Queen of All Saints Church

The McNallys on their way to church in Queens in 1945

When Elizabeth Daly Valentine died in 1951 she was living on Tulip Avenue in Stewart Manor, Queens, but her funeral was held at the Queen of All Saints Cathedral Chapel at Vanderbilt and Lafayette Avenues in Brooklyn, the church she attended a good deal of her life. When her husband John Valentine died in 1922 his obituary described him as a member of that church's Holy Name Society.

Today, Queen of All Saints describes itself as the "Adelphi Ave. Fort Greene neighborhood Church." In it's online history the Church says George Mundelein, Auxiliary Bishop of Brooklyn began in 1909 "the process of erecting Queen of All Saints Cathedral Chapel, overseeing every detail himself." The church replaced the Chapel of St. John which had been at the site since 1879.

The cornerstone was laid in 1911.

 Architect Gustave Steinbeck's inspiration was Sainte Chapelle in Paris,

a 13th-century Gothic church.

Sainte Chapelle, pictured in a miniature of Paris from about 1400.

A map of the parishes in northern Brooklyn. The Valentines and the McNallys attended Sacred Heart and Queen of All Saints in the pink box. The blue push pin below shows the location of Queen of All Saints, east of Fort Greene Park.

John J. Valentine 1855 – 1922

The Pennsylvania/New Jersey border defined by the Delaware River

John J. Valentine was born October 21, 1855,  in Mercer County, New Jersey. His parents were recent immigrants from Strasbourg in the Alsace district of France. Louis Valentine and Magdoline (Lena) Droesch Valentine immigrated some time between 1853 when their third child Mary was born in Alsace and the fall of 1855 when John was born in New Jersey.

Mercer County, New Jersey

At the time of John's birth Mary was about 2, brother Louis, Jr. was about 5 and Magdelin the eldest was about 7 years old. Eighteen months after John's birth, Elizabeth arrived. Both John and Elizabeth were born in the township of Lawrence in Mercer County, situated across the Delaware River from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Lawrence was a rural town between Princeton and Trenton, Mercer County's major city. John's obituary gave his birthplace as Trenton.

Sometime between Elizabeth's birth in the spring of 1857 and the mid-1860 census, the Valentines moved a few miles north to Hunterdon County where their last child Catherine was born at the end of 1860.The census found them in the small town of Ringoes in East Amwell Township. An 1844 book on New Jersey described "the village of Ringoes, in a delightful valley [containing] about 20 dwellings."

Ringoes in 1918, about 70 years after the Valentines lived there.

John's obituary mentioned that he had lived in Brooklyn for 67 years in 1922, implying the Valentines moved to New York about 1855, which does not mesh with the census or Catherine's birth information, both indicating they left New Jersey after 1860. The 1870 census lists them in Brooklyn with Louis Sr. working as a house carpenter and the younger Magdelin, Louis Jr. and Mary working as tailors and tailoresses.

Brooklyn in the 1870s

Louis died sometime between that census count and 1872 when the Brooklyn City Directory listed Lena Valentine as a widow, living at 263 Floyd. Five years later Lena was living at 15 George.

We haven't a wedding date for John but Georgi Dorr guesses he married Elizabeth Daly about 1880 or 1881. Elizabeth and John had 5 children between 1882 and 1892, among them our Grandmother Anna Valentine McNally. Georgi writes:

"John had a variety of occupations: he ran a produce store until it folded about 1899, was a watchman in a dry goods store[Abraham & Straus] according to the 1920 census, and a foreman at a stable according to his death certificate."

Turn-of-the-last-century economics were as volatile as those in our time.

The Valentines look prosperous in this photograph of the younger children about 1893. The produce business was probably good in the early 1890s when unemployment was 3% in 1892, but in 1897 when the Panic of 1897 hit, 12 to 14% were out of work. Lewis dropped out of high school to work at Abraham & Straus around 1898 as the recovery began but unemployment was still at 12%.

The Panic of 1897 was almost as bad as the 1933 depression. Causes were a housing bubble, poor banking practices, which led to a freeze on credit and bank failures (long before bank accounts were insured.)

Near the corner of Myrtle and Adelphi in the 1940s from the New York Public Library

Near the corner of Adelphi and Myrtle today.

The lower floors have been turned into store fronts

but the upper stories remain much the same as when the

Valentines lived in the neighborhood.

John died in 1922 at the age of 67. They were residing at 271 Clermont Ave, Brooklyn. Georgi writes: "He died, however, not at his Clermont Ave home where the medical examiner viewed his body, but at a neighborhood store at 331 Myrtle Ave."

