III, would be a rural carrier, and his grandniece, Cecelia Day Stelbrink, would be postmaster for thirty-six years, would become, fate’s full circle, a world-famous laboratory for the international Center for American Archeology founded to study and preserve the grace and refinements of Calhoun County’s local Native American culture.
As a new citizen in Calhoun County, John T. Day, Senior, was a Democrat who served on election and other boards in the county named—long before he arrived as the first of four generations of impartial Day family judges—for the family of the ill-famed Democrat John Calhoun who as a Southern nationalist won the Electoral College vote to be the seventh Vice-President of the United States in 1825 and then resigned as a defender of slavery and states rights in 1832.
At a Lincolnesque six-feet-two, Judge John T. Day, Senior, was a slender, dignified, handsomely moustached man who, unmarried at the start of the Civil War in 1861 when he was 41, was drafted for service in the Union Army, but was exempted, after his travels as a fit young man, because of a leg crippled, likely by the Irish heritage of arthritis, or perhaps by a farming injury. That infirmity and his farming success eventually impelled him to bring his unmarried younger brother, Bartholomew, Junior, from Tipperary sailing on May 15 from Queenstown, Ireland, on the immigrant ship, S. S. Helvetia, to New York in 1868. It is yet to be discovered why the devoted brothers waited almost twenty years after John’s arrival for Bartholomew, Junior, to immigrate and become business partners.
In the S. S. Helvetia manifest, Bartholomew, Junior, was listed as “Barth Day, Passenger 905, age 24 [he was actually 39], laborer.” Because the Day family in Ireland was large, John T. Day, Senior, the American patriarch, who was regarded as the family’s founding Calhoun County chieftain of the Clan Ó Deághaidh, also assisted the immigration to Hamburg of other Irish in-law families already married to Day women in Ireland by the name of Kelly, Hughes, O’Connell, and Corbett. He brought two of his own several sisters over, and one, named Margaret, married Edmund Hughes, and the other married a Corbett.
In fact, “Passenger 906” on the S. S. Helvetia was the cousin of John T, Senior and Bartholomew, Junior, “Barth Corbett, 31, laborer,” who left his father Edmund and his mother Mary Day Corbett, the sister of John T., Senior, and Bartholomew, Junior, behind in Tipperary. Another sister staying in Ireland married a Kelly. With less than a dollar between them, they traveled from New York to New Orleans by train and then by boat to Calhoun County. The best existing example of how these immigrants lived is the restored primitive village of Lincoln’s New Salem only one hundred miles away. Batty Corbett’s story typifies the mid-nineteenth-century pioneer history of the Day brothers and cousins.
The 1891 book, A Portrait and Biographical Album of Pike and Calhoun Counties profiled Bartholomew “Batty” Corbett, who married Catherine Hughes of St. Louis, as it could have profiled in parallel John T. Day, Senior, and Bartholomew Day, Junior, who became a citizen on June 17, 1873. In its workaday details the Album entry resembles the 1920s-1930s homespun details in Virginia Day Fritscher’s memoir of her Day family life in this book.
For a time after his arrival young [Bartholomew] Corbitt [sic] worked as a farm hand, cut cord wood [sold to steamboats] and did various odd jobs such as he could find to do, carefully hoarding his resources preparatory to securing for himself a home. He finally bought one hundred and sixty acres of the land he now occupies, which was covered with timber and in the wild condition in which it had been left by the aborigines. He was obliged to do the pioneer work of clearing the place, and for several years after he settled thereon he occupied a little shanty, 10×12 feet, made of logs with a clapboard roof. He lived in this dwelling until he was able to build a better house. He added to his estate as his affairs prospered and now owns two hundred and eighty-five acres which he has brought to a firm condition as regards its tillage and improvement. Mr. Corbitt [sic] has served as School Director with credit to himself and his constituents. In politics he is a Democrat and in religion a Catholic. He has acquired a leading place among the Irish-American citizens of Hamburg Precinct, having gained the confidence of the business community by his honesty and industry, and the respect of all who admire sturdy enterprise, thrift and a law abiding spirit.
