All of her life, and all of mine up until a few years ago, my Granny Scott believed and passed on the belief that her father was an Irishman who came to the United States and then to the new state of Texas in the mid-1800s, John Ratican. John was fun to have in my family tree, a real rags to riches and back to rags story of a man with a great deal of intelligence and ambition and an Irish man's way with the ladies who eventually rose high and then fell very low.. John was a man with a lot of interesting paper trail to track from the days when newspapers and city directories were the main source of information, both public and private. He caused some scandals and had many triumphs, and the newspapers reported it all.
I was never able to piece together information about his arrival in the States or his early years. He might have arrived in 1844, but Ratican was a common Irish name, and there is no more common first name than John, so the record of arrival of an Irish John Ratican could have been someone else. He wrote on a document late in his life that he was born in Ireland in 1836 and came to Texas in 1858.
John Ratican was a Confederate veteran, like many of our Souths, but he was married to my Great Grandma Gard whose father and family on her mother's side were all Yankees. I always wondered what family dinners were like for them. His name appeared on a Fort Worth list of Civil War soldiers onto which someone had written in pencil, apparently as an afterthought, the name of his father-in-law, Frederick Daily, the sole Union soldier on the list. He had fought with Hood's Texas Brigade, a mix of several regiments and the only Texas troops to fight in the Eastern Theater as part of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Commanded by Texan John Bell Hood, they participated in at least twenty-four battles in 1862 alone, including Second Manassas and Antietam; in 1863 they fought at Gettysburg, Chickamauga and the sieges of Chattanooga and Knoxville; and in 1864 they fought at the battle of the Wilderness. This brigade had over four thousand men. John's service with Hood's Texas Brigade made him an important member of the Confederate Veterans' group in Fort Worth, and when he died there was some sincere speechifying done in his memory. John's life grew pretty complicated at the end, and he moved into the Confederate Veterans' Home in Austin in 1899 and died there on his birthday in 1902. He is buried, as were all the old Confederate veterans who died in the home, in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin, now reserved for those deemed worthy.
After the war John must have spent some time in St. Louis, Missouri, because a woman named Anna Kelly followed John to Texas with two children named Kate and James Ratican. Kate Ratican always reported her place of birth as St. Louis on census and other records. He might have been some other places as well, for one of the news reports in 1885 on John was a one line report that John was heard to say his eldest son died that day, and it could not have been Anna Kelly's son James or his boys with Bridget Boyle in Dallas. I never figured out whom he meant.
When he got to Dallas in the 1870s, he not only started a family with Bridget Boyle, he started engineering projects, and by the 1880s he was partnered with a man who became renowned among Texas engineers, Joseph Laing, although John held some contracts by himself. Here are a few of the things John was involved in building, in order of the news reporting of them: 1883, cemetery road in Fort Worth, paving the first Fort Worth streets, Dallas streets including Bryan, Sycamore, and Ross streets, laying the railroad from Greenville, Texas, to Dallas, laying an extension to the railroad from Dallas to Hillsboro, laying 35 miles of railroad from Nacogdoches to the Red River, becoming a partner in Fort Worth Cement, building sewers in Fort Worth, a housing development of large, nice homes in Fort Worth (one of which he would occupy with my Great Grandmother Mattie Daily Ratican and her daughters), laying track for the trolley in Fort Worth as well as providing the cars, more paving of Fort Worth streets, and so on. John is reported as making fairly large donations to charities, and the city directories of that time list him as a contractor and a railroad man. Rags to riches--John's story fit the bill.
By 1891 John had divorced Bridget Boyle in Dallas, leaving her with two sons whose movements after that are not clear. He had met and married my great grandmother Mattie Daily, a petite woman twenty-four years his junior. They had two daughters, Stella and Hortense, who made the newspapers themselves sometimes. Anna Kelly and John's other Ratican children, Kate and James, were also in Fort Worth at this time, but not in the newspapers. Then it all began to unravel, but the unraveling started with an event that they all probably celebrated at the time: John was awarded in December,1891-- by himself this time, without Laing-- a contract to run a railroad from the Fuente coal mines in Mexico to connect with the Mexican International railroad near Piedras Negras, across from Eagle Pass, Texas.
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| Mattie and John Ratican |
If you read railroad history in Mexico, it begins with a long period of time when American banks or financiers or individuals investing in the building of Mexican railroads lost their shirts. John Ratican's story is just one of many that can be told.
Apparently trying to stave off the backers, a bank up in New York, John and Mattie tried something that in Texas was illegal at the time: they tried to borrow money on their big nice home. The court record had testimony that the man arranging the loan explained to them how to do it: put the title in Fred Daily's (Mattie's father) name. Then it all collapsed.
The family story passed down for generations was that Mattie was a strong woman who would not abide drink and got rid of men if they chose that path. By 1892 Mattie and the girls were in San Antonio running a hotel, as Fred Daily had done all Mattie's life. The appeals court eventually gave the title of the Fort Worth home to John who lived there with his daughter Kate Ratican Anderson and her family in 1897. They made Fred Daily pay back the loan, but the fact that the loan broker had advised John and Mattie to make out the title to the home to her father, and the fact that no Southern court was happy to see New York financiers take a home in their state, meant that the bank could not take the home from Ratican. Mattie never lived with John again, and filed for divorce in 1899 when John checked into the Confederate Veterans' Home. She sued for title on the home at least twice, but never won because Kate Anderson testified that she left the home first.
She came back to Fort Worth at least by 1896 and ran a boarding house after her stay in San Antonio, where, coincidentally, my grandmother was born in 1894. From stories told by my Granny, it appears that although John and Mattie were separated during the time from 1892 at least until Mattie's return to Fort Worth, pegged in the city directories of San Antonio and Fort Worth, there was no hint ever given my Granny or her sister Hortense that John Ratican was not her father. When Stella Ratican died, she was buried from the big home on 9th, detailed in the newspaper as "from the home of her sister, Kate Anderson." My Granny recalled playing with her cousins Maidie and Maudie, Kate's daughters. So they all knew about each other.
Mattie lived off and on with my Granny who later had stories for her grandchildren about the wealth that John Ratican had, but no explanation other than drink of why Mattie had "run John off." Indeed it appears Mattie did the running, but drink may well have been the cause.
A few years ago I laid out the timeline for these events from city directories and the court case testimony,etc. and began to wonder about Ratican as my Granny's father. Research led me to a living granddaughter of Kate Ratican Anderson living in Fort Worth who had gown up in the big house on 9th. Doing her DNA, she did not come back as cousin to me or my brother Bob. Then recently my cousin who was Hortense Ratican Abbott's grandson had his DNA done, and he came back a clear cousin to the Fort Worth lady (as well as to me and Bob since our grandmothers were sisters) and with about twice the amount of Irish ethnicity as Bob or I have in our DNA.
So I am not as Irish as I once thought. Irishman Ratican has left a pretty large hole in my tree. And I have no idea who my great grandfather really was and not much hope of ever knowing. They say not to ask questions if you don't already know the answer. Maybe there is something to it, but truth has always trumped story for me.
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