A store front at 370 Myrtle today

An obituary from Ancestry.com:

John J. Valentine, Sr., for twenty-one years employed by Abraham & Straus, Inc., Fulton street, as a night foreman, died suddenly yesterday at his home 271 Clermont avenue. He was born in Trenton, N.J., sixty seven years ago, and had been a resident of Brooklyn for sixty-two years. He was a member of the A&S Benevolent Association and the Holy Name Society attached to the R.C. Church of the Queens All Saints, where a requiem mass will be celebrated at 9 a.m. on Thursday. He is survived by a widow, Elizabeth Daley VALENTINE; three sons, Lewis J., a Lieutenant attached to the Eleventh Inspection District, New York Police Department. William M., and John J. Jr., and two daughters, Mrs Anna MCNALLY and Mrs. Elizabeth CURLEY, and twenty-nine grandchildren.

Elizabeth Daly Valentine (1861-1951)

Elizabeth Daly Valentine, Christmas, 1946 when she was 85 years old.



Cousin Georgi has shared her genealogical research on our ancestors. Some of the elder cousins can remember our great-grandmother Elizabeth Daly Valentine who lived with her daughter Anna Valentine McNally when we were young.

Her baptismal records indicate she was baptized on July 6th, 1861 at the Church of St. Aidan, in Ferns, County Wexford, Ireland. Because Aunt Kay and I (Barbara) also had a July 6th birthday I was often reminded of the coincidence by my mother Cele. Whether Grandma Valentine was born or christened that day is unknown but that was the birthday we celebrated.


Elizabeth was one of nine children born to William Daly and Anne Daley Daly in County Wexford, Ireland. Like the rest of Ireland, the small medieval town of Ferns had a population explosion in the 1840s. Overpopulation, potato famine and other economic hardships caused ten percent of the townspeople to leave in the 1850s. The Dalys endured until 1872 when her father sailed for America with the older children. Elizabeth was 10 years old. About two and a half years later her mother and the younger children (Mary, Lizzie, Annie & Charles, according to the passenger list) arrived in New York aboard the SS City of Montreal on October 22, 1874. Lizzie was 13.


SS City of Montreal, launched in 1871 and sunk in 1887

William’s occupation was a cooper (barrel maker) according to the 1878 Brooklyn City Directory, which lists the family at 89 Canton Street, Brooklyn. That year his wife Annie died of peritonitis on November 2, 1878, when Lizzie was 17. Two sisters died of scarlet fever, Mary in 1879 at 22 years of age and Annie in 1885 at 21.


Two portraits of a cooper from the Library of Congress website.

At the time of her death Mary was listed as a “general servant,” a typical occupation for a young woman born in Ireland. The older sisters who never married, Bridget (1849-1934) and Margret “Maggie” (1852-1929), followed the same occupation, listed in records as housekeeper or housework. Bridget was also reputed to be a local midwife. Sometime between 1880 census and Annie’s 1885 death, the family moved down the block to 83 Canton Street.

One stereotypical view of an Irish maid in 1908 from the Library of Congress

By then Elizabeth had left home to marry John J. Valentine. Georgi believes they married about 1879 or 1880, a date based on her absence from her father’s household in the 1880 census and the birthdate of their first child Lewis J. Valentine, born on March 19th, 1882. John Valentine, our great-grandfather, was born in Mercer County, New Jersey, on October 21, 1854, so if they married in 1879 he was about 25; she about 18.

The Valentine children attended PS 26, the Gates Avenue School. This photo of the boys in 1899 may include a Valentine or two. Anna was about 14 years old and probably knew many of them.

Elizabeth and John had 5 children between 1882 and 1892. Their eldest, called Uncle Lew in the family, grew up to become Police Commissioner of New York City (see the blog entry dated September 26, 2009.) Their eldest girl was given the poetic name of Anna Marie Colette Valentine, born November 9, 1885 when her parents were 31 and 24 years old. John Valentine seems to have owned a retail fruit store when the young family lived on Troutman Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He then became a "small commission merchant," according to Lew's biography and the Valentines moved to 142 Adelphi Street. John's business failed about 1898. Lew quit high school to work as a delivery boy at Abraham & Straus department store to help support the family. John's obituary also notes he worked at Abraham & Straus for the last decades of his life.



John Valentine died October 9, 1922 in Brooklyn at the age of 68. He and Elizabeth were living at 225 Adelphi Street with their daughter, Elizabeth "Bess" Valentine Curley, her husband, Frank, and their family in the 1920 census. Georgi also found her in the 1930 census, living next door at 223 with the Curleys and sister Bridget. Bess Curley died in 1940 and Frank Curley in 1946, so Georgi guesses that Elizabeth Daly Valentine didn't move in with our McNally grandparents until after the Curleys died in the 1940s.

