Joseph Grady

     Joseph Grady was born circa 1865 at Pennsylvania.² He was the son of Thomas Grady and Ann Scott McCloskey.¹

Joseph was enumerated with Thomas Grady on the census of 1 June 1870 at Ashland, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, as Joseph Grady. Joseph is a white male listed as a 4 year old. He was born in Pennsylvania and both parents are of foreign birth.³

A vivid description of the exploitation under which the child workers suffered is given by the correspondent of the Labor Standard(May 17, 1877) who visited the mines in the anthracite. His description of the breaker room in the Hickory Colliery, near St. Clair, Pa., is worth quoting in full: In these works 300 men and boys are employed; and when I went through the buildings and through the mine I saw them all. Among all these 300, although I was with them for hours, I did not hear a laugh or even see a smile. In a little room in this big, black shed-a room not twenty feet square-where a broken stove, red hot, tries vainly to warm the cold air that comes in through the open window, forty boys are picking their lives away. The floor of the room is an inclined plane, and a stream of coal pours constantly in from some unseen place above, crosses the room, and pours out again into some unseen place below. Rough board seats stretch across the room, five or six rows of them, very low and very dirty, and on these the boys sit, and separate the slate from the coal as it runs down the inclined plane.

It is a painful sight to see the men going so silently and gloomily about their work, but it a thousand times worse to see these boys. They work here, in this little black hole, all day and every day, trying to keep cool in summer, trying to keep warm in winter, picking away among the black coals, bending over till their little spines are curved, never saying a word all the livelong day. I stood and watched these boys for a long time, without being seen by them, for their backs are turned toward the entrance door and the coal makes such a racket that they cannot hear anything a foot from their ears. They were muffled up in old coats and old shawls and old scarfs, and ragged mittens to keep their hands from freezing, and as they sat and picked and picked, gathering little heaps of blackened slate by their sides, they looked more like so many black dwarfs than like a party of fresh young boys. The air was cold enough and the work was lively enough to paint any boy's cheeks in rosy colors; but if there was a red cheek in the room it was will hidden under the coating of black dust that covered everything. These little fellows go to work in this cold, dreary room at seven o'clock in the morning and work till itis too dark to see any longer. For this they get from $1 to $3 a week.

One result of their work is the clean, free coal, that burns away to ashes in the grate; another result I found in a little miner's graveyard, beside a pretty little church, where more than every other stone bears the name of some little fellow under fifteen years of age. The boys are all sizes and ages, from little fellows scarce big enough to be wearing pantaloons up to youths of fifteen and sixteen. After they reach this age they go to work in the mine, for there they can make more money. Not three boys in all this roomful could read and write. Shut in from everything that is pleasant, with no chance to learn, with no knowledge of what is going on about them, with nothing to do but work, grinding their little lives away in this dusty room, they are no more than the wire screens that separate the great lumps of coal from the small. They have no games; when their day's work is done they are too tired for that. They know nothing but the difference between slate and coal. The smallest of the boys do not get more than $1 a week, and from this pay goes up to $2 and $3. Some of them live several miles from the colliery, and are carried to the mine every morning in the cars and back every night, the company charging them ten cents for each trip and deducting the fares from their wages at the end of the month. Sometimes, after the boys have got to the mine, they find that some accident has stopped the work; then they have nothing to do for the day and get no pay. In this way, I am told, it is no unusual thing for a boy to find, at the end of the month, that his indebtedness to the company for railroad fares is some dollars more than the company's indebtedness to him for labor. So that he has worked all the month for a few dollars less than nothing.⁴

Joseph was enumerated with Thomas Grady on the census of 1 June 1880 at Shenandoah, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, as Joseph Grady. Joseph is a white male aged 15 years. He is single, works as a slate picker and was out of work for 6 months during the census year. He was born in Pennsylvania and both of his parents were born in Ireland.⁵

Joseph was enumerated with Michael Grady on the census of 30 April 1910 at Fell Twp, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, as Joseph Grady. Joseph is listed as a brother and is a white male aged 45 years. He is unmarried and was born in Pennsylvania. His father was born in Ireland and his mother was born in England. He works as a laborer in a coal mine and was not out of work during the census year. He can read and write.^6,7

Joseph Lieberman: Over the years her brother Joseph, looking like a derelict, would mortify Mrs. John Curtin, intrigue her children, and scandalized her prosperous, proper Prtestant neighbors and her lace-curtain relatives whne he put in a periodic appearance on White Street. After her husband helped clean him up after a visit to a barber, Uncle Joe would be on his way looking acceptably respectable in a new suit and shoes until his next visit. It was said that the ne'er-do=well rammbler finally settled down among his brothers in Lacawana (sic) County.⁸