Showing posts with label Paul Family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Family. Show all posts

Saturday, June 13, 2026

Compendium of Family Biographies, Stories and Videos For My Wife's Schaffner, Paul, McKnew and Whittle Lines

 My wife Linda Joan (Leland) Seaver has an interesting ancestry but there were only a few family stories handed down by her grandparents and parents over the years.  She is the daughter of Leo Severt Leland (1911-2002) and Edna May Schaffner (1913-1979) and was born and educated in San Francisco, California, and became an elementary school teacher.  In 1967, she moved to the San Diego, California area, and married Randall J. Seaver in 1970.

Over decades, I have done genealogical research for her ancestry, and have found quite a bit of information about her ancestral families.  Over the past year, I have written and published genealogical sketches for each couple in her ancestry back through the 2nd great-grandparents (with the exception of her parents). From the genealogical sketches have come AI-assisted biographies based solely on the sketches, and from the biographies have come AI-assisted ancestor life memoirs and stories for each couple. Finally, I have used Google NotebookLM to create infographics, video overviews and slide decks for the biographies and many of the stories.  

The purpose of this blog post is to collect the information for each family line in one compendium for Linda's Schaffner-related ancestral families:

1)  Parents, Leo Severt Leland (1911-2002) and Edna May (Schaffner) Leland (1913-1979):

  • Genealogical Sketch:  pending
2)  Grandparents Paul Frederick Schaffner (1879-1934) and Edna Catherine McKnew (1884-1974):
3)  Great-grandparents Herman Schaffner (1851-1921) and Mary Ann Paul (1854-1908):
4)  Great-grandparents Elijah Pickrell McKnew (1836-1912) and Jane Whittle (1847-1921):

5)  2nd Great-grandparents Frederick Schaffner (1828-1899) and Susanna Hoffman (1830-1855):

6)  2nd Great-grandparents John Charles Paul (1823-1879) and Maria T. Beamish (1827-1909):

7)  2nd Great-grandparents  Jeremiah McKnew (1804-????) and Frances Allethia Pickrell (1810-1845):

8)  2nd Great-grandparents  Alexander Whittle (1818-1853) and Rachel Morley (1818-1861):


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First Updated:  13 June 2026
Last Updated:  31 July 2026

                               ==============================================

Links to my blog posts about using Artificial Intelligence are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page. Links to AI information and articles about Artificial Intelligence in Genealogy by other genealogists are on my AI and Genealogy Compendium page.


Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on X, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com. Note that all comments are moderated, and may not appear immediately.

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Wednesday, April 15, 2026

Life Memoir of Maria (Beamish) Paul (1827-1909) in San Francisco in 1907

 I wrote an AI-assisted ABC biography for the family of my my wife's 2nd great-grandparents John Charles and Maria T. (Beamish) Paul in ABC Biography of John Charles and Maria (Beamish) Paul of Ireland and San Francisco, based on my genealogical research over 38 years. 

I wondered what Maria (Beamish) Paul might have told her grandchildren in a life memoir in late 1907. 




(AI Google NotebookLM Infographic for Maria Paul's life memoir)

1)  I requested Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 to   "Please write a life memoir for Maria (Beamish) Paul based on the attached biography, as she might tell to her grandchildren in 1907."

2)  The AI Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5 memoir (edited for accuracy and completeness) is: 


In My Own Words
The Life of Maria Paul
née Beamish

As told to her grandchildren, San Francisco, 1907


"We came such a long way, children. But I would do it all again."

Come, Sit Beside Me

Now then, come close, all of you, and stop your fidgeting. Pull your chairs up to mine and let the fire do its work. Yes, you too, little one — there is room on the footstool. I am an old woman now, eighty years come August, and my bones have earned the right to sit near a warm hearth. But I have enough breath left in me, God willing, to tell you something of where I came from and how I came to be sitting in this very chair, in this city, in California of all the improbable places in the world.

Your mother and your aunt Rebecca have heard bits of this story, here and there, over the years. But I never told it all at once, not from the beginning. So tonight I will try. You must promise me one thing, though — you must remember it. Write it down someday if you can. A family that forgets where it came from is like a ship that has lost its anchor. It drifts, and it does not know why.

