Her Early Years in St. Louis, MO
After their marriage in St. Louis, Missouri in 1877, Daniel and Mary Jane (Ryan) Hardie lived in Cincinnati, Ohio for a few years. Their first son, Daniel Eugene, was born in 1878 in Cincinnati.[1]
The family returned to St. Louis around 1879 and remained there until 1897, living initially on Papin Street and subsequently on Caroline Street then Bell Avenue. In addition to Daniel Eugene, the family unit in 1880 included Daniel Senior’s three daughters (Janet, Isabelle, and Elizabeth) from his second marriage as well as Mary Jane’s son (Eugene O’Neil) from her first marriage. [2]
Daniel and Mary Jane’s first daughter, Frances Diamond Hardie, was born in St. Louis in 1881. She was baptized at St. Malachy Roman Catholic Church, 2900 Clark Street in the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood. Her godmother was her maternal aunt Ellen (Ryan) Diamond, who would later marry John W. Allen.[3]
In addition to her three half-sisters and her brother Daniel, Frances had a second brother, William Norval, born in 1883, and a sister, Marie Ellen, born in 1886.[4]
About 1889, Daniel Hardie became the proprietor of a pottery manufacturing operation, “St. Louis Art Pottery”, on 2135 Washington.[5] He is described in 1891 as a pottery dealer at 2135 Washington street who “lives comfortably with his family on Bell avenue, and all the members of his household are so uniformly healthy that he has said to his friends, laughingly, sometimes that the physicians of the city would never think of complimenting him by an honorary membership in their medical society”.[6]
