FAN club research & an interesting story uncovered
Edmond Hogan's "romantic" and "celebrated" succession drama
Hello! Today I want to write about the life and times of someone who has no relation to me, beyond that they appear as a witness on a few of the same documents that my most annoying brick wall witnessed.
Elizabeth Shown Mills came up with the concept of “FAN club research”. FAN in this case stands for friends, associates, neighbors. The idea is that, by researching everyone who had anything to do with a person, you can often find more information about the target person that you would never have otherwise found. It’s very effective, and in my experience, super interesting! This is a story I unearthed by doing that sort of sideways, broad research on everyone in my brick wall’s orbit. It didn’t help me find anything directly related to my brick wall in this case, but it hardly seems to matter when I found so much other interesting stuff. :-)
So, this is the record that piqued my interest regarding Edmond Hogan:
No. 325 Power of Attorney dated December 16, 1825. James BOWIE of the Parish of Rapides, gave power of attorney to Lemuel TANNER. Witnessed by Edmond HOGAN and Aaron KING.
It doesn’t look like much, but this is one of the very few conveyance records (or any other kind of record) that mention Aaron King, who is my fifth great grandfather twice over and the bane of my existence. (Kidding, sort of.)
I’m familiar with every name on this record, but I didn’t know much about Edmond Hogan. James Bowie is the Texas Alamo hero. Lemuel Tanner was a wealthy planter in Terrebonne Parish who had a lot of land and business dealings there at this time. He married my sixth great grand aunt, Celeste Belanger. All I knew about Edmond Hogan before a couple of days ago was that he appeared on several records with all the usual suspects I often see around Aaron King and that he seemed to have come from Ireland. I wanted to learn more, and boy, did I!
The bulk of what I gleaned about Edmond Hogan came from his will and succession case, both filed in Orleans Parish. The information in those two primary sources eventually led me to other sources that confirmed and fleshed out some of what I found in the court documents. All sources used are cited on his Wikitree profile, so head over there if you want to see receipts. :-)
Edmond was born in County Cork, Ireland, around 1784. He married Margaret Maroney at some point before leaving Ireland and had one son with her, Jeremiah Hogan. He stayed in Ireland, and, I presume, so did Margaret. At the time of Hogan’s will being made, he had not heard from his son in many years and didn’t know if he was alive or dead.
In May of 1825, Edmond published advertisements in New Orleans papers (in French) for his services:
He is offering assistance with erecting buildings, creating plans for buildings, etc. Edmond appears to have been a professional architect or civil engineer; he is referred to as both in various sources.
Around this time Edmond moved to Terrebonne Parish; he appears on records there as early as 1825. In Terrebonne, he married a second time to Hannah Crawford, a widow who owned property there. I didn’t find a ton of information about Edmond’s time in Terrebonne, but I do know that he witnessed several conveyances such as the one that started me down this rabbit hole, and at times he bought and exchanged land with James Bowie himself. He was a party to an agreement of some kind with the Barataria & Lafourche Canal Company (1830). He seems to have worked for a time as a land surveyor. In 1830 Edmond’s wife won some kind of judgment against him, but it’s not clear what the context of that was. It was said that Edmond and his wife moved to Texas sometime in the early 1830s, in debt, and that her property was sold off to satisfy said debt. Nobody heard from them again after that in Terrebonne.
The next part of Edmond’s life remains pretty murky to me, but he seems to have spent time in Texas and Mexico as well as in New Orleans. Edmond joined the Mexican navy at the time when they were at war with the Texans over the fate of Texas (which was for a time its own country, the Republic of Texas, before becoming a part of the US). It’s not clear why he would have joined the Mexicans, but the evidence that he did is abundant.
In 1835, Edmond was captured along with the rest of the crew of the Correo by the Texans.
Less than a year later, in 1836, Edmond was again captured by the Texans, this time on the brig Pocket. Several names from the previous capture are mentioned again:
This second time, Edmond seems to have not had an easy time with his captors. He was surely considered an enemy combatant, and he was likely whipped and had his life threatened. When he was eventually brought back to New Orleans and released, he was in bad shape. The rest of his story is mostly drawn from the testimony of his friend Peter Gallagher, who also ended up being Edmond’s estate administrator. Peter had a way with words, and his testimony reads like an old adventure novel.
Edmond met Peter around 1835 through his work as an architect. Peter was a bricklayer. Peter describes Edmond as visibly destitute, barely having clothes to wear, and in need of a place to sleep. Peter suggested that Edmond come to the boarding house he lived at, a place run by one Mrs. Moore in the Marigny. This Edmond did. He didn’t have any money to pay for his board, but the Mexican consulate took care of his necessary bills when needed. Edmond was not well; his condition was fragile, and he continued to deteriorate over the course of several months until he died. During this time, Peter helped him manage his affairs. As Peter tells it, eventually Edmond wanted to enter in his last will and testament, and Peter helped him get that done.
Edmond left all his property to his son Jeremiah, if he was alive, and if not, everything was to go to Peter. Peter claimed that Edmond said he had no living relatives in the world, and that he first tried to make Mrs. Moore his sole legatee, but she refused.