Ireland: The Country I Carry Inside Me

I was born on the twenty-seventh of August, in the year 1827, in County Cork, Ireland. I will not pretend I remember it clearly — one does not remember being an infant — but I carry Ireland inside me the way you carry the smell of your mother's kitchen long after you have left home. It is a green country, they say, greener than anything you will ever see in California, and the sky is a particular shade of grey that has no equal in all the world. My father was Thomas Beamish and my mother was Catherine, and beyond that I will not tell you much, because there is not much I know with certainty, and I will not invent what I cannot remember.

What I do know is this: Ireland in those years was in terrible trouble. The potato, which was the food that kept half the country alive, began to fail in the autumn of 1845, when I was eighteen years old. What followed was a catastrophe beyond anything I have words for, even now. People starved — truly starved, children and grandmothers alike — and others died of the fevers that follow hunger as surely as night follows day. A million souls, they say, perished in those years. Another million left on the emigrant ships. I was among those who left. I had to go. Ireland as I had known it was dying, and I was young and strong and I wanted to live.

The crossing to America was not pleasant. I was a young woman traveling alone, which was not so uncommon as you might think — we Irish girls learned early how to look after ourselves. The ship was crowded and the sea was rough and the smell below decks was something I prefer not to dwell upon. But I arrived. I arrived in one piece with my health and my wits about me, and that was more than many could say.

New Bedford, Massachusetts: Where I Found My Footing

I made my way to New Bedford, in Massachusetts, which was at that time one of the great cities of the world — or so it felt to a young Irish girl who had never seen anything larger than a market town. New Bedford was the whaling capital of the earth. The harbor was full of ships, tall-masted and magnificent, and the smell of whale oil hung over everything like a permanent fog. It was a busy, prosperous, noisy place, full of sailors and merchants and people from every corner of the globe.

I found work in the household of a respectable family, as many Irish girls did. It was honest work and it kept a roof over my head and food in my belly, which was all I asked of life in those early years. I learned the ways of an American household — the stoves, the marketing, the laundry, the particular standards that New England women kept. I learned to speak without quite so much of Ireland in my voice, though it never left entirely. Your grandfather used to say he could always hear County Cork in me when I was angry, and perhaps he was right.

It was in New Bedford that I met John Paul. He was a Newfoundlander — which is almost the same as being Irish, I always thought, because half of Newfoundland was Irish to begin with. He was a cooper by trade, a maker of barrels, and he had strong hands and a quiet manner and dark eyes that I found very difficult to look away from. We were married on the twenty-ninth of April, 1852, in a Roman Catholic ceremony. Father McNulty performed the rite. I was twenty-four years old. I wore my good dress and carried flowers that a neighbor had cut from her garden, and I was the happiest I had ever been in my life.

Our Early Years Together

Mary Ann was born to us in November of 1854, our first child, and such a joy she was. I had feared, as young mothers do, that I would not know what to do with a baby — but it turns out that babies are rather instructive on the subject. They make their needs quite clear. Rebecca came along in November of 1856, and by then John had decided that New Bedford, wonderful as it was, was not where our fortune lay. The country was moving westward. Every newspaper you picked up in those years spoke of nothing but the West — the railroads being built, the land being settled, the opportunities waiting for a working man with a strong back and an ambitious heart.

So we moved to Chicago, Illinois, in about 1856. Chicago was something altogether different from New Bedford — flat as a tabletop and loud as a thunderstorm, sitting on the edge of that great lake which is so large you cannot see the other shore and might mistake it for the sea. The city was growing so fast you could practically hear the hammering day and night. John found work there, and we made our home in the eighth ward. It was a decent neighborhood, working people mostly, Irish and Germans and a scattering of everyone else.

Two more children were born to us in Chicago. Little Robert came in 1859 — and I must tell you about Robert, because I will not skip over him simply because his story was short. He was a beautiful boy, with his father's eyes and my stubborn chin, and he died before he was five years old. In those years you expected to lose children. Everyone did. But expecting it does not make it easier. You carry them with you, the ones you lose. I carry Robert still.

Abbie was born in September of 1861, our third daughter and a fierce little creature from the first day. By the time she arrived, the country had gone to war with itself — the great Civil War that tore America in half. John was too old to be taken as a soldier, and for that I thanked God every morning. We watched the headlines and prayed for it to end, and it did end, but at a cost that still makes me grieve when I think of it.