Not long after Bartholomew, Junior’s arrival, the bachelor brothers decided that in the hard-work prosperity of their middle-age, having built their “better houses,” they should each marry “a nice Irish girl” as a helpmate. According to the 1860 census, 87,563 Irish immigrated to Illinois where they were five percent of the population and where there were 92,000 more men than women. Bartholomew, age 39 or 40, traveled to the Kerry Patch neighborhood in St. Louis, just north of the present Convention Center, where he was introduced to Mary Lynch, age 20, who was born thirty miles from Fethard in Waterford, and whose father, John (Jack) Lynch, was a sailor who drowned in Lake Erie, leaving her with a maiden aunt. The name “Lynch,” from Clan O’Loinsigh, comes—coincidentally or not—from the word “loinseach” meaning “sailor” or “mariner.” Years later, because of this family tragedy, her youngest son, Bartholomew III (1887-1954), would constantly warn his own five children about the dangers of living along the flooding river at Kampsville, saying: “Drowning runs in our family.”
His daughter Virginia Day Fritscher wrote: “Back in Ireland, the Day family knew the Lynch family. My grandmother Mary Lynch was a twin with black hair and blue eyes. Her twin had red hair and blue eyes and stayed in Ireland when Mary was sent to meet my grandfather, Bartholomew, who was twenty years older. Her father died and she never saw her family again. My daddy [Bartholomew III] had reddish hair that somehow turned brown when his prospective wife, who became my mother, said she could not marry anyone with red hair. So in the summer of 1910, he went west for about three months, thinking about marriage while visiting his brother Tom in Portland, Oregon, and when he returned his hair was brown.”
As to Virginia’s interest in multiple births in the Day family, her son George Robert, married to Sharon Lee O’Farrell, had “Irish Triplets” when their twin daughters, Dianna and Laura were born in 1964, a quick ten months after their first son, Scott, was born in 1963. Judge John W. Day on May 5, 1993, answered Virginia’s letter about her upcoming June trip to Ireland: “Nice to hear from you. Regarding your question, the only Days I know of [in Ireland] lived near Fethard about twenty-five years ago and were located by our cousin Loretta Corbett Booth of St. Louis….[She said] the head of the family was Tom Day and he had triplet daughters who were about age nine then. Tom Day is probably dead as he was in his fifties or so when they were born, according to Loretta. I doubt there were any other triplets in the area and you ought to be able to find them.” On August 22, 1993, he wrote: “Dear Virginia, We hope you enjoyed your trip to Ireland and arrived home safely. Enclosed is a copy of the Day Family history I promised to send.”
Bartholomew, Junior’s older brother, John T., Senior, attended the Lynch-Day wedding (c. 1870) with the thought of traveling on to New Orleans, or, according to one story, Tipperary, if need be, in search of a bride. Instead, age 51, he danced with that never-married aunt of Mary Lynch, Catherine Dorsey (1816-1909), who was born in Youghal in Cork, was three years older than he, and was so independent in spirit that in his later years, he was inclined to say out of her presence, according to Judge John W. Day, that “It was a sad day for me when I met ‘Irish Kate.’” Their senior marriage of convenience that became inconvenient produced no children. As a result, his dutiful brother Bartholomew, Junior, gratefully named his first son, John Tyrrell Day, Junior, thus turning “John T. Day” into “John T. Day, Senior,” in the local newspapers and history books like The History of the Illinois River Valley.
This essay preserves the “Senior” and “Junior” labels to match that exact usage in historical documents, and then switches to the more common use of Roman numerals for the third generation. So Bartholomew staying in Tipperary is “Senior”; his son, Bartholomew, the immigrant, is “Junior”; and Junior’s son, Bartholomew (Bart/Batty), born in Michael, Illinois, is “III.”
In 1952, when Virginia Day Fritscher’s son John/Jack, age thirteen, asked his grandfather, Bartholomew III, why he had no middle name, he joked, “We were too poor to afford one.” In the 1930 census, and seemingly only in the 1930 census, there is a “Valentine Day” listed, without the “Bartholomew,” whose life-details as “head of household” match Bartholomew III; but this name “Valentine,” appearing nowhere else in the Day short-list of names, seems to be a mistake, or a census-satirizing subversive joke made to the serious census taker by Bart who was known for his kidding sense of humor. Who, besides Stage Irish vaudeville comedians, engaged in the stereotypes of Paddywhackery, would saddle their child with the name “Valentine Day”? In that same census, Mary Pearl Day is listed off-kilter as “Pearl M. Day.” Twenty-four years later in 1954, Bartholomew died on February 13, the Eve of St. Valentine’s Day. In researching “Bartholomew Day,” the singular difficulty is that search engines confuse that name a million times over with the “St. Bartholomew Day Massacre” of French Protestants by French Catholics in 1572.
