Mart Casey

Martin Casey. 5/9/1901 - 5/30/1973. He was a grandfather to us and although he was not a blood relative he was family. He married our grandmother Mom-Mom  in the early 1950's although I'm not sure of the exact date yet. There are pictures from the wedding in the family and Betsy was the flower girl. She was about 5 and remembers the wedding so it was probably 1954. I was then 3. They then lived together at the apartment on Wissahickon Avenue which I do remember. He worked at Leeds & Northrup which was originally located on East Logan street in the neighborhood but later moved out to the Fort Washington area. I remember driving by it all the time going between Germantown and Harleysville.

He didn't want to be called Grandpa or Poppa or any kind of grandfatherly terms of endearment. He just wanted us to call him Mart. So they were always referred to as Mom-Mom and Mart. However, he was a grandfather to us and he and Mom-Mom were always there when we were growing up.

A few years later they moved into the Morris home on East Evergreen Avenue in Chestnut Hill. That was the family home where her first husband's father grew up in. Our great-grandfather Thomas Morris's sister Catherine Morris lived there until she passed away in 1955. Mom-Mom eventually inherited the house and she and Mart moved in. One thing I remember very well in that house at that time was the round ottoman in the living room that opened up and was filled with toys. We had special toys that were only available to us at Mom-Mom's house. We spent a lot of time in that house over the years.

I've been doing some research on Mart on the Ancestry site where I got his birth date. I also discovered that he grew up on Seymour Street several houses down the street from the Keegan house where Mom-Mom lived. It turns out he was best friends with my great-uncle Thomas Keegan who was born in 1902. Mom-Mom and Mart knew each other as kids and through their teenage years. 

Mart Casey married Helen McGettigan in early 1929 according to some records I found. She tragically died on November 3, 1929 in childbirth. She dies giving birth to twin girls who also tragically died that day. I can't imagine how devastated Mart and the family must have been. 

Mom-Mom had married Thomas Morris in 1927, had a child in 1928, and then her husband, my grandfather, died in 1931. Mom-Mom and Mart as young people shared the tragedy of losing their spouses at an early age.

Mart moved into the home of his sister Margaret and her family, the Metzgers, after the death of his wife. John and Margaret Metzger lived on Clapier Street with their family and Mart joined their household. As far as I can tell he stayed with the Metzger family at least into the 1940's.

Mom-Mom and Mart were close friends their entire lives and Mart wanted to marry Elizabeth Keegan Morris for many years after the death of their spouses. She kept putting him off and waiting for her daughter to graduate from high school, then get married, then after having a child, and another child. Apparently in the early 1950's Mart said now or never. They got married.

I have great memories of Mart as we were growing up. He used to tell us stories of Indians buried in the backyard in Chestnut Hill. He would often take me and Tom to the Wissahickon Park and also to get spring water from a fountain near Cresheim Valley Drive. We loved going there and thought it was an adventure. I previously wrote about Mart's escapade at the Knife and Fork Inn. 

In the early 1960's Mart drove a Chrysler Plymouth with one of those push button transmissions. I thought it was way cool to watch him push that button to go in reverse or drive or park. Those transmissions didn't last very long on American cars.

We went on vacation with Mom-Mom and Mart every year. Most of the time it was sharing a house down the shore and sometimes we would go up to the Poconos together. 

Mart got lung cancer from smoking. He always smoked... a lot. I was overseas in the Navy when he got really sick. I was home a few times during that period and would go and see him. He was not well and didn't look good. He finally had surgery that removed one of his damaged lungs. He never recovered from that procedure. The last time I saw him was after the operation and he laid in bed and opened his shirt to show me the incision. He could barely breathe but he wanted to impress on me the dangers of smoking. I had quit myself a year earlier but would go back and forth over the next few years. Quitting smoking was the hardest thing I ever did but Mart tried his best to make it easier for me by using him as an example. He died a few months later in May of 1973. He was 72 years old.

I was able to attend his funeral. It was a very sad affair. Mart was well known in the Germantown neighborhood where we both grew up. I had many friends who were related to Mart somehow including the Barry's, the Reiley's, the Staunton's and of course the McGettigans. The Metzger's were a big family in the neighborhood too. Helen McGettigan, Mart's first wife, came from a large family and perhaps these other families I knew of were from Helen's siblings and they all shared common great-grandparents. People in those neighborhoods and that time tended to marry within the community.

I enjoy family researching and I like going off on tangents of other people related by marriages. I could spend a lot of time doing this and I intend to keep exploring the neighborhood too.