James Ransom & Katherine Shuey

James G. Ransom was born November 11, 1849 on a farm in the small town of Clay, just north of Syracuse, New York. He was the sixth child born to John and Anna Ransom. Although he grew-up farming, James was educated and mechanically inclined, working first in carpentry before becoming an engineer. James was taller than average and intelligent, with blue-gray eyes. In the 1870’s he married a local woman named Elva V. Williams and they had a daughter, Edith, born in 1873. Elva died in 1883 leaving James to take care of their young daughter.

By the mid 1880’s, James had left Syracuse, appearing in the Chicago area by the 1890’s where he continued working as an engineer. In the village of Lemont, just south of Chicago, he met a young woman named Katherine Shuey and the two were married in 1895. Katherine was twenty-two years younger than her husband and only two years older than her step-daughter. Together, James and Katherine had a son, Orel, born in 1897. By the time Orel was born, they had left Chicago and relocated to Cleveland, Ohio. They remained in the Cleveland area for about twenty years.

James worked for the McMyler Interstate Company as an erecting engineer. The McMyler Interstate Co. was based in Cleveland and specialized in the manufacture of material handling and construction equipment such as traveling gantry cranes, locomotive cranes, ore and coal handling machinery, locomotive pile drivers and similar railroad equipment. James traveled the world while working for McMyler. His passport application noted that the second and third fingers on his right hand had been amputated, not all that uncommon in his line of work. James traveled to Durban, South Africa in 1914 to oversee the installation of a 100-ton car dumper. While there, his daughter Edith passed away. Soon after, in 1917, James was sent to Rouen, France to oversee the erection of a crane. At the time, France was caught up in World War I, and although James was safe, working well behind the French trenches, the Atlantic crossings would have been dangerous with German U-boats patrolling the waters.

After his safe return a few months later, James and Katherine moved to Buffalo. Katherine suffered from exophthalmic goiter, a thyroid disease that would have caused the thyroid gland in her neck to swell and her eyes to bulge. It also causes nervousness, weakness, and heart disease. She passed away from the disease in July of 1919 at the age of forty-eight. She was buried in her family’s plot at St. Alphonsus Cemetery in Lemont, Illinois. After her death, James and Orel remained in Buffalo where James worked as a master mechanic until his own death in 1928 at the age of seventy-eight.