When John T. Day, Senior, died April 17, 1888, the farmland went to Catherine Dorsey Day as a life estate, and then to Bartholomew, Junior, and Mary Lynch Day. In short, Bartholomew Day, Junior, from Tipperary (May 20, 1829-September 6, 1903) married (c. 1870) Mary Lynch from County Waterford (1848-1925), and they became the parents of five sons and two daughters including their first-born Mary Katharine Day who died a few days after birth. Their surviving children were:
1. Judge John T. Day, Junior (1872-1942), their second-born, who married schoolteacher Addie Fowler in 1904, and had four children: Mary Day Roth, Loretta Day Ritter, Catherine Felice Day Hagen (who was a look-alike for Virginia Day Fritscher), and Judge John William Day;
2. James Day (1875-1951), the licensed engineer and steamboat captain who, taking after his (drowned) sailor grandfather, successfully took a flat-bottomed steamboat ballasted for ocean travel down the Mississippi through the Gulf of Mexico to Portland, Oregon, and, in a marriage cut short by his wife’s death, was the father of one child, Howard Day, a Middleweight Boxing Champion of the Navy in the 1920s; James Day was, according to Mary Pearl Lawler Day, a look-alike for her grandson John (Jack) Fritscher;
3. Margaret (Mag) Day (1878-1938), named for her Tyrrell grandmother, who married Casper Joseph Stelbrink in 1900 and had two children: Joseph and the never-married postmaster Cecelia;
4. Thomas Day (1880-1945) who moved west as a bronco-buster around 1900 and settled in Portland where he married and worked in the shipyards, and was buried in Riverview Cemetery in Oregon next to his wife Anna Etta Mackey, daughter of John Mackey and Pluma St. Ores, with whom he had one child: Margaret who, according to Judge John W. Day, “was almost an identical look-alike for Helen Day, the daughter of Joe and Ella Day”;
5. Joseph Day (1883-1960) who was a postmaster in Hamburg and married Addie Fowler’s sister, schoolteacher Ella Fowler (who was also a Hamburg postmaster) in 1911, and had two children: Helen and Joseph, Junior;
6. and the youngest, Bartholomew (Bart/Batty) Day III (1887-1954), who married Mary Pearl Lawler from her paternal Clan Ó Leathlobhair and from her maternal Clan MacDonnchadha in 1911, and was the father of their five children—of whom the males died young in their fifties: including: the Catholic priest and Army Chaplain John Bartholomew (John B. Day, 1912-1967), James T. (1914-1968), Margaret Norine Day Chumley (1917-1996), Virginia Claire Day Fritscher (1919-2004), and Harold Joseph (1922-1977).
In 1932, while many eyewitness fact-checkers of this generation of the Day family were still alive, John Leonard Conger and William Edgar Hull confirmed, as sorted above, the line of descent from Virginia’s grandfather, Bartholomew Day, Junior, in The History of the Illinois River Valley:
Bartholomew Day [Junior] served on the school and village boards, as well as on many grand and petit juries. He devoted his attention to farming, and was a Catholic in his religious faith. To him and his wife were born five sons and two daughters, namely: John T., Junior; James, who is an engineer on the Mississippi River Improvement Service; Mrs. Margaret Day Stelbrink, of Kampsville; Thomas, who is employed in shipyards in Portland, Oregon; Joseph, who is engaged in fruit raising; Bartholomew, who is a rural mail carrier out of Kampsville, and Katherine [named after Catherine Dorsey], who died in infancy.
Calhoun County Judge John W. Day (1919-2013), the son of Judge John T. Day, Junior, wrote to his cousin Virginia Day Fritscher on August 8, 1993, that the two oldest brothers, John and Joe—who was also over six feet tall—had a special regard looking after their youngest sibling, Bartholomew, III, who was sickly as a boy and shorter at five-feet-ten. Bartholomew III’s, wife, the stylish St, Louis beauty with Gibson Girl hair, Mary Pearl Lawler Day, recalled how in the early years of their marriage, Bart nearly died from one incidence of what may have been hemorrhagic purpura.
