The Terrible 1920s

In the decade of 1920, at least ten important people died in the Cook family as well as Mary Theresa Dempsey Monaghan, wife of Marcus Gage Monaghan, who had outlived seven of her children and her husband, and had raised her grandsons, Don and Frank Ranney when her daughter, Mary Bernadette, died of tuberculosis in 1911 at age 30.

In 1920, James Cohen, second husband of Mamie Cook's mother, Frances Neathammer, died at age 57. Frances' first husband, Charles Noonan, had died before 1900, and we find Frances living in Cleveland in the 1900 census, having moved up from Niles, Ohio, with two teen-aged daughters, Sadie and Annie. We are not certain when exactly Charles Noonan died, or how, but he must have been very young, since he would only have been 36 in 1890 and he disappears before 1900.

The move to Cleveland by Frances Noonan at least explains how Mamie met Bernard Cook, since she grew up in Niles, at least 50 miles south of Cleveland. We are not sure how Mamie met Bernard, but we can speculate that her father, Charles, visited the saloon operated by J.J. Cook and Mamie could have been sent by her mother to fetch him. There may be a more innocent explanation, of course.

We find James Cohen in Warren (near Niles) in the 1880 census living with his immigrant Irish parents. They had arrived only two years earlier in 1878 when James was 15. In 1900, we find him as a boarder in a rooming house in Cleveland, Ward 16, in the same census as the widow Frances Noonan and her daughters. We have to presume he followed her up there, because they were married in time for the 1910 census and had moved back to Niles, Ohio. In 1910, Frances Cohen was raising three of her brother John's children after he died in 1908 at the age of 43 - another house of orphans in the maternal side of the family! By 1920, Frances was widowed again and living with her brother's now adult daughter and four boarders: three Bills and a John.

In 1920, we know Albert George Cook, Jr. died tragically young at 22, and his father lost his wife, Maggie in 1923 and soon married his son's widow, Rose.

In 1921 the beloved Joseph John Cook (J.J.) died at age 69. Katie's brother, Lewis/Louis Wambaugh followed in 1922 at the ripe old age of 86. Lewis had served in the Civil War with Company D of the 76th Infantry Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers.

Frances Noonan-Cohen's father, Jacob Neathammer, also served in the Civil War with the 171st Regiment of the Ohio National Guard, only nine years after arriving in the USA from Germany; which is ironic because so many young German men left Germany to escape mandatory conscription!

In 1927, Katie's sister, Regina, died in the Cook home on October 20.

In 1929, Catherine Eva Smith Cook died in April, seven months before her youngest son, Charles, and his wife, Ida, were killed in an auto accident.

It was a rough decade for the Cooks.