Hang Down Your Head, Frank Doole

I have been digging away at various pieces and parts, hither and yon, and took a second look at this fellow who had married three times - two of those times into families that are connected to me.  He seems like less than a pleasant character, but a character for sure.

Lydia Hinmon

Francis Doole was born 20 Jun 1823 in Antrim, Northern Ireland. His wife, Martha Shaw, born in 1825 in Ireland, traveled with him to the United States, arriving 25 Dec 1843 in New York City. They moved to Ware, Massachusetts, where they became US citizens in November of 1854.

Their daughter, Mary Jane, was born in Ware, but by the time the first of their three sons came along in 1854, the family was in Floyd County, Iowa, which is a hop and a skip from both Bremer and Butler counties.

Martha died in 1879 and Frank remarried to Lydia Hinmon Stuck Harshman.

Lydia was born about 1839 to George Richard Hinmon and Anna Lewis in Erie County, Pennsylvania. Her first husband, William Stuck, died during the Civil War. They had been married in 1855 and he died in late 1863. They had one son. She married George Harshman next, in 1866, and it appears that marriage ended in divorce. George seems to have moved on from Iowa, where several Hinmon's had settled and headed West to Nebraska. Lydia then married Francis Doole, widower, on 05 Jun 1880 in Floyd County.

The 1880 Agrigultural Schedule 2 of the Census indicated Doole was fairly successful. He owned 130 acres of farmland in Floyd township and his farm was valued at over $5,000. Just looking at the record, it seemed all was pretty normal.

Things changed - he had fractious relations with his children which culminated in the following event involving the desecration of wife Martha's grave:

I have not discovered whether Lydia died or they divorced, but Doole married my 2xGG William Custer Smith's sister Sarah Jane, a long-time spinster who had spent many years living with her mentally disabled brother and mother and big brother WC Smith and his wife Mary Ann. That marriage occurred in 1887. In 1888, Frank made the news again:

"A "Blind Pig" which has been successfully operated the past two years at Floyd by Frances Doole, was raided and a large quantity of beer and whiskey seized. Doole is in jail at Charles City.

Atlantic Daily Telegraph, Dec 26, 1888, pg 4 Atlantic, IA"

I wasn't able to find out what happened to this case, but perhaps it led to the divorce that followed between Aunt Sarah and Doole. It was a sad situation for Sarah, who had been cared for by her relatives her entire life. She was left without a place to go after the divorce, and ended up residing in the Bremer County Poor Farm and Asylum for the rest of her life, dying there in 1924.

Doole most likely died prior to 1900, since there is no record of him in the 1900 census.

What's a blind pig? In the Midwest, Blind Pigs started in the 1880s and were quite a problem, according to the anti-alcohol crowd. It got it's name because some wily proprietor would sell tickets to a back room to see a "blind pig," and the ticket price included a drink.