♀Lilian Phipps

Lilian Phipps (born about 1862) was a seamstress in Chicago who took out a marriage licence at nineteen and had three sons. She was the grand-aunt of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), the sister of his grandmother Emily Josephine Phipps (1868–1919). She was the eldest of the three daughters of William Bennett Phipps (1827–1898) and Emily Eliza Morgan (1838–1895).

Early life

The 1880 census gives her birthplace as North Carolina, where her parents had been living in 1860 and where her father enlisted in the Confederate army in June 1862. The 1870 census, which found the family in Chicago’s Eighth Ward, lists her as Lillian, aged eight and at school. In 1880, at eighteen, she was a seamstress in her parents’ household.

Marriage and sons

On 22 January 1881 she took out a licence to marry Robert Pachaly, 23, of Chicago. The Chicago Tribune printed her name as Lillian Phipps, aged nineteen, and a Cook County marriage index dates the wedding to the same day.

Cook County birth registers record a son born to Robert Pachaly and Lillian Phipps in Chicago on 22 November 1881, another on 28 November 1882, and a third in November 1890. The eldest, Robert Willard Pachaly (1881–1934), is named as their son on his own death record. The second, Walter Bennett Pachaly (1882–1945), is recorded with the same birth date and place as the 1882 entry, which makes him her second son by inference. The third, Cyrus Morgan Pachaly, died in Chicago on 28 June 1891, aged seven months, which fits the 1890 entry. Bennett was Lilian’s father’s middle name, and Morgan is the maiden name a 1919 death record gives for her mother, not independently confirmed. Her own death is not known.

Notes

Where she was born

The 1880 census gives North Carolina and the 1870 census gave New York. This page follows the 1880 entry, since her parents were at Greenville, Pitt County, North Carolina, in 1860 and her father enlisted in Pitt County in 1862.

Her sons

Only Robert Willard’s death record names his parents; the identification of Walter and Cyrus rests on the match of birth date and age with the register entries and on the middle names. His birth date is given three ways: 22 November 1881 by the birth register and a 1921 passport application, December 1881 by the 1900 census, and 22 February 1882 by his death record. The birth date here is 1881. The 1890 birth is indexed under 21 November in one register series and 24 November in another. Her name appears as Lillian Phips on one index copy of the first register and as “Nillien Phepps” on the third.