Katie Sullivan

Of all my great-grandparents, Grandma Kottke is the most enigmatic.
Born Kathryn Sullivan, I first thought she was the daughter of Joseph Lawrence and Ida (Bloedow) Sullivan of Pennsylvania. I’d also thought she had two younger sisters, Dorothy and Margaret, and moved to Minnesota when she got married to Grandpa Roy.

However, this conflicts with living memories of her. Specifically, she’s remembered to have had an older sister named Helen (who married a guy named Ralph and had a daughter named Dorothy), and maybe an older brother named Joe. Plus, she’s said to have been the youngest of eleven children, and her family name might have been Solomon, not Sullivan.

From the time of the 1940 census, the details are certain. However, the farther you go back, the hazier it gets. Can we piece together the details we have to create a clearer picture of her early life?

The first task was to identify her sister. The question is: “In the 1920s, was there a woman in Hennepin County, Minnesota, named Helen, whose last name was Solomon or Sullivan, and who was married to a guy named Ralph?” Yes. A woman named Helen Solomon had married Ralph Carr Hussey in 1923.

-The Social Security Applications and Claims index lists Helen R. Solomon as the spouse of Ralph C Hussey and mother of Dorothy Grace Hussey.

-There’s also a Helen E. Hussey in the 1940 census who was living with Ralph C. Hussey. He was born in MN; she was born in PA They have daughters Dorothy and Marilyn.

-Ralph and Helen Hussey’s grave marker lists her birthdate as 18 October 1900.

So we have a good candidate for Grandma Kottke’s sister, who used the maiden name Solomon. It’s a bit strange that the family names on the their marriage licenses are different, but immigrant families of that era often changed their names after arrival. Maybe Helen preferred the original.

Regardless, the next step is to connect them as children in the same family. Specifically, we’re looking for a family that has a Helen and a Kathryn that are about six years apart, with a brother named Joe, who lived in Minnesota in 1920 but lived in Pennsylvania before that, and who have a last name of either Solomon or Sullivan. Is there a family like that?

Yes. In the 1920 census, there’s a Jacob J. Sullivan and Helen M. Sullivan who have an 18 year-old daughter Helen and a 13 year-old daughter Katie living in Minneapolis Ward 11. There’s also a 15 year-old boy named Joseph. All the children are listed as having been born in Pennsylvania.

But it’s not a perfect match. Grandma Kottke was said to be the youngest of 11; the birth certificate says she was #10, while “Jake” is listed as the youngest of the ten (nine surviving) children on the 1910 census.

So pretty close, but not perfect. “Katie” has a birth certificate listing 3 June 1906 as her date of birth. “Kathryn” has a social security profile listing it as 27 May.

There are other peculiarities that I can’t account for. Grandma Kottke said she was Pennsylvania Dutch, but this family doesn’t fit that profile. Pennsylvania Dutch were German immigrants from a previous era; Jacob and Helen Sullivan said they came from from Austria in the 1880s.

Plus, they identified their native language as Slovak (in 1910) and Bohemian (in 1920). That’s not Pennsylvania Dutch.

There’s also the fact that “Sullivan” is neiter Austrian nor Slovakian nor Bohemian. The family almost certainly changed it, but I can’t find any census records from 1900, and the Sullivans are inconsistent about what year they got here. It was either in 1891 and 1894 (according to the 1910 census), or in 1889 and 1891 (according to the 1920 census), or in 1881 (according to the 1930 census).

Without that information, there’s no telling what they would have changed it from. Salomon? Salmon? Szalaman? If we can’t get clarity on their names or when they immigrated (and we know it’s the same family because it’s the same address for both 1920 and 1930) then it’s anyone’s guess.

Same address, and same family, but – even then -- the census details don’t exactly match. In 1920, Jacob J. (52) and wife Helen M. (49) lived at 2110 21st Avenue South with their family.

By 1930, the children were grown, so it was just the two of them, but it was a Jack J. Sullivan (78) and his wife Helen S. Sullivan (58) at that address.

This ambiguity is frustrating, but it provides an insight of its own. That first generation of immigrants wasn’t really concerned with those details. To the extent that they don’t meet our hopes or expectations, that’s because we are looking to them for answers that they didn’t want to provide.

We see the pictures we inherited and wonder “Who are these people? Are we related to them? Why couldn’t you have spent a few hours out of your last twenty years labeling them before you died?” Because those are the things we want to know.

Clearly, they had a different attitude about such things. They grew up with an understanding that the Old World was better off left behind in the shadows of time. They looked forward to a better future, and we stand here today as a testimony for what they dreamed.

The details of Grandma Kottke’s early life may be unclear, but maybe that’s what she would have preferred. I can’t speak for her, but I have to allow for the possibility that she would say, “Don’t worry about me. Live your own life, and be that kind of person my family came here to be.”