She said the attending physician told her, “You’ll be a widow by morning.” She recalled in an interview recorded by her grandson Jack Fritscher on May 8, 1972, and included in this book: “Daddy [Bartholomew III] used to say we were descended from Irish kings, because he one time had that blood disease only royalty gets…where the blood just comes out of your pores. Daddy was in the hospital for six weeks and they cured him by giving him horse serum and he was never sick again.”
She always referred to her husband as “Daddy” and he called her “Mom.” She never liked his nickname “Batty” which his birth family called him to distinguish yet one more “Bartholomew” from his grandfather, father, and cousins. Even so, she named her own firstborn, John Bartholomew. She herself preferred to be called “Mary” or “Mrs. Day,” even though some old-timers, and her son-in-law Jim Chumley, sometimes called her “Pearl,” a name she disliked, while her grandchildren always called her “Nanny.”
In self-fashioning their family clan, Mr. and Mrs. Bartholomew Day, Junior, gave pride of place to their firstborn, John Tyrrell Day, Junior, Virginia Day Fritscher’s uncle, who was profiled by Conger and Hull:
One of Calhoun County’s most distinguished citizens is John T. Day, Junior, who has been officially connected with the county for twenty-four years, eight years as county clerk and sixteen years as judge of the county court. He is also one of the county’s leading orchardists and farmers and has been very successful in all of his affairs. He was born on the 2nd of November, 1872, on a farm formerly owned by his uncle, but now owned by himself, and located near Hamburg…. He attended the public schools and Whipple Academy, which is the academic department of Illinois College, at Jacksonville. Later he was a student in a private Normal School at Bushnell, Illinois, and also took a course in bookkeeping at that place. He received a first-grade certificate, permitting him to teach for eight years, and he served seven years of that period in the home school at Hamburg, of which he had charge. He then entered politics, and was elected clerk of Calhoun County, in which position, by successive reelections, he served for eight years, after which he was elected to the bench of the county court. As a judge he has shown himself a man of calm and dispassionate judgment, sincere and conscientious in everything he does, and has honored the position which he has filled for so many years.
In 1904 Judge John T. Day, Junior, was united in marriage to Addie M. Fowler, a daughter of Rev. W. P. Fowler [a Methodist preacher at the Oasis Church in Hardin and in Batchtown], who taught school for twelve years at Hamburg, Indian Creek, and Gilead….Judge Day is a strong supporter of the Democratic party and has attended many county, district and state conventions, as well as the national convention at Kansas City in 1900. For many years he was either chairman or secretary of the county central committee. He is president of the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce and is a member of the Woodmen, the State Horticultural Society and the County Farm Bureau, of which he was formerly secretary. During the late war he served as chairman of the exemption board, belonged to the Four-Minute Speakers and the legal advisory board. [The Four-Minute Speakers were commissioned by President Wilson to promote American involvement in the first World War by standing up to give quick pop-up patriotic speeches in town meetings, movie theaters, and restaurants.] No worthy cause has appealed in vain for the Judge’s support and he is numbered among Calhoun County’s most progressive and public-spirited citizens.
John T. Day, Junior’s children, the cousins and playmates of Virginia Day Fritscher were, as noted: Mary Eleanor Day (Leo) Roth; the doomed bride Loretta who married the dentist, Dr. Phil A. Ritter, and died from pneumonia two months prior to childbirth at 22; Catherine Felice Day (Renard) Hagen; and Judge John William Day whose son, with Wannie Bell Day, John Patrick Day, C.P., was ordained a Catholic priest in 1972.
After Judge John T. Day, Junior, married Addie Fowler, his brother, Joe Day, married Addie’s sister, Ella. Joe was an accountant and bookkeeper who could play a dozen instruments from the violin to the slide trombone and in his teens traveled across the country with various bands before settling down for several years as a working-partner farming with his favorite brother, John T, Junior, who was also musical. Joe and Ella ran a farm in Gresham Hollow just a couple miles south of Hamburg.
Virginia Day Fritscher wrote in 1980: “Two of my daddy’s brothers married sisters and their children always let us know they were double-cousins more related to each other than to us. They always called their parents ‘The Folks’ and when they’d come over unexpectedly some Sunday afternoon, they’d tell us kids the ‘The Folks’ were planning on staying for supper so we’d tell mom and she’d have us go down to the store and get some choice cold cuts, etc. as we had our big dinner of roast or chicken at noon, and needless to say after feeding seven, there wasn’t enough for four more….They both, uncle John and uncle Joe [the two oldest brothers] ran huge apple orchards.”
