Loretta Eleanor (Boyle) Connelly Riley (1905–1935)
Taken Too Soon by Diabetes
Loretta's life was short, only thirty years, but it matters a great deal to our story, because we believe she was John William Riley's mother.Loretta Eleanor Boyle was born on April 9, 1905, in Akron, Ohio. According to one family tree, her parents were John Howard Boyle (1871–1908) and Mary Ellen Gilbo. Her father died in 1908, when she was only three. About a year later, she and her brother William were adopted by their aunt, Alice I. (Boyle) Connelly, and Alice's husband, Patrick Connelly. That's why Loretta grew up with the last name Connelly, and why you'll often see her called "Loretta B. Connelly," with the B standing for Boyle. When she died, her death certificate named John Boyle as her father but listed Alice Connelley as her mother. That fits the adoption: to the family, Alice was her mother. (We have two different death dates for Alice, 1926 and 1953, so that's another little puzzle.)The same tree gives Loretta a sister, Hannah B. Boyle (1905–1994), and two half-sisters, Margaret Irene McMahon (1910–1974) and Ellen Marie McMahon (1914–1982). In 1910 and 1920 the family lived in Salineville, Ohio, a small town in the eastern part of the state. By about 1923 Loretta was in Cleveland.There, on February 11, 1925, she married Harris Henry Riley, a young man from Burlington, Vermont, who had already been in the Navy. She was nineteen and he was twenty-one. Their Cuyahoga County marriage record (No. 37495) says they were married by the Rev. J. P. Treacy "after publication of banns." Banns are a public announcement, usually read aloud in church on several Sundays before a Catholic wedding, so anyone who knows a reason the couple shouldn't marry can speak up. The record wasn't officially filed until November 3, 1926. On September 9, 1927, their son, John William, was born in Cleveland. By 1930 the family was living in Akron, and a few years later they had moved to Harris's hometown of Burlington. Those were the hard years of the Great Depression, and Harris's life was rough and tumble, as you can read on his page.Loretta had diabetes. Today it's a disease people live with for a long time, using insulin and careful eating, but in her day it was far more dangerous. Insulin had only been in use since about 1922, and diabetic coma still killed many young people with diabetes in the 1930s. She died on August 21, 1935, at Mary Fletcher Hospital in Burlington, at thirty years, five months and twelve days old. Her death certificate gives the cause as diabetic acidosis, which means a dangerous buildup of acid in the blood when the body can't use sugar, leading to a diabetic coma, with diabetes as a contributing cause. Harris gave the information for the certificate, and it describes her as a housewife and the wife of Harris H. Riley of Burlington.John was just eight years old. Loretta's obituary in the Burlington Daily News, printed the same day she died, names her husband, Harris H. Riley, and her son, John, along with Hannah, Margaret, Helen, William, and Patrick McMahon. That obituary is the strongest evidence we have that John was Loretta's son. That December, Harris married Doris D. Guyette, and it was Doris who raised John from then on. Later papers almost always named Doris as John's mother, which is why this took some detective work to sort out. John's full Ohio birth certificate should settle it for good.Loretta never saw her son grow up to be a Marine, a ballplayer, and the father of eight. Still, every Riley descended from John carries a little of her.