The Schooner Festival has been in high gear in Gloucester recently as shown by some great pictures by Jay Albert you can see at Cape Ann Images blog and the Good Morning Gloucester blog. So, of course this makes me think about schooners in our family history.

This is a picture of the schooner Concord, owned and operated by Captain John Duguo, an ancestor-in-law a couple of generations back who sailed about the same time as our direct ancestor Captain John Bentley. This picture puts in perspective for me the relative size of the ship to the mean and to the sea. Yikes. Those guys sure look small there and it's a wonder ANY of them ever came back from these fishing trips.

John Bentley was born in 1847 in County Galway Ireland. I have not yet found the siblings he surely must have had. To my knowledge, his parents Henry and Kate never came to America. He arrived in New York from Ireland before he was 18 years old, perhaps in 1863 when he would have been only 16--Ryan's age! He married Mary Catherine Costello (Kate) Christmas Day 1864 (17 years old if we accept the dates on the various records). Our ancestor Catherine Bentley was born 4 years later, the third of six children.

Captain Bentley and his father in law, Martin Costello, died at sea in February 1882 when he was only 35 years old. His wife was left with 5 living children, the youngest only 8. Kate Bentley died just 3 years later of "natural causes". By this time, the children were older and probably taking care of each other, but I've often wondered what life was like for them after they lost their father and then their mother in such a short time. An article in the October 1886 The Century Magazine called Gloucester Fishers states "Few men who fish on the Banks live to be old, and the result is there are comparatively few old fishermen in Gloucester." And many fatherless children.

Captain Bentley is our great great grandfather -- the same generation as the old fisherman Timothy Ryan. When I read The Perfect Storm I immediately thought of Captain John Bentley and have always felt a strong bond with this story.