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Hannah Heston Coggins 1854-1902 Native Philadelphia Artist, Suicide Death NYC, 96 Fifth Avenue
New York Herald 7 January 1902
Philadelphia Inquirer 7 January 1902
Interred 1/9/1902
Aged 48
~~~~~~~
SUICIDE'S BODY BURIED
The funeral services over the
remains of Miss Hannah H. Coggins, the artist, who committed suicide in New
York, were held yesterday afternoon. Rev. F.A. Hinckley, pastor of the Spring
Garden Unitarian Church, conducted the services. The funeral was private and
the interment was made in Woodland Cemetery. Miss Coggins' remains were taken
to the residence of Paschal H. Coggins, 5025 McKean avenue, Germantown, on
Wednesday.
Date: Friday, January 10, 1902
Paper: Philadelphia Inquirer
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Volume: 146 Issue: 10 Page: 10 (Source: Find
A Grave Memorial # 156597425)
June 22, 2016
Got no feedback
on Hannah Heston Coggins here or on my FB page. I guess a lonely old maid
artist killing herself is not a topic people want to deal with or tend to
identify with.
I discovered
her obit when doing research for 90 Fifth Ave. where Countess Anne Leary lived
in the 1890s. The 90 and 96 got confused
in the newspaper archive I was researching on.
The 96 Fifth Ave address had a lot of
traction. It was at one time the biggest and most social mansion in NYC before
the Civil War. After the Manhattan Club phase, it was just rented out as
studios in a less than fashionable part of Fifth Ave as that social center kept
moving uptown until all the big gilded age mansions got built around the
beginning of (50th Street to 59th Street) and further up Fifth Ave. on Central Park, the so-called “upper east
side”. That whole mixed block of houses between 14th and 15th
street got torn down around 1910 to build 10 story fancy fronted, Terra cotta
covered, loft buildings suitable for the printing industry, small issue
magazines and fancy office space.
Even if my interest
in genealogy is not great, my interest in a lot of history must rely
on genealogy to piece together some of the facts of lives past. People who die
without being married or die without children or outlive their children don’t
leave behind amateur family genealogists keeping track of siblings, cousins and
their descendants. No “green leaves” on
those advertised on TV genealogy subscription things.
It is
helpful if other genealogists have done of lot of work before you. Pulling
together the life of the little orphan girl Hannah H. Coggins and some of the
items mentioned in the news articles make some sense. The fact mentioned that
Hannah H Coggins was once wealthy. She came from the family of a businessman
and that is probably the source of that fact. That fact that her father was an
engraver leads to a little girl’s interest in her father’s trade.
The crux of probable sadness in her life is the death of her mother in 1858 when she is about four and
her father running off to war around age 40 as a private to die at Antietam.
Interesting fact to me was that he was in the 28th Pennsylvania Volunteers
Company P.
My own Great Grandfather was a private in the 28th Pa.
Company A. My g-grandfather made a splash in that battle in a daring feat of
wrestling a Confederate flag bearer for his Confederate flag and getting it in the middle of the battle, a battle that Edward
H. Coggins was wounded and died as a result of. My great grandfather a 19 year old Private - Immigrant. BTW (Fuckface Donald).
Other
records of a military nature has his wounding, Edward Coggins, on the 17th of
September and his death on the 21st. The Philadelphia County Death
Certificate is listing the DOD as October 6, 1862. I think the date of over two
weeks difference from the military records DOD is no doubt bureaucracy
demanding a death cert in order to bury a body in a box from the Virginia
battleground.
I am impressed how fast a
coffin gets shipped, no doubt via train, north in the middle of a war. Seeing the Death Certificate, before seeing a
book about the genealogy of a John Kirk and his descendants’, has Edward listed
as single, which I thought as a mistake, but on further research on Find a
Grave, I found his wife had preceded him in death, so in fact he was single.
In any case,
Hannah was on her own, an orphan, being probably brought up by relatives after
the death of her mother and then her father, she sought out a life of art and in
the end she was alone, an anonymous person in NYC who left Philly to seek more opportunities
there than her native provincial town could provide her. “The endless city
never sleeps; it just goes on and on…”
Biography Library Company of Philadelphia
Genealogy of John Kirk Born 1660 - Intelligencer Press Doylestown Pa. 1912-13, Page 199
.
.
.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
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