The Long Journey West: Chicago to San Francisco

It was in 1862 that John made up his mind that California was where we were bound. The Gold Rush had happened more than ten years before, but San Francisco was still drawing people by the thousands, and John said that a man who could work hard could make something of himself there. I will not say I was entirely enthusiastic about the idea. I had only just got Chicago arranged to my liking, and now we were to uproot ourselves again. But I had followed John from New Bedford to Chicago and I was not going to stop trusting him now. So I packed what we had and we set off.

Now, children, I want you to understand that in 1862 there was no railroad all the way to California. That would not come until 1869. So the journey west was a considerable undertaking. We went by train from Chicago south through Illinois and on down through the heart of the country, all the way to New Orleans, in Louisiana. That train journey alone took the better part of several days, and with young children it felt longer still. The railway cars were not luxurious — hard wooden benches, coal smoke, and the constant rocking and screeching of the wheels. We ate what we had brought with us and watched the landscape change outside the window, from the flat prairies of Illinois to the great wooded lowlands of the South.

New Orleans was like nothing I had ever seen. I had not expected it to feel so foreign — so French and Spanish and African all at once, the language a mixture I could barely follow, the food full of spices that made my eyes water, and the heat, even in what they told us was a mild season, heavier and wetter than anything I had known in Ireland or Massachusetts. We were there only long enough to arrange our passage on the ship. I did not see much of the city except the port, but what I saw I have never forgotten.

We sailed from New Orleans across the Gulf of Mexico to Panama. In those days you crossed the isthmus of Panama by a combination of boat and rail — the Panama Railroad had been completed just a few years before, and it was the fastest route to the Pacific. The crossing took perhaps a day, but it was a day spent in stifling jungle heat, with the air thick and green around you and strange birds screaming in the trees. I kept Mary Ann and Rebecca close beside me and held Abbie on my lap and tried not to think about the stories one heard of yellow fever and cholera along that route. We arrived safely on the other side, which I considered a minor miracle and thanked the Virgin Mary for.

Then we boarded a ship on the Pacific side and sailed north up the coast of Central America and Mexico and on up to San Francisco. The Pacific, despite its name, was not always pacific — we had some rough days at sea that had me wishing I had never left County Cork. But when we came through the Golden Gate — that great gap in the hills where the bay opens out before you — it was one of the finest sights I have ever seen in my life. The city was spread across the hills like something from a story, white and gleaming in the afternoon sun, and I thought: yes. Yes, this is where we are going to make our home.

San Francisco: Our Home at Last

We settled first on Green Street, and then moved several times over the years as the family grew and circumstances changed. John worked hard — as a cooper when he could find that work, as a laborer, as a janitor and watchman in his later years. It was not the life of ease that the dreamers imagined when they set off for California, but it was a real life, with a real roof over our heads and real food on the table, and I did not complain. We were not alone — the city was full of Irish families in much the same situation, and we looked after one another.

Robert Henry was born to us in about 1864, and then the twins — Thomas and John — came along in December of 1868, which was a surprise that I received with somewhat mixed feelings, I must confess, at the age of forty-one. Seven children in all. We raised them in this city, on these steep streets, and I watched them grow into their own people with a mother's particular mixture of pride and alarm.

John — your grandfather — died in May of 1879. He was fifty-five years old and the dropsy had taken hold of him, which is to say his heart and his body wore out before his spirit did. He died at Clara Street and we buried him at Mount Calvary Cemetery, where I will go to join him in God's good time. I was fifty-one when I lost him. We had been married twenty-seven years. I will not try to tell you what it is to lose a husband of twenty-seven years because I do not have the words and you, please God, will not need to know for a very long while yet.

The Children I Have Loved and Lost

Your grandmother has outlived children, and that is a grief that does not diminish with time. My little Robert died in Chicago before we even came to California. Then John Junior — my youngest boy, the twin — died in September of 1889, only twenty years old. He had his whole life in front of him. Abbie, my fierce, funny Abbie, died in November of 1894 at thirty-three. And Robert Henry, who sailed away to Mexico on some business of his own, died there in Acapulco in 1902.

I do not tell you these things to make you sad, but because they are true, and the truth of a family includes its sorrows as well as its joys. I have had both in good measure. Your mother Mary Ann and your aunt Rebecca are still here, and Thomas, and their children — you — and that is a richness that I am grateful for every single day I open my eyes.

The Earthquake: The City That Shook and Rose Again

Now I must tell you about last year, about the eighteenth of April, 1906, because you are old enough to remember some of it yourselves, and you should hear it told plainly.

