From Today I Found Out.

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Jane Toppan was born Honora Kelley, daughter of Irish immigrants by the names of Peter and Bridget Kelley. Unfortunately for her, when she was just a few years old, her mother died of tuberculosis, leaving her in the care of her alcoholic and allegedly abusive father.

Accounts are conflicting as to whether Peter Kelley, who was nicknamed around town "Kelley the Crack"- short for crackpot- owing to being considered a little loopy, then proceeded to raise Honora and her two older sisters, Delia and Nellie, himself, or left them in the care of their grandmother.

Either way, a few years after their mother’s death, whether because he simply didn’t want to raise them anymore or because he thought they’d have a chance at a better life if he gave them up, he carted the six year old Honora and eight year old Delia off to the the Boston Female Asylum orphanage in 1863.

If the orphanage chose to take the girls, it was likely they’d be placed with a family somewhere as an indentured servant.  Luckily for Peter and unlucky for the family that would eventually take Honora in, the orphanage took one look at Peter and the state of the girl’s clothing and general lack of hygiene and decided to accept them, noting she and her sister were, to quote a record from the asylum concerning the girls, "rescued from a very miserable home."

As for Peter, who appears to have been a tailor or tailor’s assistant of some sort, he went his separate ways from the girls and never saw them again. It’s not clear why he chose to keep his oldest daughter, Nellie, or even precisely whether she actually existed at all. The story of Nellie only came about later when a supposed cousin claimed Honora had an older sister named such that went insane and was committed to an asylum in her 20s.

Whatever the case, just to quickly wrap up Peter’s story, records are scant, so it’s difficult to definitively determine what happened to him, but rumor has it he became increasingly unstable over the years. Further, whether true or not isn’t clear, he supposedly eventually sewed his own eyelids shut and was subsequently put in an asylum. Efforts on our part to find a contemporary, first-hand account of this failed, so we’ll leave it to you to determine whether this was true or not.

Going back to Honora and Delia, Delia appears to have ultimately become a prostitute and nothing is known about her after that.

This all brings us around to Honora. She stayed at the orphanage for two years with little known about her time there until she was placed in the Toppan household in Lowell, Massachusetts under the care of Abner and Ann Toppan….

Author: Daven Hiskey
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Host: Simon Whistler
Producer: Samuel Avila