pronouncing it to be due to heart failure. The funeral was held in the Catholic Church in this city Thursday morning and was witnessed by one of the largest audiences ever assembled in Battle Creek on an occasion of this kind. Mr. O'Neill was a sincere Christian gentleman, having been reared in the Catholic faith, was modest in manner and charitable and honest in every sense of the word. He was a kind father and a good neighbor, and if Patrick O'Neill had an enemy on earth at the time of his death the people of Battle Creek never heard of it. Mr. O'Neill was one of the founders of Battle Creek, and the people of this enterprising little city owe much to him for making the town what it is today."

Patrick O'Neill was survived by four children, a son and three daughters. His son Owen died in 1907. The two oldest daughters Margaret and Helen (Nell) went to Chicago and graduated from nurses training. Katharine, the youngest daughter studied at the Chicago Art Institute until she entered the religious order of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This was the order that conducted St. Francis Academy in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the school that she and Virginia Hale, daughter of Felix Hale, attended as girls.

Margaret and Nell volunteered for overseas duty during World War I. They served part of the time with field hospital units just back of the front lines. Nell told of the long hours they sometimes had to serve because of the shortage of nurses. She recalled one occasion working in an emergency area where the men were rushed for immediate leg amputations as their wounds were gangrenous from poison gas. She worked all day and into the night, how many hours she did not know. She would become faint and the doctors would motion her outside to get a breath of fresh air, and as soon as she revived she was back inside. They told her later that the doctors she was working with performed more than sixty amputations during the stretch of time she worked with them. In those days there were no miracle drugs such as sulpha.

Margaret and Nell served throughout the war and returned to nursing in Milwaukee afterward. On their retirement they lived in California until Margaret's death in 1962. Nell then returned to Milwaukee and died there in 1965. They are buried in the family plot in St. Patrick's cemetery with their father, mother and brother Owen. At Nell's death, Sister Mary Gabriel (Katharine) wrote to old family friends in Battle Creek, "They are all there now. I am the last leaf on the tree and will be buried wherever I happen to die."

Sister Mary Gabriel for many years an art instructor in Clarke College in Dubuque is now in Chicago at The Immaculata College, where she is still active. When she answered the request for information on her father for the centennial publication of the Battle Creek committee she wrote, "It is only as I grow older, very old in fact, that I appreciate the life and hopes and dreams and courage which inspired my father from the time he ran away from home in Ireland before finishing high school, through Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, until he established a home

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