Caroline Elizabeth Caldwell [Neddo] McIntosh

I hope all of you had a chance to read through our late Uncle Rip’s recollections of his youth in Burlington, Wyoming, over the past week. If you haven’t, make a point of doing so – it’s worth reading. (Nobody clicked on the “comments” button at the bottom of last week’s post, so maybe no one is reading this stuff. If not, I’m content entertaining myself.)

This week I’d like to spotlight someone I’m sure most family members don’t know much about: Caroline Elizabeth Caldwell McIntosh. I find her story fascinating (to read it, click here). Indeed, was I the only one who didn’t know our family had a connection to the founder of Notre Dame University? (Read on, please, and I’ll get to that.)

To help explain who she was and how we’re all related, Caroline is the wife of John McIntosh (b. 1824), mother of William Abram McIntosh (b. 1859), mother-in-law of Nancy Lena Guhl McIntosh (b.1865), grandmother of Mary Anne McIntosh (b. 1890) and great-grandmother of Rip, Mark, Marie, Carlos, Snuffy, June, Reanous and Helen Henderson.

The information on the family Web site comes via a history I found in an old manila envelope in my mother’s back closet, written by Caroline’s granddaughter Ann Neddo. (I guess I’ll have to do some searching to see if Caroline actually wrote journals, and if so maybe they are available.) Caroline was the daughter of an Irish father (David Caldwell) and a Scottish mother (Mary Ann Vaughn), and was born after her parents journeyed to Canada. She was the fourth of nine children.

At some point, Caroline moved to a “city” – which one, this particular history does not make clear – and met a man named Charles Neddo, whose father reportedly had been a founder of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind. (I Googled Charles Neddo and it looks like some Neddos donated significant land to the university in the 1880s, and many are buried at a cemetery reserved for those who made contributions to its founding. In my brief search, I couldn’t confirm the “founding” part of the story, but it may well be a fact – there seems no reason to dispute it.) She married him in 1849, and they had two children. Not long after, though, her family (the Caldwells had joined the Mormon Church in 1843) set about preparing for the move to Salt Lake City, and Caroline decided she would go with them. Her husband, Charles, was a devout Catholic, and was understandably not interested in going to Salt Lake City. Given the modes of travel at the time, this presented something of a “Sophie’s Choice” for Caroline, who along with her soon-to-be ex-husband had to decide which child would go West and which would remain in the Midwest.

She did go to Utah with her family, and had quite a life in the territory, marrying John McIntosh and … well, that’s what the Web page is for: you can read her story here. (I found another Web page, too, that repeats the story I have posted (they must have copied and pasted it from my site, since it also includes the “back to home page” at the end of the piece) as well as other useful tidbits of genealogical information. To view it, click here.)