The Dooley Sisters and Brothers, Mary’s siblings
March 17, 1897, was the day that would forever change the lives of the Dooley family, because on that day 38-year-old John Francis Dooley died. He left behind a 36-year-old widow and six children. After his funeral his wife Martha was faced with the monumental task of caring for her children, with no source of income to support them. She turned to her church for help and most of the children were placed in Catholic-operated orphanages, where they would remain until they were adopted, placed in foster homes, or came of age.
Agnes Dooley was the oldest. There is no record of when of how she left the orphanage.
On August 26, 1905, at age 22, she married 38-year-old Thaddeus Stephen Clark , whom everyone called ‘Thad’. He was born in Ohio and graduated from Scio College. He then moved to Charleston, West Virginia, to begin his law career with Chilto, MacCorkle & Chilton. Later he formed his own law firm, Clark, Woodrow & Butts, and became a director of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Co.
On January 17, 1907, their daughter Isabel Tomasa Clark was born. She was the same age as Mary’s son, Bernard. By the time he was seven, Berne spent summers in Charleston with the Clarks. Two photographs taken in 1914 show him with the Clarks and his aunt Tomasa Kelsey.
At some point, after 1914, they moved to 513 Linden Road, in the South Hills section of Charleston.This is a 2-story, gable roof,stone or brick house with flanking 1 1/2-story wings. Their property consisted of 1.46 acres.
On December 21, 1929, 22-year-old Isabel married 24-year-old William May Woodroe. Based on the name of Thad’s law firm it is not difficult to figure out that William was the son of one of the firm’s partners, and may have also been a lawyer at the firm. Around 1940 they moved into a new home and ordered custom-made wallpaper for the entrance hall. As part of the preparation for having this wallpaper printed, Isabel and William dressed up in colonial-period clothes and posed in the yard for a photograph. The photograph was used to create their image in the design for this paper.
On October 28, 1940, Steven Clark Woodrow, their first child, was born. James Thad Woodrow followed on August 30, 1945. James Thad was only 20 when he died in an automobile accident in 1965.
Agnes’s husband, Thaddeus, died in 1943. Agnes died in 1970. Isabel died in 1982 and her husband, William, died in 1985.
Martha Tomasa Dooley was 10 in 1900 when she left the orphanage and was legally adopted. She was adopted by Judge Maynard French Stiles and his wife, Ellen Field Stiles, of Charleston, West Virginia.
Maynard Stiles was born in Tunbridge, Vermont, in 1854. He graduated from Harvard in 1877, then headed for Colorado where he became a police judge in Irwin. In 1884 he married Ellen S. Field. In 1893 they moved to Charleston, West Virginia. Tomasa was educated at schools in Charleston.
On June 16, 1916, at age 26 Tomasa married 26-year-old Van Rensselaer Kelsey. In a newspaper article about the wedding Tomasa is described as the “possessor of a remarkably sweet soprano voice of great range and volume”. The couple’s honeymoon included New York, eastern summer resorts and Canada. Then they returned to Los Angeles, CA. where Van was a popular and prominent business man.
Van and Tomasa had four sons, Maynard Kelsey who was born November 12, 1918, but died just three days later; Van R. Kelsey, Jr., born November 29, 1920; Richard Stiles Kelsey, born September 20, 1922; and John Field Kelsey, born December 7, 1925.
Van R. Kelsey died October 13, 1932 at age 42. There is no record of when Tomasa died.
James Thomas Dooley was 5 when his father died. He may have been placed in Mt. Mary’s Industrial School for boys at that time, or when he was of school age.
At age 29 he married Neva West. They had two children. James Thomas Dooley, Jr. was born June 3, 1922, followed in 1926 by a daughter Patricia. On June 12, 1929 James died at age 37. His widow, Neva, Married James L. Hill in 1929 and both James, Jr and Patricia legally changed their last names to Hill. James Jr, later moved to the Chicago area.
Anna Jane Dooley, was only three when her father died. There is no information about her time at the orphanage.
On February 10, 1915, at age 21, Jane married Roy Henri Evans. They had one daughter, Agnes Evans born September 21, 1919. This marriage ended in divorce.
On December 9, 1933, when Jane was 39, she married 41-year-old Major Charles Love Mullins, Jr. Charles was better known by the nickname “Moon ” based on the then-popular comic strip Moon Mullins, but Jane called him Love.
Love was born in Gretna Nebraska on September 7, 1892. He graduated from West Point with the class of April, 1917. He was attending the Air Corps Tactical School when he and Jane, whom he affectionately called “Sergent Dooley” married.
From 1934 to 1936 they were assigned to the 29th Infantry at Fort Benning. From 1936 to 1938 he served on the War Department Staff in Washington, DC. Then he attended Command & General Staff School.
When he graduated in 1939, President Roosevelt assigned him to Nicaragua to establish a military academy patterned after West Point, for Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza. He and Jane spent nearly three years in Nicaragua while he turned the academy into a first-class institution, acting as its’ first director. (In 1959 Nicaragua issued an airmail stamp with the likeness of President Roosevelt, President Somoza and General Mullins, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Academia Military de Nicaragua in 1939).
Love became a Brigadier General upon their return to the states in early 1942. He was next sent to the South Pacific to join the 25th Infantry Division.
In January of 1945, his troops landed on the beach in Luzon, where they fought the Japanese for 165 days.
After the surrender of Japan, now a Major General, Love Mullins and his division took part in the occupation of Japan under General McArthur. Jane joined him there for the next three years.
In 1948 he was assigned to Fort Meade, Maryland, as Deputy Commander of the Second United States Army. Love and Jane occupied a large brick house on base. There was a room in the basement full of all the gifts that the Japanese had given them in appreciation of his help in rebuilding their post-war nation.
In 1949 he was assigned to Brazil as head of the United States Military Mission.
In January of 1953, after thirty-five years of service, Love retired from active duty. He and Jane spent the next eight years in Nogales, Arizona.
In 1961 they moved to San Francisco.
On March 1, 1976, Love died. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. On February 16, 1997, at the age of 103, Jane died. She is buried beside her husband. The inscription on their tombstone includes “Wife - Jane Dooley Mullins - Sergeant Dooley”.
William Benton Dooley was only five months old when his father died. He probably stayed with his mother until he was old enough to be placed in St. Mary’s Industrial School.
After graduation he entered the Marine Corps.
In the 1920’s Benton married Esther Blumberg. They had two daughters, Martha Geraldine, born May 26, 1924, and Betty Meredith, born on March 15, 1927. Benton worked for a time as a house-to-house milk deliveryman. They later moved to a farm in Iowa.
Martha married Orville Sievers in 1944, and Betty married Max Neiman in 1946. Around that time Esther and Benton moved to Florida to be near their daughters.
For a number of summers Benton and Ester would come north to stay with Mary and Henry while Edee and Berne were in Maine. WhenLarry and Carroll bought their 1920’s house on Hilltop Road, Benton showed Larry step-by-step how to remove and replace all of the broken sash-weight cords on the double-hung windows.
79-year-old Benton died November 28, 1975 just three months after Esther passed away.