This whole scenario is rather sketchy to me; Edmond had only known Peter for less than a year, and for much of that time he was surely not in the city. Edmond had told Peter he had extensive property holdings in Terrebonne Parish, Plaquemines Parish, Texas, and Mexico. Despite Edmond’s ragged appearance and lack of funds, Peter took him at his word on this. Peter had hopes of inheriting all of this land if he agreed to administer Edmond’s estate, so he did. Perhaps Peter had a hand in having the will written to make him sole legatee (if Edmond’s son was not alive or never found). Edmond may not have been well enough to understand what was happening. In any case, he passed away in October 1836.
Thus began Peter’s saga of trying to locate Edmond’s property. As the estate administrator, he needed to conduct an inventory of all of Edmond’s property so it could be appraised and properly disposed of. A lawyer Peter consulted with told him to go find the property and titles and then come back to him. So Peter set out on his journey.
Peter’s first stop was Matamoras, Mexico. He took a ship to Mexico then hired a horse to get the rest of the way to his destination. Once there, he asked around, including with contacts he knew from back in Ireland who were now in Mexico, and people told him that they did know of Edmond Hogan, who had been there as a refugee from Texas for some time, but they said he had never owned any property there. Disappointed but still resolved to find Edmond’s property, Peter headed back to New Orleans after about four months.
He then decided to try Terrebonne Parish. Peter ended up talking to Judge Barrow there, who told him what he knew about Edmond Hogan, which wasn’t much, just that he had worked as a surveyor, married, and went to Texas. He also said that Edmond did not and had never owned any land in Terrebonne. This is interesting, because there are actually records in the Terrebonne books of Edmond buying land from James Bowie and also exchanging land with him, although I have no idea if Edmond owned anything by the time he died. I’m not sure how Peter never found any of this. He claims to have examined the books, but it seems he didn’t examine them very closely. He wasn’t going about this process in the usual way that a person would, with lawyers and proper legal channels. He went back to New Orleans.
It was a very similar story in Plaquemines Parish, except nobody there even remembered Edmond Hogan.
At this point, Peter has spent a huge amount of time and his own money on chasing down Edmond’s property. He’s found nothing, so he starts to assume that Edmond was, basically, full of shit, and just stays in New Orleans working at his bricklaying. In 1839, Peter is informed that Edmond is owed money from his ordeal on the Pocket. The Texas government awarded damages to those captured to keep the peace with the US government, who they really wanted to remain on good terms with. Because Peter is the administrator of Edmond’s estate and, at this point, assumed to be the sole heir, Peter can collect this money on Edmond’s behalf. So he decides to go to Texas to inquire about this money and also to check to see if maybe Edmond did have land in Texas, killing two birds with one stone.
Unsurprisingly, he found no land in Texas. Additionally, he couldn’t collect the money in Texas and needed to go to Washington, D.C. to do that. This he did, and he collected about $700, which wasn’t even enough to cover the expenses he’d incurred doing all this traveling. Dejected, he decided to move on with his life, although he couldn’t imagine why Edmond would do this to him. He never filed the inventory of Edmond’s estate or officially fulfilled his legal obligations as administrator, figuring that he couldn’t administer an estate with no estate apparently existing.
A bunch of time passes. It’s not until the late 1860s that Edmond’s son, Jeremiah, learns of his father’s passing. He was also told that his father had left a vast estate behind, and that Peter Gallagher had usurped this. It seems that Jeremiah himself didn’t really believe that there was a vast estate, as his dad had never owned anything, but nevertheless, he ends up suing Peter, with Irish friends in New Orleans acting as his attorneys and agents. The court case drags on all the way to at least 1873. Poor Peter must have seriously regretted ever having any part in this matter!
Jeremiah won the suit, but there was still no property to turn over to him, so it was all a wild goose chase waste of time in the end. But we got some really great testimony out of it from Peter. ;-)
Peter moved to San Antonio at some point. I haven’t found much about him that I can be sure is the right person, but it appears from some later newspaper articles that he may have been a part of the Santa Fe expedition.
Most interesting to me, personally, in all this, is the question of whether Edmond was just bullshitting Peter and everyone else talking about his land, or if he really thought he owned land. James Bowie is known to have engaged in lots of land speculation scams at this time, and James Bowie is who Edmond bought land from in Terrebonne at one point. He wouldn’t have been the first or the last to get burned by Jim Bowie.
I really wonder if he didn’t “buy” more land from Bowie in Texas and Mexico that he could never have gotten a clear title to. That was the crux of Bowie’s scams in Louisiana; he sold land he didn’t own by claiming to, for example, have been given the title by the Spanish Crown before the United States bought Louisiana. A lot of these Spanish grants were falsified, but it was very hard to prove, and the recorders in individual parishes had no real way of knowing if a Spanish claim was legitimate. Many times, land was sold to multiple people at the same time.
I’m not sure how Aaron King might fit into all of this, but he certainly kept interesting company.