1939-12-06 — Page 15

THE CHINA MAIL, DECEMBER 6, 1939

TO-DAY'S STRANGE STORY OF REAL PEOPLE

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THE VANISHING

DESMOND FAMILY

BY VINCENT TOWNE

One of the most baffling disappear-

ance mysteries of the past century in-

volved nine members

of the same

family-a mother, her five

her nephew, niece and mother.

!

children,

the latter's

This enigma of the vanished Des- mond family dates back to 1835, in which year two brothers, Daniel Joseph and James T. Desmond were sharing an office at 99 Spruce Street, Philadelphia. James became but a struggling merchant and died

poor.

or

Miss Mary@of

Now's

Edward Wrote Many Letters

Hoping To Locate. His Sister,

GANG FIGHT IN KOWLOON

A.

GANG FIGHT BETWEEN

CINEMA TICKET

RACKETEERS

OCCURRED OUTSIDE THE

YAT THEATRE

TAI

AT YAUMATI AT

9 P.M. YESTERDAY.

Some 20 persons were involved. Some used files with the result that one was stabbed in the right arm and left side of the body.

He was removed to the Kowloon Hospital. No arrests have been made.

NEW CHUNG KING RADIOTELEPHONE

Chungking, To-day. Chungking and Moscow will soon be connected by radio-telephone. the missing Desmonds in lists of vic-and, according to officials of the Minis- Tests have recently been carried out, tims of railway and steamship acci- try of Communications, dents that have occurred since 1869, very satisfactory. but to no avail.

respondent.

Daniel became a prominent lawyer | were unsatifactory. None of the miss- and when he died left an estate valued ing nine died in New York at $20,000 which to this day remains

Brooklyn, if the

Ales unsettled, because his daughter, Mary, of the Board of Health are and the widow and five children of his reliable, and none of them was a any brother completely and mysteriously time a patient in the public hospitals vanished.

or an inmate of any of the city pri-

New York, sons or other institutions, of Greater

Attempts have been made to trace past century,

In 1811, Daniel had become consul general for His Holiness, Pope Piux IX. The Philadelphia directory for 1844 described him as "consul general for the Pope, vice consul for Sardinia, consul for

Austria, Portugal and

Tuscany." It was during an epidemic of cholera which swept Philadelphia in 1849 and 1850 that he fell a victim to the Black Angel.

Years previously, he had married a Miss Pink Blyden, daughter of Gover- nor General Blyden of the West Indies. Of eight children born to the couple five died in infancy. Daniel was sur- vived by his wife and the remaining three children Mary, Edward and Henry. They and their mother continued to reside in Philadelphia until 1864, when they moved to New York, but, with the exception of Edward, definite trace of all of them is lost from that date,

Records of the War Department show that Edward enlisted in the Army on November 18, 1865, and that when his term of enlistment ended in 1888 he re-entered the ranks. He died at one of the Western posts. During the entire time that he was in the service he had been stationed in the Far West, and for this reason he was not present when either his mother or his brother Henry died. But it is known that he wrote many letters purposed to locate his sister, Mary, and was not success- ful,

While misfortune was thus visiting the family of Daniel Desmond, that of his brother, Joseph, was having trou- bles, too. James died not long after Daniel, and was survived by his widow and Ave children-Clement, Joseph, James, Charles and Mary L. They were not left in comfortable cir- cumstances and so, like the family of Daniel, they removed to New York, that they might be near their rela- tiver. It is not quite certain just when this migration took place, but they were in New York at the time Mrs. Pink Blyden Desmond died, for the latter daughter, Mary, made her home with them after the death of her mother.

а

But not only Mary but her aunt and five cousins thereafter vanished without leaving the slightest trace.

The house in which this branch of the Desmond family lived became place of mystery, and neighbours found unending interest in peering through the windows, as though ex- pecting to find some solution of the mystery inside.

It hardly seemed possible that seven persons could disappear so completely. Mary was said to have taught school in New York for a number of years previous to her mother's death, but a careful search of the records of the public and parochial schools failed to show that she was a teacher at any time.' Her name did. not ever appear in any of the New York City directories. For that matter, helther did those of her mother, brother, aunt or five cousins. Five hundred Desmond families liv- ing in the United States and Canada - were questioned by letter. The results

The fate of Mrs. James T. Desmond, of her daughter, Mary L., her sons, Joseph, Charles, James-and Clement, and her niece, Mary remains as one of the most perplexing riddles of the

these wero Our Own Cor-

Sanitary Inspector J. M. Boyd, lost stolen from the one of his uniforms yesterday. It was clothes-line in the rear of his house at No. 7, Cameron Road, Kowloon.

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