Thomas Steeds Sr

     

Thomas Steeds Sr married Ellen McNamara, daughter of Patrick McNamara and Ellen Mullins, at England. Joseph Lieberman: Ellen MacNamara Steeds Mellet Grady was married three times, first to Thomas Steeds, an English Protestant from a family somehow involved in shipping or shipbuilding. After she emigrated from Ireland to England, probably during or soon after the potato famine in the 1850's, they met in Liverpool where she worked as a clerk in a tobacco shop. Although fluent in both English and Gaelic, Ellen identified herself for a US censor as being illiterate, like both her second and third husband, since the English Army of Occupation forbade the education of their generation of Irish Catholics.

Perhaps because of his family's objection to their marriage, the couple went to live in Louisiana. Thomas was employed there as an overseer of a plantation near New Orleans. They had three children, Thomas Jr., Margaret and Catherine.

When yellow fever decimated the Irish immigrants in New Orleans, Ellen buried her two little girls, Mary (sic) and Catherine. Alone in Louisiana except for young Thomas, Ellen contacted her Aunt Cottie who invited her niece, once the war was over, to join her family in a "patch" called Darkwater in Eastern Pennsylvania.¹

Thomas Steeds Sr died before April 1865; When the Civil War broke out, Thomas Steeds joined the Confederate Army. When it was over, he never returned home. He had joined a group of other Southern Irreconcilables who, rather than surrender when New Oreleans fell in the war, fled West and perished in exile even before Lee surrendered.¹