CHRIS III RAILROADER
 |
The most noteworthy member of the
Captain’s second family with Ellen Elizabeth Lee was Christian William Kirkman
III, born Dec. 22, 1882 in Bridgeport, CT, and a lifelong railroader. After growing up in Little Neck, CWK III became a New York City trolley car motorman who tootled along Manhattan’s East Side 2nd Ave. line in the early 1900s. Like his father, Christian III had two marriages. His first wife was Edith Elizabeth Foster Kirkman of Flushing, a violent tempered woman born in |
| Liverpool, England. Documents show they had an apartment in
upper Manhattan near the George Washington bridge and in 1906 had a son, Christian William
Kirkman IV. CWK III and Edith clearly were mismatched. He was an even-tempered Dane and she a violent tempered English spitfire. They divorced shortly after CWK IV’s birth. In 1909, CWK III became a switchman in the Northern Pacific Railroad’s freight yard in Staples, MN and married Anna Jelinek Fiala, a divorcee who had three children. Legend holds Anna chased CWK III from New York to Minnesota and forced him to marry at gunpoint. Unfortunately, Chris III lost two fingers of his left hand in a switching accident in the Northern Pacific’s freight yard. Stranded, crippled and unable to find work in rural Minnesota, in 1911 CWK III decided to purchase a horse drawn wagon and return East. That produced one of the family’s strangest sagas. With his wife, mother and four children, CWK drove 1,500 miles from central Minnesota to Middletown, CT, a difficult 68-day journey on primitive roads. Instead of going West to find his fortune, Chris III went East. Some Kirkmans do things bass-ackwards. In 1916, CWK III became a conductor for the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, a job he held for 32 years until his retirement in 1948. During the 1930s and ‘40s he was chief conductor of "The Pilgrim," a famous passenger train that ran from New York to Boston. During the 1940s he owned a home in Packanack Lake, NJ, a farm near Oakland, NJ, and finally an estate near Williamstown, NJ.
CWK III was a tall (6'2"), slender man with a commanding presence. Pictures show he was a handsome young man and a white-haired, very Danish old man. There was always a pot of coffee on his stove (a Scandinavian tradition) and he was a hooked chain smoker: lighting one cigarette after another, usually using the burning tip of a smoked down cigarette to light the next. Chris and Anna raised five children. Three (Frank, Theodore and George) were fathered by Anna’s first husband and changed their names from Fiala to Kirkman when Chris III adopted them. Anna gave birth to the fourth child, blonde gorgeous Elinor, in Staples, MN, and their last child was another adoption, Elinor’s son Charles "Bill" Kirkman. In 1948, Chris III and Anna moved to Williamstown, a small town in South Jersey, and he died there on Nov. 9, 1950 after a two-year bout with lung cancer. Like his father, Chris III was a 32nd degree mason and was given a Masonic funeral. He was buried on Nov. 13, 1950 in Pine Grove Cemetery, Middletown, CT.
An aside about Edith Foster Kirkman, CWK III’s first wife. Census records show she was born Sept. 1, 1885, in Liverpool, England, the younger daughter of Edward Foster who landed in Philadelphia in 1888. The 1900 census shows Edward Foster, his wife Catherine, and their children William, Alice and Edith, living in North Hempstead Township, Long Island (an area that included Little Neck). The Fosters moved to nearby Flushing in the early 1900s. The most memorable feature of the Fosters was their knock-your-ears off English accents. They omitted the H sound in words like hand, how and house and they came out ‘and, ‘ow and ‘ouse. They spoke the King’s Liverpool English until they died. Stroke-crippled Grandma Edith passed away Dec. 26, 1942 and was buried in Flushing Cemetery, as are all the Fosters.
The Captain's second child with Ellen Lee, Ellen II, was born June 26, 1887 in Manhattan and nicknamed Nell.She was an Unsinkable Molly Brown type who in her early years resembled actress Ingrid Bergman and had a lot of the Captain’s moxie. Nell’s grandson Gene Burleson claims she was a government agent who reported on German saboteurs and sympathizers during World War I. Nell married George Bonn of Palisades, NJ in 1905 and had two children, Ellen III and William Bonn. During the 1920s, Nell divorced George Bonn, returned to Little Neck, established a bakery and a children’s boarding home and built several houses, thus becoming an aggressive female business woman. Nell moved to Houston, TX in middle age and died there in August 1963 (age 76).
There’s only limited information about Charles, the Captain’s third child by Ellen Lee, born Feb. 12, 1889 in Jersey City. Charles spent his life in New York City. He was a Navy enlisted man in World War I, married Lydia Mills of Pennsylvania, and had a son, Edward, in 1916. Uncle Charley, as he was called, died in the Bronx, NY in 1945. Charles’s son Edward apparently reverse migrated to Chester, England during the Great Depression. |
