Clotilda S. Brosnaham Shuttleworth
1820-1850



Brosnaham graves in the Catskill Village Cemetery Clotilda's gravestone is the tall one on the right.

       Clotilda Santiago Brosnahan was born July 1820 in Pensacola. On 6 July 1843, she married William Louis Shuttleworth, a Lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Their oldest child, John George, was born in 1844. Clotilda bore two more children, Mary, in 1847, and William Rodman in 1849. She died from complications of childbirth in January 1850 shortly after William Rodman was born. He lived two months longer than his mother, dying in March.

Clotilda died in Brooklyn on the same day that her mother-in-law, Mary Shuttleworth died. The obituary notes that they would be buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Mary was buried in Green-Wood, but Clotilda was buried with her children, Mary and William Rodman, in the cemetery in Catskill. Clotilda's oldest child, John George, lived with Clotilda's father, Dr. John Brosnaham, and his second wife, Isabella Sierra, in Pensacola. He graduated with a medical degree 1 May 1867 from University Medical College, New York. After serving as the administrator of his father's estate in 1871, he died in Brooklyn, New York in 1876. He is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn with his father.


Clotilda's notice of death appeared in the Brooklyn Eagle, Monday, January 28, 1850, p.2

     





The following appeared in the Home Journal Apr 6, 1850:

DIED

   On January 27, at Brooklyn, Mrs. Clotilda Shuttleworth, wife of Captain W.L. Shuttleworth, U.S.M., in the thirtieth year of her age; and on the 21st of March, William Rodman Shuttleworth, aged five months. The following lines are from the pen of the bereaved husband and father:

The stroke of Death that blanch’d her cheek
   Dimm’d not her brilliant eye;
But wild and fitful flashes told
   That her last hour was nigh.

Her raven hair in tangled locks
   Out o’er her pillow flung—
Long tresses soft as flossy silk—
   in mazes all unstrung.

She wakes now from lethargic sleep
   And cries in accents wild—
“Where am I? Ah! my husband, dear,
   Bring, quickly, bring my child.”

She clasped the Babe, then softly then,
   Beamed her dark eyes with love;
“Querido Mio, must we part?
   My own chiquillo dove.”

“My Husband guard our precious Boy
   Through infancy and youth;
As I would teach him, so must thou,
   The love of sacred truth.”

Then smiled she as a saint would smile
   While kneeled her husband there,
And vowed to make her slightest wish
   His future theme of prayer.

And now her long dark lashes close
   O’er orbs yet purely bright;
Her breathing faint and fainter grows—
   Her soul hath ta’en its flight.

The infant, with its Mother’s look,
   Imbibed her nature too;
And ‘though we watched it hour by hour
   Still weak and weaker grew.

And it hath joined his parent now,
   In realms where dwelt the blest—
In the same grave where sleeps she, there
   Her Babe lies on her breast.

And oh! how bright the ideal gleam
   To the bereaved one given,
That Wife and Child, with angels pure,
   Still smile on him from heaven.

The Catskill Cemetery picture above was taken by Anne Healy Field, May 2008. The source for the poem above by William Louis Shuttleworth: Home Journal (1846-1856). New York: Apr 6, 1850. Vol. 15, Iss. 217, p. 3; Proquest: American Periodical Series Online. Sources for the biographical information come from census and other records and can be found in the descent reports for William Louis Shuttleworth and Dr. John Brosnaham.


14 June 2008
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