Kate Braton married an Irishman, Isaac Michael Gaffney, and started out married life. Their first child, Martha, was born on May 1898 but only lived a few months. Several more children followed. Stephen b. 1899, Roger b. 1902; Lillie Mae, b. 1903 and Gracie, b. 1904. They were all on the 1905 census for Blackduck. His occupation: painter.
By the spring of 1906, things were so grim for the Gaffney family that six persons out of a family of nine, residing at Blackduck, were confined at the Beltrami county poor house. Application for care was made to the county officials some time previously and on April 3, 1906, Superintendent Phillippi of the poor farm went to Blackduck to investigate the case. He found the family destitute and the father suffering with heart trouble and tuberculosis. The mother and one child were also afflicted with heart trouble.
A pathetic case of the breaking up of a family was made public in probate court two months later when Judge Clark sent two little boys, Stephen and Roger Gaffney of Blackduck, to the state school at Owatonna. The father and mother were both too sick to work and with the family had been charges at the county poor farm for two months. The authorities decided that the poor farm was no place for them, and the two boys were committed to the state school. Lillie Mae was placed with a family in Crookston, while the youngest child remained with her parents for the present.
But they were survivors! By 1910, Mrs. Kate Gaffney and her three children Stephen, Roger and Gracie were living on a farm at Prairie View in Wilkin County, with Mrs. Gaffney’s brother James Braton and the grandmother Martha Braton. The grandfather William Braton had died on July 24, 1907, and the Braton family are buried in Prairie View Cemetery. Martha Braton, the grandmother, died in 1914.
At time of WWI draft, Stephen, a machinist, was living in Seattle with his mother. Grace married at the age of 18 in 1927 in Kalispell, Montana. By the 1930 census, Stephen was married and had two children and was the supervisor of a chain of grocery stores (Bi-Rite) in Spokane, Washington. In 1940, he was the owner of a grocery store. From the Poor Farm to a State School, to ownership of his own business!
Kate Gaffney moved to Montana and died on May 16, 1958 at Kalispell, Montana.