Suzanne Lawless Goldblatt interview (great-granddaughter of James Lawless)

Suzanne Lawless Goldblatt interview (great-granddaughter of James Lawless)

2003

Suzanne Lawless Goldblatt shares family stories of her great-grandfather James Lawless Sr., and her grandfather James R. Lawless Jr., successful grocery merchants, barkeepers and landowners who operated business on South Street in Morristown in the early to mid-nineteenth century. James Lawless Sr. was born in Ireland in 1848 and was the youngest son of a well-to-do Irish family. He had ambitions when he emigrated to America ca. 1863; he originally worked for a wealthy family (possibly the Steinway family, according to Goldblatt) and resided in Brooklyn. He met his wife, Catherine Kelly, who worked as an upstairs maid at one his employer's associates in the Morristown area, and the couple was married at the Church of the Assumption in 1875. He and Catherine had nine children. His second son James Richard was born in 1878. By 1880, Lawless Sr. established himself in Morristown as a grocery merchant and owned property on Madison Street. By 1910 he owned property on Macculloch Avenue and parcels of land throughout Morristown, and a grocery establishment next to a spacious house on the corner of South Street and Elm where he and his large family resided. His son, James Richard Lawless, worked as a salesman for the business and for a while lived with his wife Alice in a rental on Pine Street according to the 1910 Federal Census. James Lawless Jr. had two children, James C. born in 1912, and Cornelius, born in 1914. His wife passed away due to childbirth complications in 1914 and James Jr. did not recover well from the death of his wife, so his sister Rose returned from a teaching job in Orange to help raise the two sons at the family house on South Street. James Lawless Sr. died in 1925. James Lawless Jr. remarried some time between 1920-1930 to Irish born Mary Farrell. and died in 1934. James Richard Lawless's second son, Cornelius, was Mary Suzanne Lawless Goldblatt's father. Mrs. Goldblatt tells her great-grandfather's story--that of a strict Irish family man who raised a successful family, helped people in the close-knit community, and was a well-liked and fair landlord in Little Dublin.

NJ/DE Digital Collective

http://cdm16100.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16100coll12/id/33

Irish-American; Oral histories; Neighborhoods; Stores