Henry & Elizabeth Shoup - German immigrants and great-great-grandparents of Bessie Hartney About the Leddy and Hartney Families

THE LEDDYS COME TO AMERICA

Very Irish, we are! And that means almost no information on our ancestors. The immigrants from Ireland were not well liked in America and most were day-laborers with little in the way of personal records. Our immigrant ancestor who came to America was William Leddy, who arrived in Toledo, OH in 1869 at the age of 15. Records indicate he came alone. A day laborer, he married a 2nd generation Irish-American, Ellen Brogan; she was 24, he 30. Ellen's parents, Michael & Ellen, had arrived in American before 1860, the year their daughter Ellen was born. William and Ellen had three children: Mary (b. 1885), Nellie (1887) and Alice (1889). Ellen died in 1890 at the age of 30. (I’m afraid I don’t what became of the Brogan children; Mary married a William Wilde and had several children, of whom one (Mary Wilde) married an Edward Rohloff and also a William Ocheske.

William married again in 1895; his 2nd wife was Mary Finnegan, another 2nd generation American-Irish woman from Swanton, OH. Her parents were Hugh and Mary, who came to America before 1858, the year Mary was born. William and Mary had two children: Jane (b. 1897) and William jr. (1902). Jane married Arthur Wiedenger, a clerk for the railroad, while she worked in Toledo real estate. Meanwhile, younger sibling William married Bessie Hartney in 1920; he was 18, she 16. William and Bessie (who went by the name "Betty") had four children: Jim (b. 1923), Sue (1924), Carol (1928) and Bill jr. (1932). Jim was a decorated Army B17 turret gunner in WWII in the European theatre, married Peg Bahnsen and raised his family in Toledo. Sue married Bob Sussman, began their family in Toledo, then moved to Michigan where Bob was employed by the Chrysler corp as a cost estimator. Carol, a school teacher, married Don Cook, a traffic engineer for Toledo and had seven children. Bill married Gloria Brunk, had two sons, then divorced; he later married Marilyn Wittman, raising a family in Toledo. William and Betty divorced; William married a second wife before he died in 1960. Betty married Bob Walinski, but they too divorced. Betty retired from her career at Army Tank Command and passed away in 1989.

THE HARTNEY/SHASTEEN BRANCHES

Betty Hartney's father was James Hartney, a sometimes sailor on the Great Lakes and 2nd generation Irish American, whose parents came to America and settled in Elmira, NY where they ran a grocery. When not working on a ship, he was a bartender. James and his wife Della Shasteen divorced sometime between 1904 and 1912; James died at sea in 1916 during a lake storm when he was swept overboard and drowned in Lake Erie. James and Della's children were Betty and her older brother Dale (1903). Dale moved to Pittsburg, PA where he married his bride, Vicki Kruppa. Della married her second husband Louis Cann in 1912; the couple had two children: Warren and Jean. Louis was a kind man who was a good grandfather to Betty's four children.

Della Shasteen was the daughter of William Shasteen and Suzanne Shoup. Both familes have been in America since colonial days. We believe the first Shasteen immigrant was Dr. Pierre Chastain, who fled France to escape Huguenot persecution, coming to Virginia around 1700. There are several generations of many families prior to William Shasteen in America, most of whom lived in VA and PA and who trace back to predominantly English roots. Suzanne Shoup, on the other hand, was granddaughter to Henry Shoup & Elizabeth Behringer, who immigrated from Germany to Ohio in the early 1800's. Her mother's ancestry, through the Stahl family, goes back several generations in America, mostly composed of German immigrants who came to America in the 1700's. One ancester of note, Christian Cackler, was an original settler in what is now the Cleveland area in the late 1700’s, he and his father being the first non-indigenous people to homestead that area. Christian wrote of his life in “Recollections of an Early Settler”, a published book which is still available.


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