John Anthony Rooney

Dates

Event	Date	Source
Born, West Roxbury, MA	8 December 1865	Massachusetts Birth Records
Married	19 December 1893 to Katharine H. Cusack, Roxbury	Massachusetts Marriage Records
Died	6 April 1941	U.S. SS Claims Index, Boston Globe Death Notice

John Anthony Rooney was born on December 8, 1865 in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. He was the fourth oldest child of Patrick Rooney and Catherine Connell, both of whom were born in Ireland. In the 1870 census he is recorded as being 4 years old and living in Hyde Park with his parents and four siblings.

We don't know where he went to elementary or high school. After high school he was apprenticed to Norcross Brothers, "at that time the largest firm of building contractors in the United States" (Globe Appointment Article) He was made a foreman for Norcross and worked on the Ames building in Boston as well as other large projects around the country, including Atlanta, Georgia and Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In addition to working, he participated in the Grattin Literary Institute of Hyde Park where his brother Patrick was also a member. We know from the paper by Catherine Burns that he read "Edward Bellamy, Leo Tolstoy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and George Eliot." He was a member of the Tolstoi Club of Boston

He decided to leave Norcross and enroll at MIT. When he told his mother, Catherine Connell Rooney, that he would be going back to school, she threatened to never speak to him again, because, we suspect, his financial support was needed to maintain the "farm". He did go back to school, and she didn't speak to him. Ganna said that the only time she saw her father cry was when his mother died.

He was a member of the MIT class of 1891 but left in 1889 to start a contractor business with his older brother Patrick. He built "residences, churches, mills, mercantile and public buildings both for the city [of Boston] and the U.S. Government."

The courtship of he and his future wife, Katharine Cusack, is documented in a series of 190 letters the two sent each other between 1887 and 1893 now housed at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. Those letters are the basis of Catherine M. Burns's article The Courtship of John Rooney and Katharine Cusack, 1887-93: Obligations and Marriage Ideals in Irish-American New England.

The two married in on January 19, 1893. The event was recorded in the "Massachusetts, U.S., Boston Archdiocese Roman Catholic Sacramental Records, 1789-1900" with Latinized names (i.e. Joannes A. Rooney, Catharina H. Cusack, Hanora Cusack). In 1898 he purchased a piece of property on Temple Street, West Roxbury, and then built a house on it. Doing so satisfied a demand that Katharine's mother, Hannah Cusack, had made as a condition of her daughter's marriage. Hannah Cusack, a widow, had demanded $6,000, but was satified with an arrangement where both she and her youngest son, Andrew, a bookkeeper, lived with the young couple. The family at Temple Street is recorded in the 1900 Federal Census which lists three children.

• Katharine (misspelled "Catherine", born 1894
• Margaret, born 1897
• John, born 1899

In 1906 John A. Rooney was appointed building commissioner for the City of Boston on July 17 at a salary of $5,000 a year by John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald. He seems to have been reappointed, or officially appointed, to a three year term that began on May 1, 1907