Marie Tavormino, Orphan Train Rider

Marie Tavormino was sent to Illinois well before 1900 when she married a distant relative of her guardians, Mr. and Mrs. Michael Devine in Bloomington, Illinois. She had been raised as if the child of the Devines, who were childless Irish immigrants. Marie married John Frank Frawley on January 14, 1900. He was a member of a prominent Irish family in McLean County. They lived on a family farm in Dawson Township, Illinois and had four children: William, Melvin, Margaretta & John.

New information from Clark Kidder's 6 volume work about NYJA Orphan train riders reveals that Maria Tavormino came to McLean County on June 3, 1889. She was placed with Mr. and Mrs. Devine immediately and lived with them until her marriage in 1900. Traveling with Maria were two siblings, one named Coloy and the other Nicholas. Coloy lived mostly with the James Murphy family in Heyworth, IL, but for a short time in 1892 lived in Chicago with the patriarch of the Murphy family. He returned to Heyworth, but no record of him is found in the census records. Nicholas Curry lived with Kile M. Curry, and moved to Ogden, Iowa with that family in 1892.

Placing Catholic children was troublesome for the Protestant orphan train operators. Emotions ran high between the two religious groups, who had very little use for one another. The Catholics were convinced that the Protestants wanted to eliminate Catholics from the country and that placing Catholics children in Protestant homes was one way of accomplishing this goal. Conflicts over the placement of Catholic children (Irish, mainly) led to the establishment of Catholic orphan train organizations that were operated by the Catholic church. Those organizations accounted for the large number of orphan train children sent to Louisiana and Texas, where there were large numbers of Catholics.

Most Catholics lived on the East coast of the country. McLean County, however, had a good number of Catholics of both Irish and German heritage.

In the 1940 census Marie and her husband lived with all three of their sons at 1011 S. Center Street in Bloomington. William was a telephone installer and widowed. Donald was a stenographer for a hardware dealer. Their third son, Melvin, was 36 years old but unemployed. The 1940 census is interesting for the data regarding education levels of respondents. Marie reported that she had completed her education only as far as the 3rd grade. Her sons had completed their educations to the 8th grade.

Marie died August 25, 1974. Her obituary indicated that she had two brothers and one sister who predeceased her. Those could have been her adopted brothers James and Francis and Annie O'Brien, another child from the New York Juvenile Asylum, or it could have been a reference to her birth brothers. Her son William had died in April of that year, and another son was living in the same home for the aged in El Paso, Illinois at the time of her death. Her husband had died thirty years earlier.

Marie donated a drawing of hog butchering day to the Pantagraph and it was published in the paper in 1997:

Marguerite Frawley married in 1925 to James Umstaddt, in Indiana, and had one son, named Eugene. Marguerite and her husband made their home in Bloomington, where Marguerite operated her own beauty salon, and operated several taverns. It is through Marguerite that the family line of Marie Tavormino continued, because Eugene Umstaddt also had children and grandchildren.