The third child of William George Duffy and Rebecca Smith Duffy was Elizabeth Mary Duffy, who was born in Millerstown Borough, Butler County, Pennsylvania on January 30, 1877. The post office at Millerstown would become known as the Chicora, Pennsylvania post office in 1891, although it seems Millerstown persisted as the borough’s name for some time after that. The name “Chicora” may have come from a famous legend about a wealthy Native American kingdom sought after by the Spanish after a party of Spanish explorers captured and enslaved a man they named Francisco de Chicora.
Millerstown was part of the Butler County oil boom. In the 1870 census, there were about 200 residents. The borough had a hotel, a tailor shop, a few stores, a blacksmith, stables, and a wagonmaker’s shop. Oil was discovered on two local farms in 1873. As a result, the population boomed.
It was doubtless this discovery of oil that brought William George Duffy and his wife to Millerstown. The town experienced a major fire in April, 1874. It rebuilt quickly, and by September 1874 the town’s population was over 2,500 and “150 derricks could be seen from the reservoir.”
There were five major fires in Millerstown between 1874 and 1892, one of the biggest in 1877. Elizabeth was not yet a year old when a fire “threatened the whole town.” It started in a tobacco store and took out all of one side of Main Street, destroying 28 buildings.
This was the world she and several of her siblings were born into.
Elizabeth was six years old when her mother died in 1883. Two years later, in 1885, her father remarried. Catherine Mahoney had no children of her own, but raised six children with W.G. Duffy.
On June 21, 1895, when she was 18 years old, Elizabeth married Francis Charles Moriarty, who was 21 years old. It is not clear how they met or where they met, or what Francis’s occupation was at the time. I do know that after they married, the couple lived in the areas where the Moriartys lived, because their two eldest children were born in Pennsylvania, in Foxburg, Clarion County Pennsylvania.It is possible that Francis may have sought work in the oil fields, since he worked in the oil fields after they married, or that William Duffy’s work brought him north of Chicora for a time. Foxburg and Chicora are less than 20 miles apart on today’s roads.
By 1899, the couple was living closer to the Duffys, who by then were in Tyler County, West Virginia. Francis and Elizabeth were in Alvy, Tyler County, West Virginia. This county is just over the Ohio border and is also near the Pennsylvania border. Today, Alvy is part of a nature preserve, although the state has sanctioned new drilling in Tyler County, including on some nature preserves, so it may be home to oil exploration again.
In the 1900 census, Francis was working as a day laborer. Almost all of his neighbors were working on oil wells, so it is likely that he worked on one, too, or in a related industry. This is not surprising, since the oil industry had taken hold in Tyler County before the Civil War, and that was the overwhelmingly dominant industry there at the time. The exact location of where they were living when the 1900 census was counted is: Enumeration District 89: McElroy Magisterial Dist. (part)
Divide the district into two enumeration Magisterial Districts by the following line: Beginning at the mouth of Indian Creek, thence with the dividing ridge between McElroy Creek and Indian Creek to the Doddridge county line and that part of said Magisterial Dist. lying on the waters of Indian Creek shall constitute Enumeration District 89.
The couple had nine children over a span of nearly 20 years:
Gertrude Emma Moriarty 1896–1992
Kathryn Rebecca (Kass) Moriarty 1897–1975
Emma Dolores (Sister Carmelita) Moriarty 1899–1993
Edwin Daniel (Ted) Moriarty 1901–1971
Margaret Virginia Moriarty 1905–1983
Julia Marion Moriarty 1907–1998
Francis (Bud) William Moriarty 1911–1984
Wade George Moriarty 1913–1981
Mary Elizabeth Moriarty 1915–1994
By 1910, the family had moved to the Clay District of Harrison County, West Virginia. Francis was working as a laborer in the oil field. Eventually they moved to Adamsville, near Clarksburg, and then to Clarksburg itself. By 1917 they were living at 415 College in Clarksburg, and Francis was working as a planer hand at the Hazel-Atlas Glass Factory.
By 1920, Francis had followed their eldest daughter Gertrude to Augusta, Kansas, where she had stopped off (intending to move to California and live with Doll Duffy; instead she remained in Augusta) to visit Francis’s sister — for whom she was named — Gertrude Moriarty Warnock. Gertrude Warnock’s husband, James Warnock, was working in the oil industry in Augusta — oil had been discovered there in 1914. By the middle of 1916, there were 150 gas wells and 50 oil wells in production in the Augusta field. Francis also obtained work there, and the rest of the family soon boarded a train and joined him. The Moriartys owned a home at 609 Osage there; by 1925 their daughter Gertrude and her husband Herman Fischer were living there with their baby daughter Marjorie; the Moriartys lived in another home in Augusta.
Francis soon got promoted to a job as the superintendent of an oil lease in nearby El Dorado, Kansas. El Dorado’s oil field had produced 9% of the world’s oil during World War I; in 1918 it was the largest producing field in the U.S.; by 1929 over 200 million barrels of oil had been marketed from Butler County wells. In 1934, there were 1,770 wells producing oil in the El Dorado field.
Although Gertrude had married and Emma Dolores (soon to become Sister Carmelita, CSJ) had entered a convent, Elizabeth and their seven other children moved with him to the house on the lease.
Elizabeth and Francis lived on the lease until his death on April 9, 1935.
Elizabeth loved traveling, and in addition to sightseeing also visited each of her adult children. Her “headquarters” were with Francis (Bud) and Ruth Brandon Moriarty, and their daughter Kathryn has many childhood memories of going to the train station to drop off or pick up her grandmother. Ruth Moriarty had lost her own mother at a young age, and was very fond of her mother-in-law, who was good company while Bud was away from home on business trips.
Elizabeth Duffy Moriarty died on August 29, 1951, in Quebec, Canada, while visiting the Catholic Shrine of Ste. Anne De Beaupré with her daughter Sister Carmelita (Emma Dolores).
She is buried next to Francis in Calvary Cemetery in Wichita, Kansas.
Patrick Duffy (b 1812) + Elizabeth Dillon (b 1818)
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William George Duffy (1846) + Rebecca Smith (1856)
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Elizabeth Mary Duffy (1877)
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Information presented here is based on my interpretation of the sources I’ve found. As new sources are found or inaccuracies discovered, the site will be updated.
Always happy to hear from cousins.
Duffy Family History 