 Citizen Kane  Denison Resident 1910 - 1922 J.
O. O'Kane was born July 5, 1882, in Manhattan,
New York City, New York.
The name on his birth certificate is James
Joseph O'Kane. From that
same document we learn that his parents were
John and Liza Brodenek
O'Kane. John was an engineer, born in Ireland.
Liza was born in New
York City. We next find James O'Kane in the
historical record in the
1900 Census, where he was a 17-year-old farm
laborer boarding with the
Goin family on their farm in Fannin County.
It's a long way from New
York City to rural Fannin County, Texas, but
there he was. It's
possible that New York City James and Fannin
County James were not the
same person, but there are good reasons for
thinking they were. On the
census form his birth date of July 1882 and
place of birth in New York
both match the information on his birth
certificate. We know that he
turned up in Denison in 1910, and that tends
to corroborate his
surprising presence in Fannin County a decade
earlier.
He appears as J. O. Kane in Denison newspapers and as Joseph O. Kane in Denison city directories; therefore, I will refer to him as Kane, even though his descendants use the name O'Kane. The December 11, 1910, issue of The Sunday Gazetteer contains his first ad for the business he had just purchased, Union Woolen Mills at 209 W. Main Street. Near the bottom of the same page is a paragraph complimentary of the new manager as a person and a businessman (misidentified as J. A. Kane instead of J. O. Kane). Union Woolen Mills sold men's clothing, mainly suits.  The Sunday Gazetteer Sunday, December 11, 1910 pg. 4  It
opened in April of 1909 under the
ownership of Sam Mathews. He sold it
to Sam Hill in the fall, and Hill sold it
to Kane at the end of the
following year. Kane is identified in the
ads as the manager, but The
Denison Daily Herald referred to him as
the proprietor when he married
in 1913. Among the mysteries
surrounding J. O. Kane are how many
wives he had and what became of them. His
last known wife was Bernice
Lee Benner (1889-1964) of Mound City, Holt
County, Missouri.
The
newspaper report of their 1913 wedding
says the Kanes "will welcome
their friends at No. 319 North Rusk
avenue." That was a temporary
residence. The two-story house sat across
from St. Patrick's, and today
the address is a parking lot. Before and
after the Kanes' wedding the
house was occupied by J. W. and Mary
Corcoran. He was an insurance
agent. The Corcorans possibly either
offered their home to the
Kanes while they were away somewhere, or
they took them in as house-guests until
they could find a place of their own.
Before the 1913
City Directory was published in August,
the Kanes had moved to 1019 W.
Main Street. The 1915 and 1917 city
directories list them at 109 N.
Scullin.
Before he married Bernice in 1913, he was listed in the 1911 Denison City Directory at 416 N. Scullin Avenue with a spouse named Alta. No other information about her is known to exist. In April of the previous year, eight months before Kane arrived in Denison, a census taker in Fort Worth enumerated a man there named Joseph O. Kane. He was 29, he was born in New York, and he was a tailor. Our man was a year younger, but his place of birth and occupation match the man in Fort Worth. "Joseph O. Kane" is also how our man is listed in Denison city directories. The Fort Worth Kane had a 26-year-old wife named Alice and a five-year-old son named Clyde. Both were born in Missouri, but nothing more is known about either of them.
Kane's
great-grandson says that Great-grandma
Kane returned to Mound City,
Missouri, around 1922 with her two
children but without their father.
Mrs. J. O. Kane last appears in Denison
newspapers in the Personals
column of The Denison Herald in the issue
of June 5, 1922. The snippet
merely reports that she had been a visitor
to Sherman. J. O. Kane
himself is last mentioned in newspaper ads
for his business in January
of 1921. He and Bernice and Union Woolen
Mills are all listed in the
1921 Denison City Directory, published in
March of that year. None of
them are listed in the 1925 directory.
Bernice claimed to be a widow in
the 1930 Census in Missouri. No trace of
her husband appears in any
known record after 1921. Patrick O'Kane
wrote that Bernice resisted all
entreaties from her children and
grandchildren to provide any
information about her mysterious husband.
She refused to discuss him at
all. They have inferred that he may have
deserted her and the children.
If so, did he also desert Alice and Clyde
in Fort Worth? And what about
Alta, his 1911 spouse in Denison? If
Bernice knew the answers to those
questions, she took them to her grave. But
she did save her photographs.
 Biography Index Elaine Nall Bay ©2022 If you find any of Grayson County TXGenWeb links inoperable, please send me a message. |
J. O.
Kane