I was at Natoma Street when it happened. It was just past five o'clock in the morning and I was not yet properly awake — at my age sleep is not always easy and I had been lying half-dozing when the world came apart. The shaking began suddenly and violently, not like the little tremors we sometimes feel here — this was a roar from deep in the earth, as though the ground itself had lost its temper. The walls cracked, the plaster fell, the windows shattered. I held on to the bedframe and prayed, because there was nothing else to do.

It lasted less than a minute, they say, though it felt like an eternity. When it stopped I got up — my heart hammering fit to burst — and looked out at what remained. The street was full of people in their nightclothes, all of us looking at one another with the same wild expression. Then we smelled the smoke. The fires had started almost immediately, fed by broken gas lines and fallen stoves, and with the water mains ruptured there was almost nothing to be done about them. For three days the city burned.

I watched the smoke rising from a dozen directions at once. I watched people loading their belongings onto wagons and baby carriages and their own backs and walking out through the streets with that particular blank look that disaster puts on human faces. The soldiers came and dynamited whole blocks to try to make firebreaks — the explosions going off one after another through the night, a sound I pray I never hear again. Mary Ann came and found me on the first day and took me to stay with her family, and I was grateful for that. I was seventy-eight years old and not as steady on my feet as I once was.

When it was over, a great portion of this city we had come so far to reach lay in ruins. Three thousand people dead. Hundreds of thousands without homes. I thought of the ship coming through the Golden Gate forty-four years before, and the white gleaming city spread across the hills, and I wept — not just for what was lost, but for all the people who had built it, most of them immigrants like us, who had come here with nothing and made something from it.

But then, children — and this is what I want you to remember — San Francisco got back up. Within months the hammering had started again. The streets were clearing, the rebuilding was underway, and people who had lost everything were already making plans. I have lived long enough to have seen great hardship in my time, and I will tell you this: the measure of a people is not whether they are struck down, but whether they rise. This city rose. I am proud of it.

What I Would Have You Remember

So that is the story, or most of it. A girl from Ireland who crossed the ocean alone at the age of about twenty-three, who found a good man in New Bedford and followed him to Chicago and then took a train to New Orleans and a ship through Panama and arrived in this city on the edge of the world and called it home. It is not so remarkable a story, really — there were thousands of us, hundreds of thousands, all doing much the same thing. But it is my story, and it is yours too, because you would not be sitting here in front of this fire if it had not unfolded exactly as it did.

Ireland is inside me still, and Newfoundland is inside you through your grandfather, and New Bedford and Chicago are in there too somewhere. All those places made us. Do not be in too great a hurry to forget them.

Now then. It is getting late and I am tired, and I believe I can hear your mother in the kitchen, which means supper will not be long. Come and give your old grandmother a kiss. Every one of you. Yes, even you, Paul — you are never too old to kiss your grandmother, whatever you may think.

God bless you all. Every one.

— Maria Paul, née Beamish
San Francisco, California, 1907

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3)  The Video Overview of Maria Paul's life memoir, created by the Google NotebookLM AI tool, is:   

4)  I edited the Claude memoir text to correct minor inconsistencies and errors. Every large language model (LLM) AI tool writes descriptive text much better than I can write. The AI tools are very perceptive, insightful and inspiring, creating engaging text in seconds, including local and national historical events and social history detail when requested.

5)  This is historical fiction, based on my own genealogical research. It is what Maria (Beamish) Paul might have told her grandchildren in 1907.  

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Links to my blog posts about using Artificial Intelligence are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page. Links to AI information and articles about Artificial Intelligence in Genealogy by other genealogists are on my AI and Genealogy Compendium page.

Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver

The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2026/04/life-memoir-of-maria-beamish-paul-1827.html

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post. Share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below. Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com. Please note that all comments are moderated, and may not appear immediately.

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Saturday, April 11, 2026

ABC Biography of John Charles and Maria (Beamish) Paul of Ireland and San Francisco

Using the ABC method described in Using Artificial Intelligence In the Ancestor Biography Creation (ABC) Process, enhanced by further developments, here is another ancestor couple biography using the Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 AI tool.

1) The genealogical sketch for the family of my wife's 2nd great-grandparents John Charles and Maria (Beamish) Paul, including family members, record abstracts and sources, is in Genealogical Sketch of the John Charles and Maria (Beamish) Paul Family of Ireland and San Francisco.  


