Catherine had a life before James entered it.

In 1900, the census recorded twelve-year-old Katie McNiff with her parents, William and Sarah, her younger sister Sadie and an older boarder, Mary A. Tobin. The record introduces Catherine as a daughter and sister inside a household of five—not as the future wife of the man whose journey we have been following.

A city directory adds another part of their world. William McNiff’s saloon stood at 1311 Main Street, while the family home was listed nearby at 1315. Home and livelihood occupied the same small stretch of Bridgeport, though the surviving records do not tell us Catherine’s daily routines, schooling, work or hopes.

Her mother Sarah was also born a McPadden. That makes this a meeting of two McPadden family lines, but no biological connection between Sarah’s Derrindangan family and James’s Tullynascreen family has yet been proved.