Thomas Gribbin

In 1860 he was a 24 year old laborer at in Schuylkill County, PA. On 15 December 1861 he enlisted and mustered in Pottsville, Schuylkill County, PA as a Corporal in Company K, 96th Pennsylvania Infantry.

He was wounded in action at Crampton's Gap on South Mountain on 14 September 1862.

He transferred to Company E, 95th Pennsylvania Infantry at their expiration of service on 18 October 1864 and was discharged on 28 January 1865.

By 1870 he was a mining engineer living in Mt Carmel Township, Northumberland County, PA. In 1874 he was living in Fulton Company mine housing at Excelsior, PA with his family and recent immigrant John Keating, his wife's brother, who left his wife and five children in Ireland to seek a better life in America.

Home from a saloon after church on 4 April 1874, Thomas and John argued about which of them was the tougher man. Gribbin shot his brother in the forehead at close range, killing him. In August he was sentenced to two years in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. In that same month, Catherine and John's brother William Keating was arrested for trying to poison Thomas, and in December 1874 coroner Frederick Hesser, who had helped convict Thomas, was murdered, probably in reprisal. The coroner's murderer was hanged in October 1879 and his accomplice later died in prison. Both men members of the Molly Maguires, as Thomas may have been.

At the 1890 US Census of surviving Civil War veterans, he was living in Shamokin, Northumberland County, and noted that he'd been wounded three times, in the cheek and shoulder with "2 ball still in the wounds."

His service basics from Bates1 and the Card File.2 His wounding in Maryland from a casualty list provided by Colonel Cake and printed in the Pottsville Miner's Journal of 4 October 1862. Personal details from family genealogists, the US Census of 1860 (which has his birth in England) & 1870, and Katherine Jaeger's research into the Northumberland, PA Molly Maguires. His memorial is on Findagrave; source of details about his murder of his brother in law, from the Selinsgrove (PA) Times-Tribune of 17 April 1874.

He married Catherine Keating and they had 5 children between 1860 and 1877.

c. 1836 in IRELAND

02/11/1894; Shamokin, PA