Bilaeva

Dad and I spent a long anticipated week in Montana in July. Three generations of our family - the Ducies and O'Brien's, our favourite ancestors - lived in the area around Butte, a bustling mining town in the latter nineteenth century which grew to over 100,000 miners and assorted characters by 1900.

There was gold, silver, sapphires and mainly copper in these mountains and they made many wealthy men, including my 2x great grandfather. Today Butte is a shadow of its former self, with only 32,000 people. It is encircled by snow-capped (in July!) mountains.


There be copper in them there hills!






They gave up on deep pit mines in the 1950s and went for the more direct approach. The main copper mine open cast pit has filled up with water - its one thousand feet deep below that surface. The colours are beautiful. Shame about the periodic table's worth of poisonous heavy metals that make the water a killer.


The infamous Hersperus Lode - a mining claim which brought my 2x great grandfather endless headaches and legal battles. It's now 'the projects' end of the town, so the misery continues.


The building where I'm pretty sure my 2x great grandparents met. She was the proprietress of a hotel on the premises, he was prospecting for gold and copper up north and most likely stayed at the hotel when he was in Butte on business. I recently chatted up a fellow on the desk at a youth hostel in Cardiff where I was staying while on a work/research trip. Grandpa Ducie fared a lot better than I did.


They moved to the nearby town of Anaconda in 1900 and both died there in 1917. The cemetery sits on the side of the mountain and they have the biggest gravestone in the cemetery. Dad is rather proud of that.

Their daughter was one of the town's debutantes. She married a fast talking Irishman from Boston and they lived in this house. My grandmother was born here. It the niftiest looking house in town. They had good taste.

I'm using a death certificate I recently obtained for one of my Ducy ancestors as an example for the magazine. It was our designer Paul who pointed out (can't believe I hadn't noticed) that the informant on the certificate was the coroner. So this evening I checked the newspapers for a report of the inquest:

 Yesterday (Tuesday) an inquest was held before W. Hayes, jun., Esq., deputy coroner, at the Angel Inn, in this town, on the body of a child four months old, named Winifred Ducey, who died on the previous Sunday, from the effects of scalds received nine days previously by the contents of a coffee pot (which accidentally fell from the fire) passing over her. Verdict accordingly.

Our 2x great grandfather's little sister. Having fled Ireland about 1846/7, his family didn't find life was that much better in England. They lost three more infants (cause of death was essentially poverty and squalid living conditions) before they picked up again and fled to America. The parents and the four children that survived were all successful, in some cases considerably so, and died in genuine, not just relative, comfort.