Virginia added in 1982: “My uncle John’s son, John W., my cousin who married Wannie Bell, is now a judge in Granite City. I’m also very proud that my brother Jimmy’s son [James W. Day] is now a judge continuing our family heritage of three judges in three generations. He is in Carrollton where my brother, his father, owned the famous Day’s Café on the town square in the 1950s.”
For many years, James W. Day was a resident and presiding circuit judge of the Seventh Circuit Court in Illinois. He was admitted to the bar in 1963, retiring from his post as circuit judge on December 6, 2020. His son with Greene County historical preservationist Dotty Allen Day, James Allen Day, became the fourth-generation judge in the Day family when he received a lifetime appointment as a United States Administrative Law Judge in 2016. In 2013, Dotty Day saved the 130-year-old Fry Octagonal Barn in Carrollton. She collected its history, and, with the engineering help of the Day cousins at J. J. Chumley Builders of Whitehall, moved it three hundred feet out of the path of incoming new homes to preserve it on their Day family farm where they began living in 1970.
Virginia Day Fritscher’s father, Bartholomew Day III, was the youngest son of Bartholomew, Junior, and Mary Lynch Day, and married Mary Pearl Lawler Day in a private ceremony conducted by the Reverend J. J. Furlong at St. Columbkille’s Church in St. Louis on July 12,1911. Their marriage banns were not announced from the pulpit and they were wed in secret to avoid threats from Francis Devine, the fiancé Mary Pearl had dropped upon meeting Bart/Batty that previous summer when she had taken the steamboat to visit her cousins in Hamburg—and in one version of their meeting—saw Bart crossing a field, and said, “That’s the man I’m going to marry.”
Her Lawler family, according to Judge John W. Day, “were people of some means.” In her 1972 recorded interview, she recalled her parents. Her father, John (Jack) Patrick Lawler, born of immigrant parents in St. Louis c. 1859, died there in 1920. Her mother, Honorah Anastasia McDonough (1862-1925), was born in St. Louis of parents whose four parents were immigrants from Ireland. She once mentioned that one of her grandmothers was named Mary Higgins. After her husband Jack Lawler’s death, Honorah lived with her only daughter’s family in Kampsville where she retreated to an upstairs room and died in April 1925.
Bart and Mary Pearl Day began their family of five children in Hamburg with their firstborn son, the handsome and athletic John Bartholomew Day, a young newspaper reporter for five years for the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, who was ordained a Catholic priest in 1938 and was a chaplain serving with the rank of Major in the Battle of the Bulge. During the blizzard snowstorms of that bloody and confusing turmoil over Christmas 1944 and New Year’s 1945, the U. S. Secretary of War sent Western Union Telegrams that both he and his brother-in-law, Jim Chumley, were each reported, separately, as “missing in action” in the Ardennes Forest. Weeks later, they were reported safe. At that time, families dreaded seeing the uniformed Western Union boy park his bicycle and ring the doorbell to deliver a telegram on yellow paper pasted with tickertape text that read like this: “Washington D. C. Date. Address: Parent or Spouse. The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son (Name and Rank) has been reported missing in action since (sample) seventeen December in Belgium. If further details or information are received you will be promptly notified. —James Alexander Ulio, The ADJ General.” On March 22, 1945, a news photo of Major John B. Day, chaplain, was printed on the front pages of newspapers across the country, and in Time magazine, April 2, 1945, showing him standing in mud in a huge field of open graves and thousands of crosses, saying Last Rites while burying unidentified American soldiers in the largest Allied military cemetery in Europe at Henri Chapelle, Belgium.
Father John B. Day, as he signed himself, then served as a parish priest in Collinsville, Quincy, Granite City, and Springfield. When his father retired from thirty years with the postoffice in 1948, he invited his parents to leave their apartment on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis, and live with him in his St. Cabrini parish house in Springfield where they became “Father John’s gardener and housekeeper.” Insofar as Father John became the Day family patriarch upon his father’s death in 1954, his mother became the revered Day matriarch in the 1950s and 1960s. As a widow, she was highly respected in the parish as “Mrs. Day” because she was, as Catholics said then, “the greatest thing a Catholic woman can be: the Mother of a Priest.” Her popular son was active in civil rights in the 1960s, and managed the design and construction of the new church and new school buildings for his growing parish where in the rectory bathroom, early on the morning of May 9, 1967, while shaving to say Mass, he called out in distress, and died of a heart attack on the floor in his mother’s arms. He was an Irish baritone who sang a beautiful High Mass. His favorite song was “Stardust.” One of his sermons and his biography appear later in this book.
