I’d like to have a clearer picture of my grandmother, Bezzie Renn. My feeling is that there multiple windows through which to view her life, but of those, only one narrow slant filtered down to my generation. That’s a story of a Bezzie Renn who was severe and forbidding, a tiny bird-like woman with sharp eyes and a beak of a nose who faced the world with a strong will and did not propitiate with softness or wile. 

Bezzie Renn was born Brigid Agnes Connelly on July 29, 1872, in Chicago, to John and Catherine Connelly (née Golden). At the time of her birth, she had three living elder sisters. A baby born five year earlier died in 1970 of scarlet fever, soon after the family arrived in Chicago. This baby was also named Bridget (but note the different spelling). Baby Bezzie appears on the 1870 census with her father John Connelly, mother Catherine, and older sisters Mary A. (Mary Ann), Ellen, and Sarah. They were living in a boarding house (i.e., tenement) at the time the census information was gathered, which was June 24^th 1870.

According to the 1870 census, John Connelly was working as a fruit peddler, Catherine was keeping house, and their oldest child, Mary A. age 8, was attending school.   It is very likely that the boarding house that the family called home in 1870 burned during the Great Chicago fire the following year (October 1871).

The John and Kate Connelly family is found living at the rear of 51 Huron Street in the 1872 and 1875 Chicago City Directories and the 1880 census.  John Connelly’s occupation is noted as “peddler” in the city directories and as “husker” in the 1880 census. The housing in that area was rapidly rebuilt in the two years after the Great Fire.[2] My grandmother Brigid Agnes Renn, born July 1872 was conceived in the month after the fire and born during the frenetic Great Rebuilding of the city.

During the years after the fire, Catherine’s older brother Anthony lived next door to the Connelly’s new home. Anthony lived at 53 Huron Street with his wife, three children, and the mother and two brothers of his wife, the McGourk family.  He worked  worked as a teamster. John and Kate Connelly had two more children, Edward P. (born 1877) and John T. (born 1878).

Catherine’s brother Anthony died in 1885. By 1888 his widow and three children were living at 95 Superior Street. In the 1890s Catherine and John moved to 62 Whiting Street, a few blocks their Huron Street residence. Both families continued to live in the same neighborhood, but after Anthony’s death, the close relations between the families faded. John Connelly died in 1899 at his home at 62 Whiting Street and that is the home from which Bezzie, my grandmother, was married the following year.

Young Bezzie’s early years, then, were lived at 51 Huron St., with her three older sisters, two younger brothers and her Aunt Maria in the same house. Bezzie’s uncle, his wife, and their three children lived next door. The men worked on the streets of Chicago: peddling produce and hauling goods. A humble beginning in a new city. But although the family brought few material resources with them from Ireland, they did have family, an ability  to engage in the rough and tumble street life of Chicago, and also a scholarly spark that would lead both Sarah and Bezzie to become teachers.