Awww...Peanuts

[Susan Higginbotham]

(07-08-2014 12:21 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Which means they are probably living in a boardinghouse... Does anyone know if John Ford ever mentioned anything about Peanuts? He was so sympathetic to Ned that I would think he'd be somewhat the same of young Peanuts - even though Peanuts was never charged.

I checked the 1860 census. The physician Joseph Borrows was living with his wife (Catherine), his five-year-daughter (Sarah C.), a 20-year-old from Ireland named Margaret McDonnel (a servant, I'm guessing), and a fifteen-year-old girl named Laura J. Towers. No boys in the house. The 1880 census also has Joseph, Catherine, and Sarah, along with a servant and some relations.

In the late 1880's, a wealthy patient, Sarah Borrows, was admitted to St. Elizabeths. Her widowed mother, Catherine, had a house constructed on the premises especially for her daughter and eventually moved in herself. (One of Sarah Borrows' fellow patients was Mary Surratt's former boarder, Nora Fitzpatrick Whelan.) I strongly suspect this is the same Borrows family mentioned in the 1860 and 1880 censuses.

Based on all this, I doubt that Peanuts was a member of the family, as I think that Joseph and Catherine's wealth and social position were such that if they had had a son, he would have been attending school instead of selling peanuts.

Addition: Dr. Borrows' obit in the May 31, 1889 Evening Star mentions that he was survived by a wife and daughter.