On 19th March 1833 a ship called the John Wells sailing from Liverpool, England, arrived off the New Jersey seaboard, sailed up the Delaware River and arrived at the port of Philadelphia. Philadelphia, the gateway to the state of Pennsylvania – the Keystone State. Two passenger cards tell the story of Susan Hoodless, aged 32 years, accompanied by Sarah aged 6 years, a young mother and daughter travelling alone across the Atlantic to start a life in a new country. The United States had been formed less than 50 years earlier in a bloody war for independence from the British. The card states her last place of residence was Ireland and that they are of Irish nationality.
This pair of immigration documents intrigued me, initially I was excited to find a record of an Irish Hoodless line. I’ve never come across any up to now. The idea of this lone woman, travelling with a young child, on a journey fraught with dangers and challenges, caught my imagination and inspired me me to find out more. Who were Susan and Sarah? Who, if anyone, was waiting for them in America? And what happened to them?
After some initial research, an interesting point to note is that they were not Irish. For whatever reason, these documents record them as being Irish. They may have said they were Irish? Was it to deflect feelings of hate and mistrust that still existed towards the English in the US? Or they may simply have been assumed to be Irish among the overwhelming numbers of Irish who were entering the country every day, way outnumbering the Germans and British flooding into the country.
‘Susan’ it turns out is Susannah, the wife of one Thomas Hoodless who was born in Middle Rasen, Lincolnshire in 1799. I found Thomas arriving in Philadelphia a year earlier, 11th June 1832, on the Alexander, out of Liverpool. He scoped out the United State’s first capital and must have considered it a good prospect, to subsequently send for his family.
Their daughter Sarah Ann had been born on 22nd August 1827 and baptised at the Cathedral Church of St Peter and St Paul in Sheffield, Yorkshire.
At the time, Philadelphia was the main entry point for thousands upon thousands of German, Irish and British immigrants who had been flooding into the city in the several decades following the colonial wars.
Philadelphia was a fast expanding city. In the 1830’s new civic buildings were sprouting, trade was thriving as new canals, railroad, bridges and dock works were built, and all this expansion attracted migrant labour. The city was designed in a grid pattern spanning a block of land between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It featured four grand open squares built around one central larger square, known as Centre Square and then Penn Square, it is now occupied by Philadelphia City Hall (built 1871-1901) where the main thoroughfares of Market Street and Broad Street intersect.
Thomas and Susannah established themselves smack in the middle of the Center City, initially at 5th and Marble Streets and eventually at 10th and Marble Streets, opposite St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, where Thomas established himself as a carpenter and house builder. Marble Street was renamed Ludlow Street at some later date. Thomas’s home and workshop is only three blocks from Center Square, one block back from Market Street. Thomas was in the right trade and the right place to make a good living and there’s no doubt he would have been busy.
In the 1850 Census for Philadelphia North Ward, Thomas 47 and Susannah 45, are recorded as living in this same area. In the building next door, their daughter Sarah is living with her husband, 33 year old German born musician William Burkhart and their three children; Evelina 5, Thomas 3 and Joseph 1. We know that Sarah is actually about to turn 23, since she was born in August 1827 and this census was taken on 10th August 1850. This means her eldest child was born when she was 18 years old (not 16).
This is the only census showing the family together, and also the last census for Sarah. She died on 16th February 1857 aged only 29 years and was buried at Passyunk Road Cemetery. Sarah and William had a further three children – William Berry (1851), Andrew (1854) and John E (1855), leaving six children in total without a mother. No doubt, this was an earth shattering tragedy for the family. It may have been the trigger for Thomas and Susannah to relocate to Camden, New Jersey, because we see them in the 1860 Census in Stockton, New Jersey Census taking care of five of their grandchildren.
The Delaware River forms the boundary between the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey and there had long been close connections between the settlements in Camden and the city across the river. Once the first rail connection was made in 1834 and a second one in 1836 the area began to attract business and industry, sawmills, grist mills, mercantile distribution of dry goods all expanded from the local farming and new railroad access. Stockton would have been a sleepy and rural farming area, a much slower lifestyle, compared to central city life in Philadelphia. Thomas and Susannah are described as farmers in this census, the five children described as New Jersey natives. No sign of the musician father, William.
Throughout these two decades 1860’s and 1870’s Thomas Hoodless continues to advertise himself in the Philadelphia business directories as a carpenter with a central city address.
Extract of Philadelphia City Directory 1870
Thomas died on 10th September 1875 at the age of 76. He was buried at Philadelphia Cemetery, Laurel Hill.
The final residence of Thomas and Susannah was 1935 Brown Street, Philadelphia, literally a stone’s throw away from the imposing and notorious Eastern State Penitentiary which had opened in 1829
Susannah dies five years later on 17th July 1880. She is also buried in Philadelphia Cemetery, Laurel Hill.
