Notes A birth registration was found for Name: Catherine Carroll; Date: Jan-Feb-Mar 1876; District: Liverpool; County: Lancashire; Volume: 8b; Page: 197. Mother: Winifred Carroll, father was unnamed.
Winifred Carroll's life was a poignant trail from the Potato Famine of the 1840's in Ireland, to a woman who died 9 years after the death of the daughter she had sent to Canada. Winifred, or Winnie, as she was called, gave birth to 3 children out of wedlock, living all of her life in the slums of Liverpool, well known to be a place of squalor and horrible conditions. Winifred finally married a drunk named Philip Clarke and boarded Catherine with her sister, Ann Carroll, 3 doors down from where Winifred, her husband Philip Clarke and Francis Blake (Catherine's half-brother) lived.
In September, 1882, Catherine Carroll is on the Circassian en route to Montreal, along with 30 other children supervised by Mrs. Yates with the Liverpool Catholic Childrens Protection Society. The month after Catherine left for Canada, Philip was murdered in a bar fight.
Additional information from NorahEllyn:
Father: Unknown
Mother: Winifred Carroll
Spouse: Charles Henry Shaw
Marriage Date: 14 Mar 1896 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Placement Family: Martin McDonald, Hotel Keeper, Ottawa
Catherine next shows up, not as Catherine Carroll, but, it is believed, as Kate McDonald in 1891, living with a Martin McDonald and his second wife, Bridget, who ran the Wellington hotel in Ottawa. Kate Mcdonald (Catherine Carroll was always called Kate to her family) is 15, born in England, and a domestic. In 1893, she is shown as a domestic living at the Wellington Hotel as Kate McDonald. This is NOT absolute--but out of all of the resources and texts, especially that all important 1891 Canadian census, this is the most likely because Catherine Carroll had to be in that part of Ottawa in 1895 to meet her husband, Charles Henry Shaw. She fits the age, birthplace and situation. As Martin McDonald never had any children by his first wife, who died in 1887, this Kate McDonald could NOT be his biological child. Most likely, she was "adopted" by Mr. and the first Mrs. Martin McDonald, which explains very well why she went by Kate McDonald.
On March 15, 1896, Catherine is three months pregnant when she marries Charles Henry Shaw. Her name on her marriage certificate is "Catherine Carroll" and she is shown as having been "brought up in an orphan asylum." Six months later, she gives birth to her first son. Maggie Shaw, Charles' sister, reported the birth and documented that Kate's name was McDonald.
Charles and Catherine Carroll Shaw had six children: Herbert Allan Shaw, born September 24, 1896; Violet Irene Shaw, born October 11, 1898; Harold Gordon Shaw, born October 28, 1900; Clifford Henry Shaw, born January 28, 1903; Milton Franklin Shaw, born November 2, 1904, died January 30, 1905; and Hazel May Shaw, born January 28, 1906.
Catherine lived quietly with her husband, a blacksmith (a good occupation in those days), until she slipped away from childbed fever in February 1906, two weeks after the death of her daughter, Hazel May Shaw. It is such a sad note that her death notice is shown in the Aylwin Methodist Registers on the same page as Hazel's, birth.
Catherine was buried on the 8th day of February, 1906, by the Rev. J. R. R. Cooper. He does not, however, give a place of burial, but Catherine's grave has tentatively been found at the Trinity Methodist Church Cemetery in Kazabazua, Quebec, in an unmarked plot owned by Reginald Shaw, her brother-in-law.