Michael T Tracy

Jane (Jennie) (O'Hara) Cronin-Kabat (1850-1882) Michael T Tracy

Jane (Jennie) O'Hara was born in New York City, New York which was considered the largest Irish city in the world during the year of 1850. Harper's Weekly described New York City as "a huge semi-barbarous metropolis... not well-governed nor ill-governed, but simply not governed at all, with filthy and unlighted streets, no practical or efficient security for either life or property, a police not worthy of the name, and expenses steadily and enormously increasing." Born to recently arrived immigrant parents, Bernard and Ann O'Hara, the family decided to relocate in the same year of Jane's birth to Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York. Less than a decade later the O'Hara's moved further west to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There, Jane would meet and later marry a young newspaper clerk, John Cronin. Jane and John Cronin moved north to the small farming town of Maple Grove, Manitowoc County, Wisconsin where they had two children. In 1872 John Cronin died of tuberculosis and Jane continued to operate the general store in Maple Grove. She would meet and later marry Frank Kabat, a local farmer. Eventually they would move away from Maple Grove and settle on a farm in Van Buren Township, Newton County, Missouri. The couple had three children. Later in 1881 the family relocated to Chicago, Illinois. Considered a pioneering woman and braving many hardships of the frontier in her relatively short life, this then is the narrative of the life and times of Jane (O'Hara) Cronin-Kabat.