One Chicago Family

The Renn Family

  • Lifting up through education: My Sinsinawa Dominican ancestors

    The 20th century did not have a lock on independent women in my family. In the 19th century, teaching was a path to independence, a path taken by five of my female ancestors, three of them as Dominican Sisters of… Continue reading

  • From the ashes, a family rises

    INTRODUCTION During the 1860s, my young grandfather, James Renn, along with his parents and siblings, fled the Agricultural Depression in western Ireland for booming Chicago. They survived the Great Fire of 1871 and, as Chicago forged ahead, so did they.… Continue reading

  • Growing up with a teacher mother

    Teachers abounded in my mother’s family. My mom taught, as did two of her older sisters, three of her aunts, and my mom’s mother (my Grandma Bezzie). For my mother, teaching was a calling. She expressed her deep Roman Catholic… Continue reading

  • The Spanish Flu: Counting the bodies in 1919

    Today, as I start my writing, it is the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, that ended World War I. Until recently, I didn’t know much about the war other than its major hits: the assassination of Archduke… Continue reading

  • A priest in the family

    He baptized us, he married us, and he buried us. My first cousin James Lester Mollohan was ordained a priest on May 3, 1951. He was a presence at every significant family event until his death in 2001. I knew… Continue reading

  • A compelled marriage and a shooting

    The life of my grand-uncle took a tragic and near fatal turn as he was starting a promising career as a medical doctor in the 1890s. His estranged wife shot him in the head then emptied her revolver as he… Continue reading

  • Bezzie and James Renn get down to business

    Newly married at Holy Name Cathedral in 1900 and returning from their honeymoon on the east coast, James and Bezzie Renn must have felt like a team that could take on the world. James, with his older brother Patrick as… Continue reading

  • Family Tree: My mom’s paternal grandparents, Renn and Reynolds

    My mom’s paternal grandparents, James Renn and Mary Ellen Renn née Reynolds,  and their children.  Continue reading

  • Great-grandfather James Rinn

    My great-grandfather did not leave much of a trail to help me piece together a picture of the life he lived, but  searches through paper, microfiche, and online records are slowly yielding results. I started with a list of family… Continue reading

  • The Renn family in Chicago, 1872 – 1895

    James Renn, our great-grandfather, immigrated to Chicago from Ireland in the late 1860s or early 1870s. Our Family Record states that his siblings are “none known.”  At the time he left Ireland, he was married to Mary Ellen Reynolds and… Continue reading