Their second son, James T., married schoolteacher Mildred Horn, the daughter of William Horn (German born) and Nettie Caroline Vahle Horn, and lived as a restaurateur in Carrollton where they had three children: Judge James; restaurateur Carolyn, and Cynthia.
Bart and Mary Pearl’s youngest three children were Margaret Norine, Virginia Claire, and Harold Joseph.
Norine married James Thomas Chumley, the engineer son of Jacksonville Alderman and building contractor Thomas C. and Myrtle Cannon Chumley, who helped build Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch, memorializing explorers and immigrant pioneers like the Day family, in St. Louis where they had five children: Ted, Patrick, Michael (Mickey), Rosemary, and Tim.
Virginia, the first of their children to wed, married Routt High School varsity athlete George Fritscher, son of Austrian immigrant farmers Joseph and Amelia Fritscher of Heron Lake, Minnesota, and had three children: writer and university professor John Joseph (Jack), Ph.D,, the first grandchild of Bart and Mary Pearl, born June 20, 1939, in Jacksonville; Vietnam veteran George Robert (Bob) who died of military-related illnesses, and psychologist Mary Claire, both born in Peoria.
Harold married Rosemary Walsh, the daughter of Maurice and Alma Walsh of Murrayville, and lived in Palmyra, Hannibal, and St. Louis with their three children: lawman and military veteran John Terrence (Terry), Mary Janice Day Campbell, and Martha Elizabeth Day Stuckenberg.
“Irish and Catholic, thank God,” said Mary Pearl Lawler Day.
“We’ve always been Catholic,” said her daughter Virginia Day Fritscher.
“Except before Saint Patrick when we were all pagan Druids,” said their grandson and son, Jack.
To which the eighty-four-year-old Mary Pearl Day replied: “‘Bless us and save us,’ said Mrs. O’Davis.”
During a trip to Ireland in 2019, John Terrence (Terry) Day and his wife, Kathy Pflueger Day, visited and dined with the large and genial O’Dea family of Tipperary who, they were given to understand, were still living on the same farm where John T., Senior, and Bartholomew, Junior, had lived with their parents and brother, Thomas, whose descendants they are.
In this book of Irish stories about this certain Day family in Illinois, Virginia Day Fritscher’s eyewitness diary recalls with loving heart and nostalgic voice the colorful comedy, the geneological drama, and the moving parts of the first 150 years of several generations of a lively Irish immigrant family putting down new roots in Hamburg, Kampsville, and Jacksonville. The ancient history of the Days can be found at https://odeaclan.org/clan-history.
—Jack Fritscher, PhD, born 1939, a Seanachie of Clan Ó Deághaidh, San Francisco, 2019
Author’s Note. With respect to the past, and to the future, every effort has been made in the present by this direct descendent of his great-great-grandparents, Bartholomew Day, Senior, and Margaret Tyrrell Day, who stayed in Ireland, to write this report with accuracy, including information from available public sources as well as from stories the author began collecting in the 1950s from his grandfather Bartholmew Day III, including his 1972 recording of his grandmother Mary Pearl Lawler Day and the writings and diary of his mother Virginia Day Fritscher; from the letters written in 1993 by his first cousin once removed, Judge John W. Day; and from research on the ground in Ireland and Calhoun County by his first cousin John Terrence “Terry” Day, retired Senior Chief Warrant 4 United States Army, and Terry’s grandson, Tyler Day.
Two invaluable books are: A Portrait and Biographical Album of Pike and Calhoun Counties, Biographical Publishing Company, Chicago: 1891, found at https://www.loc.gov/item/rc01002078//; and The History of the Illinois River Valley, Biographical Volume II, by John Leonard Conger and William Edgar Hull, Chicago, S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1932 which was digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://archive.org/details/historyofillinoi02cong pp. 298-300. Research also included Population of the United States 1860 Census Statistics: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/population/1860a-02.pdf
Please send corrections and additions to the author.