08 / James’s Bridgeport story · 1904–1912
Two Catherines.
One city. Two lives.
One was the sister he named across an ocean.
The other was the woman he would marry.
His older sister
Catherine
McPadden Kelly
The family contact.
11 Warren Court · named in 1904
His future wife
Catherine
McNiff
A different family.
St. Peter’s Church · married in 1912
Bridgeport, c.1909 · Haines Photo Co., Library of Congress. Later city context—not either woman’s home or James’s arrival-day view. Full photograph ↗ · Source ↗
The relationships make the difference
The same first name.
A different place in his life.
Choose a woman to see the record that places her in James’s story. These are two distinct people—not an earlier and later name for the same person.
His sister · Catherine McPadden Kelly
The name at the end of the crossing.
James’s passenger entry names his sister, “Mrs James Kelly,” at 11 Warren Court, Bridgeport. Catherine McPadden Kelly was already a wife and mother with a life in the city.
The address identifies a family contact. It does not prove who met James, where he stayed, or that his sister introduced him to his future wife.
Read the citation and evidence limits
Open the preserved record Two anchors. An unfinished story between them.
We know the names.
Not how their worlds met.
as his Bridgeport contact.
The meeting and courtship
remain unknown.
Catherine McNiff.
We cannot turn a shared city into a recovered introduction. A family connection, a workplace, a parish: each might suggest a question. None yet tells us how James and Catherine McNiff came to know one another.
There is another McPadden name in Catherine McNiff’s family: her mother, Sarah McPadden McNiff, has roots at Derrindangan. A shared ancestry with James’s Tullynascreen line remains unproved. Keep the branches in view →
Next · the world around them
Before we follow their lives,
meet their city.
Factories, streets, parishes and immigrant households. Bridgeport gives us a setting—not a script for what happened to James.