(AI NotebookLM Infographic - John and Maria Paul biography)

2) For the Claude AI biography, I attached a PDF of the genealogical sketch for the specific ancestors using the plus (+) icon, and then prompted the AI tool with:  "You are an expert genealogist and family historian. Please create a biography based on information in the attached file for the John Charles and Maria (Beamish) Paul family. Include parents, siblings, spouses and children (with birth and death dates and places). Summarize life events, add historical events as appropriate, but do not add or embellish any extra genealogical details. Use section headings. Expand the information in each section to add more details. The tone should be engaging and suitable for family members."

3)  The Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 biography (lightly edited for accuracy) is: 



A Family History

John Charles Paul & Maria Beamish

1823–1909 · From Ireland and Newfoundland to San Francisco


Introduction

This is the story of two immigrants who found each other in the bustling port city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and together built a family that spanned a continent. John Charles Paul, a cooper's son from the rocky shores of Newfoundland, and Maria T. Beamish, a young woman who had crossed the Atlantic from Ireland, married in 1852 and spent the next three decades forging a life together — first in New Bedford, then in Chicago, and finally amid the dramatic hills of San Francisco. Their journey mirrors one of the great American stories of the nineteenth century: ordinary working people, shaped by hardship and hope, planting roots in the New World.

The nineteenth century was one of the most turbulent and transformative periods in American history. During the years John and Maria were raising their family, the nation fought a devastating Civil War, completed its first transcontinental railroad, and watched its cities explode with immigrant energy. San Francisco — the city where the Pauls finally settled — grew from a small trading post into one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world in a single generation. To read the story of John and Maria is to glimpse that larger history through the eyes of one family.

John Charles Paul (1823–1879)

Origins in Newfoundland

John Charles Paul was born in October 1823 in St. John's, Newfoundland — a rugged, fog-draped town perched on the edge of the North Atlantic and one of the oldest European settlements in North America. At the time of his birth, St. John's was a thriving British colonial port whose economy revolved almost entirely around the cod fishery. The docks were loud with the sounds of coopering, sail-mending, and fish-salting; the streets crowded with Irish and West Country English families who had followed the fishing fleets across the ocean.

John was the second child of John Paul (1792–1838) and Mary Quirk (1800–1866), who had married around 1820, probably in Newfoundland itself. The family appears to have been of Irish extraction, a background that would have been entirely unremarkable in St. John's, where Irish Catholic immigrants made up the majority of the working population. The household John grew up in included four children:
  • Oliver Paul — born before 14 November 1822 in St. John's, the eldest child.
  • John Charles Paul — born October 1823, the subject of this biography.
  • Thomas Paul — born February 1829 in Lowell, Massachusetts, suggesting the family had already begun their move south by that time.
  • Robert Havlin Paul — born 12 June 1830 in Lowell, Massachusetts.
The Move to New England

Sometime in the mid-to-late 1820s, the Paul family left Newfoundland and resettled in Lowell, Massachusetts — a booming industrial city that had recently reinvented itself as one of America's first planned manufacturing centers, famous for its textile mills and its canals. It was a common destination for Newfoundland and Maritime families seeking steadier wages than the unpredictable fishery could provide. From Lowell, the family later moved again to New Bedford, Bristol County, Massachusetts, where John would spend his early adult years.

New Bedford in the 1840s and 1850s was the whaling capital of the world. Its harbour bristled with the masts of hundreds of ships, and its streets smelled of rendered whale oil. The city was also home to a large and diverse community of maritime workers — sailors, riggers, coopers, and tradesmen of every background. It is possible that the young John Paul, who would later be described as a cooper by trade, worked in the whale oil industry in some capacity, perhaps making the barrels in which that precious oil was stored. Some records also hint that he may have sailed as a whaler before his marriage, though this cannot be confirmed with certainty.

Maria T. Beamish (1827–1909) 

From Ireland to Massachusetts

Maria T. Beamish was born on 27 August 1827, most likely in Ireland, though her precise birthplace has not been established. Her parents were Thomas Beamish and Catherine Beamish (maiden name unknown), both of Ireland. Whether Maria had brothers or sisters, and whether her parents ever emigrated to America, remains unknown — she may have made the crossing to the New World entirely on her own, as thousands of young Irish women did during and after the devastating Great Famine of the 1840s.

