Catherine Braun Hannigan

Catherine Braun was born in Chicago in 1875 to Joseph Braun, 30 years old, and  Catherine Baltes, 27 years old. Joseph was born in Germany and worked as a carpenter. They lived on the Near West Side with many other German families and changed their name to Brown. The Baltes family were from Britten, Germany near Trier by way of Milwaukee. Many Germans emigrated after the upheaval of the Austro-Prussian war and the strict laws put in place by Bismarck to unify the country. 

By 1880, Joseph has died, possibly while working in South Park, soon to become Jackson Park, during a very hot summer. The widowed Catherine, now goes by Kate Brown, and has three girls, Gertrude 9 years old, Catherine 4, and Mary Margaret 2. They all live with her stepbrother Mathew Kill and his wife, Catherine. (They may have changed their name or it is misspelled in the census as Kew). They list their birth country as Prussia and live at 3706 S. Halsted in the Bridgeport area. Mathew was also a carpenter. Kate Brown worked as a laundress, a washerwoman.             


In 1892, 19 year old Gertrude married an Irish man, David Fitzgerald. They lived at 915 W. 38th St not far from the Armour meatpacking plant where he worked as a foreman.

Kate Brown died at the age of 52 in 1900. The younger Kate, 23 and Mary, 21 moved in with their sister Gertrude Fitzgerald and the three Fitzgerald children: Fannie, little Gertrude, and David. The two young women worked as seamstresses. More about garment workers in Chicago. 

This website from the Newberry Library details the difficult life for German and Irish immigrants in the Back of the Yards at the turn of the last century.

In the next few years, Mary Margaret would meet Joseph Klaus, also a German immigrant, marry and start a family. They had four boys right away, Joseph, Norbert, Roy and Gerald. A year later, in 1905, Catherine Braun would meet and marry Francis P. Hannigan.

David Fitzgerald on the top left, David Jr., Gertrude Braun Fitzgerald, Fanny Fitzgerald, Catherine Braun Hannigan, and Frank Hannigan. In the front is Catherine Hannigan, Gerald Hannigan, Joe or Elmer Fitzgerald, and Frank Hannigan, Jr. This picture would have been taken in 1917 or 1918.

Gertrude passed away a few years later in 1920 and her husband, 

David's fatal accident at the meatpacking plant, took place in 1925.

Mary Klaus also died in 1925 and her son, Roy, moved in with the Hannigans.