THOSE AUDACIOUS MEEHANS
A Peculiarly American Family's Website
WELCOME
Those Audacious Meehans is the story of my paternal family.
Our matriarch, Hester, was of African descent and orphaned by age eight. Our patriarch, Charles, was of Jewish/German descent but was raised as Irish. He was abandoned as an infant. Hester and Charles met as children in the Elgin Settlement, near Chatham, Ontario, AKA the Black Man's Paris.
Our earliest family story originates from a burning ship in Charleston Harbor in 1821. By 1843, we were pioneers in Ontario's Queen's Bush. In 1859, an Anderson cousin and abolitionist joined John Brown at Harpers Ferry. When 1885 dawned, we were Nebraska Homesteaders and part of a core group whose small town became known as the "longest lasting and most successful African American settlement in rural Nebraska."
Many families and communities connect the ancestors and descendants of Charles and Hester. we are irrevocably bound. This website seeks to highlight and credit those families and communities as the Meehan story unfolds.
Whether you are just curious about your Meehan family heritage, are researching the Meehans or an extended family, or if you found this site by chance, I hope you enjoy it.
This site is updated continuously. Please visit again.
Catherine Meehan Blount
2011
"Audacity augments courage" Publilius Syrus
Meehan Family, Christmas 1913, In Front Of Their Sod House
Recklessly Brave and Audaciously Brazen
Dennis Meehan became DeWitty's second postmaster in 1916 and promptly renamed the town Audacious, saying that “the people were audacious for having settled there.” (Perkey’s Names of Nebraska Locations).
The people who settled the Nebraska Sandhills were bold, daring, and determined to claim land.
But Charles and Hester Meehan sought more. Facing discrimination in Canada, where interracial marriages were legal, they dared to move their family to a place where interracial marriage was not legal. They journeyed with their Canadian friends and neighbors to Nebraska and lived in plain sight.
DEDICATED TO
the life and legacy of my grancparents
Charles Henry Meehan
(1856 - 1935)
and
Hester Catherine Freeman Meehan
(1856 - 1923)