By 1850, Maria had settled in New Bedford. The United States Census of that year records her in the household of Samuel W. Rodman — one of New Bedford's prominent merchant families — where she is listed as a 23-year-old woman born in Ireland, without a stated occupation. It was common for young immigrant Irish women to live in the households of prosperous families as domestic servants, and this is almost certainly the capacity in which Maria found herself in the Rodman home. It was a respectable if demanding situation, and it placed her squarely in the heart of one of New England's most dynamic communities.

Marriage: New Bedford, 1852

John Charles Paul and Maria T. Beamish were married on 29 April 1852 at a Roman Catholic parish in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the ceremony performed by Father Thomas McNulty. Their marriage record paints a vivid small portrait of two young immigrants: John was 28 years old, listed by trade as a cooper, born in St. John's; Maria was 23, born in the same city according to the record (though this may reflect a misunderstanding or clerical error, as all other evidence places her birth in Ireland).

Their union was a meeting of two worlds typical of mid-nineteenth century Catholic immigrant America. Both came from Irish backgrounds, both had made their way to one of New England's most prosperous and cosmopolitan port cities, and both belonged to the Catholic faith — a bond that would have been deeply meaningful at a time when Irish Catholics in America sometimes faced significant social discrimination. The couple settled in New Bedford to begin their married life.

Their Children

John and Maria had at least seven children over roughly fourteen years, born across three different states as the family moved westward. Their children were:
  • Mary Ann Paul — born November 1854, Massachusetts. She married Herman Schaffner before 1876 in San Francisco and had three children. She died 16 February 1908 in San Francisco.
  • Rebecca M. Paul — born November 1856 in Chicago, Illinois. She married Charles Henry Small before 1880 in San Francisco and had one child. She died 21 October 1914 in San Francisco.
  • Robert Paul — born about 1859 in Chicago, Illinois. He died before 1862, aged approximately 3 years, probably in Chicago.
  • Abbie C. Paul — born September 1861 in Chicago, Illinois. She died 11 November 1894, aged 33, in San Francisco.
  • Robert Henry Paul — born about 1864 in San Francisco. He died 14 September 1902, aged 38, in Acapulco, Mexico.
  • Thomas E. Paul — born December 1868 in San Francisco.
  • John Charles Paul (Jr.) — born December 1868 in San Francisco. He died 22 September 1889, aged 20, in San Francisco.
The loss of young Robert in childhood and the early deaths of Abbie (at 33) and John Jr. (at 20) remind us that nineteenth-century family life was shadowed by grief in ways that are difficult for us to imagine today. Maria buried two of her children while John was still alive, and outlived several more in her long widowhood. The family was close-knit, however, and the 1880 census finds a full and busy household gathered around Maria even a year after John's death.

Life on the Move: New Bedford, Chicago, and San Francisco

The Chicago Years, c. 1856–1862

By around 1856, John and Maria had left New Bedford and relocated to Chicago, Illinois — then a city in the midst of a spectacular and almost unimaginable boom. Chicago had become the rail hub of mid-continent America, and workers of every trade were needed. The Pauls' second daughter, Rebecca, was born there in November 1856, and their next two children — Robert (c. 1859) and Abbie (1861) — were also born in the city. The 1860 census finds the family living in Chicago's Ward 8, with John listed as a cooper and the household also including a 16-year-old servant from Newfoundland named Julia Taylor.

Arrival in San Francisco

Sometime around 1862, the Paul family made their most dramatic move: to San Francisco, California. The city was then in the midst of the extraordinary transformation set off by the Gold Rush of 1849. Though the initial frenzy had subsided, San Francisco had emerged as the financial and commercial metropolis of the American West — a city of breathtaking energy and diversity, where immigrants from Ireland, China, Germany, Italy, and Latin America lived side by side in its crowded neighborhoods.

City directories place John at several San Francisco addresses over the years, including 335 Green Street (1864), 9 Clara Street (1869), and 28 Clara Street (where he would die). His occupations shifted over time — from cooper (1862) to laborer (1865), then janitor (1869–1878) and watchman (1872–1876). This occupational decline, from a skilled trade to service and watchman work, may reflect the physical toll of aging and manual labor, the changing San Francisco economy, or simply the difficulties facing working-class immigrants in the competitive city. The 1870 census lists him, with some apparent confusion, as a 'car conductor' born in England — likely a census enumerator's error on both counts.

