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The picture above of a police
officer is a 1903 Chicago policeman —
which John H. Reidy (1842–1910) was when he and his wife, Bridget
"Delia" Cahill Reidy (1846–1928), lost their
three daughters and a niece at the Iroquois Theater
fire.
They were:
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Twenty-nine-year-old Mary Reidy (b.1873).
Mary worked as a bookkeeper
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Twenty-five-year-old Anna T. Reidy (b.1877) taught
at the Pickard School in Chicago
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Twenty-year-old Eleanor (or Eleanora) "Nellie" Reidy (b.1883) Body identified by a neighbor, Catherine Campbell.
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Forty-four-year-old Mary E. McGunnigle (b.1859), an unmarried cousin to the Reidy girls, was from
from New York where her family had homes
in New York City and in Hicksville on Long Island. She
was the oldest of nine children born to Patrick
and the late Mary Cahill McGunnigle (sister to
Bridget Cahill Reidy). Upon her mother's death at age thirty-seven, Mary had
become surrogate mother for her six younger siblings and
kept house for the family. In December 1903 Mary had been in Chicago visiting her aunt Bridget and
cousins for a week prior to the Iroquois Theater fire. Some newspapers
reported that her first name was Mayme and incorrectly gave
her age as thirty. Her body was found at Jordan's funeral home. Two of her siblings, Margaret and
Matthew, traveled to Chicago to escort her body back to New York. She was buried with her mother
and two siblings at Cemetery of the Holy Rood in Westbury, New York, leaving behind a $1,000 estate ($33,000 today).
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In 1900, five Reidy
children lived at home at 614 South Sawyer Ave.
in Chicago, where the family still lived in 1903 and
in 1910.
Mary Reidy worked as a bookkeeper, Anna as a school teacher at
the Pickard school on Sawyer Ave, and John Jr. and
Thomas as clerks on the railroad. It is not known
where Nellie worked; she may have
been in college.
John and Bridget, married in 1868, were from
Ireland, as were their parents.
Bridget and the children came to America in 1879
and John Sr. in 1880–81.
In the years after the fire
When he died in 1910, it was reported that back in 1903,
in his grief, John Reedy had tried to shoot himself and that he'd
never recovered from the deaths of his children. In
1920, Bridget Reidy, seventy-two years old, lived on Washington
Blvd. with her son, John Jr., and his family.
The Reidy family is buried at a Calvary cemetery in
Evanston, IL. Mary McGunnigle's body was
transported by train to Westbury, NY and interred in
the family plot in the Catholic Cemetery.
Mary McGunnigle's father died four months after her.
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Discrepancies and addendum
In some reports, a Reidy son, John J Reidy
(1874–1903), is named as a victim. I
don't know whether he attended the fire but he
was still alive in 1920.
They lost a grown son in 1899, four years before the
Iroquois Theater fire.
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