Introductory Notes by Winnie Woodhull:
This history is based on stories and documents, both personal and public, that I have collected and studied over the past year. A key source is the research done in the 1980s and 90s, including work in the National Archives, by Mary Kellington, the daughter of Winifred Frain Haggerty and John Joseph Haggerty. This history also owes much to Donald Haggerty and Tom Kellington, Jr., whose memories of the family in Pennsylvania (Crabtree) and Maryland (Takoma Park and Silver Spring) gave me quite a lot to go on. I am indebted to Tom Kellington for passing his mother’s notes on to me, and to both Donald and Tom for meeting me in Greensburg, PA in September 2008 in order to visit Crabtree and spend some hours in the Calvary Hill Cemetery there. We planted chrysanthemums at several family gravesites on a sunny late-summer day, and we gathered interesting information from the tombstone inscriptions. I was also able to talk with people in Crabtree, especially the town historian Gene Yanity and his wife Mary Ann (both born in 1936). Over an impromptu dinner at their place, the Yanitys pointed out that back in the day in Crabtree our family name was pronounced HEY-GERTY, probably the Irish pronunciation. Gene has an amazing collection of photos and written documents (he sent me a picture of my mother dating from about 1935) and has himself written a history of Crabtree.
I found a lot of information online through Ancestry.com: US and UK census data; birth-marriage-death indexes; draft cards from World Wars One and Two; passenger lists (ships’ manifests); and Civil War records.
This history also draws on many materials I found at county historical societies in Pennsylvania: Luzerne County/Wilkes-Barre;Schuylkill County/Pottsville; and Westmoreland County/Greensburg. Unfortunately, I know of no other documents, such as personal letters, photo albums, or journals, that may throw more light, or new light, on our family’s past.
haggjohn 