Chillicothe City Cemetery, Chillicothe, Ill.

John Jr. "Jack" Boylan and his brothers Emmett, Louis, and Archibald "Archie" were all born in this brick farmhouse, to John Boylan and his second wife Eva Weber Boylan between 1880 and 1888. The house had been built by John, perhaps as early as 1863, according to an 1890 published biography of John. He first married in 1866, and five children were born in the house between 1867 and 1875 (William, Mary Ellen "Ella", Rose, Helen "Lena", Clara). The mother of these first five, Christina Holahan, died in 1875 (probably in the house, in childbirth), and Eva Weber became their stepmother in 1879. Eva then added the four boys of her own, for a total of nine offspring all living in the house by 1888, ranging in age from newborn to age 19. John died in the house in 1903 at age 66, and Eva died in the house in 1915 at age 64, after witnessing her first two biological grandchildren, both girls, and a daughter-in-law die there between 1907 and 1913 -- first the firstborn baby of Archie and Nellie Manning (who also died in the house, of acute pneumonia, with the unnamed baby) and second, 4 year old Mary Agnes Boylan, the firstborn of Jack & Lucelia Mooney. Archie remarried, and his wife Clara Wilhelm gave birth to their first four children in the house (Johnnie A., Marjorie Frances, Mary Magdalene, Paul A.). Archie and Clara contracted tuberculosis, and spent months in a sanitarium, losing the house in about 1925. Archie and Clara's youngest baby Josephine "Jo" was born in early 1926, in a second house up the hill from the main house. The second house and remainder of the farmland were lost six or seven years later after the stock market crash of 1929, followed by successive crashes in 1930 and 31. Archie's older sister Ella Boylan Staab and her husband, who had a farm immediately adjacent to the original house, repurchased the house and land later in the 1930's. It was inherited by one of their granddaughters, Mary Staab Horan.