John's civic standing is documented in the San Francisco Great Register of Voters. In his 1867 registration he noted he was 'not naturalized'; by his 1876 registration he claimed citizenship 'by naturalization of father' — suggesting that his father John Paul Sr. had at some point become a naturalized American citizen, a status that could be inherited by minor children under the laws of the time.

The Death of John Charles Paul, 1879

John Charles Paul died on 31 May 1879 in San Francisco. He was 55 years old. The cause of death was recorded as dropsy — a historical term for what we would today call edema, an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the body that was commonly associated with heart, kidney, or liver disease. A death notice appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on 3 June 1879, inviting friends and acquaintances to attend his funeral from his home at 28 Clara Street.

John was originally buried in Mount Calvary Cemetery in San Francisco, one of the city's principal Catholic burial grounds. In 1940 — more than sixty years after his death — his remains were moved to Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma, San Mateo County, as part of a broader relocation of San Francisco's historic cemeteries. Colma, which famously came to have more dead residents than living, became the final resting place for hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans. There is no individual gravestone for John at Holy Cross; he rests in a general reburial area alongside four others from the same transfer.

Maria Paul's Long Widowhood, 1879–1909

Maria was left a widow at 51, with several children still at home. The 1880 census captures the household at 773 Acheson Street in San Francisco: Maria at the head, daughters Mary Ann and Rebecca (both now married), youngest daughter Abbie, and sons Robert Henry (14) and the twins John (12) and Thomas (12), still at school. Living with them was also Maria's son-in-law Herman Schaffner, a bookbinder from New York of Hessian parentage, and his infant son Paul — Maria's first grandchild.

The years that followed brought more loss. Abbie died in 1894 at only 33. John Jr. had already died in 1889 at just 20. Robert Henry died in 1902 in Acapulco, Mexico, far from home, at 38. Mary Ann, her eldest, died in 1908, just a year before Maria herself. Only Rebecca Small and Thomas survived their mother.

By 1900, Maria was living at 408 Natoma Street in San Francisco, renting rooms to lodgers — a common way for widows to support themselves. The census records her as 72 years old, able to read, write, and speak English, a widow of 3 surviving children from at least 3 born. She noted she had immigrated in 1830, having lived in the United States for 70 years by that point (perhaps the enumerator misunderstood).

Maria Beamish Paul died on 9 December 1909 in San Francisco. She was 82 years old, and her cause of death was listed as senility. She died at the Home of the Aged — a care institution — and her funeral notice in the San Francisco Examiner announced that her remains would lie at the parlors of Theodor Dierks & Co. before a private interment. She was buried beside her husband in Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma, though like John, her grave in Section M lacks a marker.

A Legacy

John Charles Paul lived only 55 years, but they were years packed with movement, labor, and change. From the salt-scented docks of St. John's to the fog-wrapped streets of San Francisco, he followed the great westward tide of nineteenth-century America. Maria outlived him by thirty years, raising their children, welcoming grandchildren, and witnessing San Francisco grow into a great metropolis — until the city was nearly destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906, just three years before her own death.

The graves of John and Maria at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma bear no markers today, but this account, assembled from census records, city directories, newspaper notices, and vital records, is its own kind of monument — a remembrance of two people who crossed oceans, endured losses, worked hard, and loved their family. They deserve to be remembered.

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4) An Audio Overview (essentially a podcast) created by the Google NotebookLM AI tool) describing and celebrating the lives of John Charles and Maria (Beamish) Paul can be heard here (click on "Audio Overview" and wait for it to load).

5)  The Video Overview discussing the John Charles and Maria (Beamish) Paul family created by the Google NotebookLM AI tool is:  


6)  The Slide Deck produced by Google NotebookLM was incorporated into a Google Slides file, and the created Google Vids presentation is below:  


7)  I edited the Claude biography text to correct minor inconsistencies and errors. Every large language model (LLM) AI tool writes descriptive text much better than I can write. I was an aerospace engineer in my former life, and my research reports and genealogical sketches reflect "just the facts gleaned from my research." The AI tools are very perceptive, insightful and create readable text in seconds, including local and national historical events and social history detail when requested.

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Links to my blog posts about using Artificial Intelligence are on my Randy's AI and Genealogy page. Links to AI information and articles about Artificial Intelligence in Genealogy by other genealogists are on my AI and Genealogy Compendium page.


Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver

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