John Fanning and Eliza McCarthy
John Fanning
John Fanning was born in Wexford in the South of Ireland, the son of James Fanning and Catherine Fortune. It's not certain where he grew up, but on 19th June 1870, he was living in Portland Row on the northside of Dublin. He married Margaret McPadden at St Agatha’s church. Margaret lived close to John Fanning and was the daughter of the late Bartholomew McPadden and his wife Rose.
However, the marriage was short-lived as less than six months later another announcement appeared the newspaper. At the age of 25 or 26, John Fanning became a widower.
He must have decided to go to seek work and a change of scene by going to Canada in the period shortly after his wife’s death. By 1874 he was in Ottawa and listed in the city directory as a Cabinet Maker. In Ottawa, he met Eliza McCarthy and the two of them married on the 7th May 1874.
Eliza McCarthy
Eliza McCarthy was 25 when she married John Fanning in Ottawa in 1874, meaning she was born around 1849. She was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the daughter of Owen McCarthy and Johanna Harman or Hannan. The family lived in Ottawa for two to three years. They had their first daughter, Catherine (1875) and then a second daughter, Mary Anne, two years later in 1877
Return to Ireland
The family then crossed back across the Atlantic and take up residence in Dublin. John and Eliza Fanning moved back to the same street, Portland Row, that John Fanning gave as his address when he married Margaret McPadden in 1870. They either lived with John Fanning's mother or very close by. While they were in Dublin, John and Eliza had another child Maud Helen Fanning who was born in 1879 and baptised at St Agatha’s Church in North Dublin. Maud was followed by a brother, James Sanford Fanning, born in 1880
Back to Canada
Having been in Dublin for around 5 years, the family decided to move back to Canada and in 1882, the family took passage from Derry to Quebec.
This time the family decided settle in Toronto. A second son, John Francis Fanning was added to the family in 1884 with his grandmother Joannah McCarthy listed as his godmother. The Fanning family lived in the area of west Toronto for the next few years. In the 1891 census, the family was living in a house by themselves.
Tragedy hit the family just a year later in 1892 with the death of Eliza Fanning from Phthisis, known today as TB. The records stop there for a while. There is no further mention of John Fanning in the city directories and he seems to have vanished from future records.
Maud Fanning would have been about 14 when her mother died and there would have been difficult times for the family with the youngest, an 8-year-old child. During the next few years, she met Daniel Dineen and married him in 1899.