Adelphi Street today. The brownstone in the middle #283 is for sale.

Elizabeth Daly Valentine died in Stewart Manor, Nassau County, on February 27, 1951 when she was 89 years old. She is buried at St John’s Cemetery, Middle Village, Queens.

Grandma Valentine (age 85) and William Brackman in March, 1947.

Valentines in Williamsburg

Uncle Lew Valentine holding his hat while

Watching LaGuardia smash slot machines

Anna Valentine McNally had three brothers and a sister. The eldest, Lewis Joseph Valentine (1882-1946), became famous as "New York's top cop", the Police Commissioner under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia between 1934 and 1945.

In 1939 Lowell M. Limpus published Honest Cop, Lewis J. Valentine: Being a Chronicle of the Commissioner's Thirty-six Years in the New York Police Department. After Valentine retired he wrote an autobiography Night Stick: The Autobiography of Lewis J. Valentine. Neither book nor the many newspaper and magazine articles about him contain much about his youth. But through his story we learn a little about his sister, our Grandma McNally, and their parents John and Elizabeth Daly Valentine.

Uncle Lew was born March 19, 1882 (hence his middle name---March 19th is St. Joseph's day). A 1936 New Yorker magazine profile says he was born

"on Troutman Street, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. His father, John Valentine, who was of Alsatian descent, was the proprietor of a small fruit store. His mother, whose maiden name was Daly, was a native of County Wexford, Ireland…. He attended public and parochial schools and served as altar boy at St. Bridget's Church.… His father's business failed [about 1898] and Valentine had to leave school and help support the family."

Brooklyn in 1879

Although the biographies call it St. Bridget's--- it's St. Brigid's. The church and school are still there although both have been rebuilt since the Valentine children's day. The new church, shown in this photo from about 1940, replaced their frame church, demolished in 1921.

From Limpett's Honest Cop:
"He was born in a little frame house on Trautman Street [it's Troutman], in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. His father was John Valentine, who owned a little fruit store, and his mother had been Miss Elizabeth Daly, a pretty Irish girl from County Wexford. John Valentine himself was half German and half Irish, but he had been born in Brooklyn. Little Miss Daly, who first saw the light of day on July 6, 1861, had accompanied her parents to America when she was thirteen. They settled in an Irish community in the Long Island metropolis and there John Valentine came courting a few years later.

Troutman Street today. Few frame houses survive.

"Five children resulted from that union, the oldest being Lewis. He had two younger brothers, Will and John, and two sisters, Anne [her name was Anna] and Elizabeth. And they proved to be a very happy family.

The Valentine youngsters grew up in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, which was then an independent city in its own right…. John Valentine had begun to branch out a little: he had established himself as a small commission merchant, and he and his wife decided to move farther into the city so that the head of the family could be nearer his business.

They selected another Irish community which was springing up in the Bushwick neighborhood, and settled down at 142 Adelphi Street. The children were enrolled at Public School 26 on Gates Avenue, near by. For the rest of their lives they were to refer to it as "the old Gates Avenue school." And for a long time it combined with the church to constitute the boundaries of their everyday existence.

The elder Valentines were devout Catholics, and they had made their home in a deeply religious community. Religion, consequently, became a very vital influence…The Valentines attended St. Bridget's Church….

['Irishtown' had] almost a small-town environment, this localized community life of the 1890's. Brooklyn itself was a huge congregation of small towns, each with its own school and church and tiny business section. Barefoot boys and girls cavorted in the streets….And everybody knew everybody else."

Bushwick is in the lower right corner of this map of Williamsburg. Troutman Street runs two blocks northwest of the green rectangle Bushwick Park. The Valentine house was just about under the point of the red arrow. Click here to see an arial view today:
<http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=troutman+street+brooklyn&ie=UTF8&start=0&ll=40.703416,-73.926873&spn=0.015844,0.027165&z=15&iwloc=A>

References:

---Lowell M. Limpus, Honest Cop, Lewis J. Valentine, being a chronicle of the Commissioner's thirty-six years in the New York Police Department (N.Y. E.P. Dutton & Co., 1939) pp 18-19.
---"Profiles: Independent Cop," New Yorker, October 3, 10 & 17, 1936, # 1 pg 21-2
---Lewis J. Valentine, Night Stick: The Autobiography of Lewis J. Valentine (N.Y.: The Dial Press, 1947)