From misfortune to windfall?

100 YEARS AGO

When a Times Union reporter came to call, Mrs. Joseph F. Ody, engaged in a “sheer struggle for existence” with her husband and two sons in their modest Philip Street home near Lincoln Park bordered on one side by frame shacks and on the other by empty lots, was packing up her family’s belongings, having been given a notice to vacate the premises. She recounted the many other misfortunes that had befallen her family in recent months, including the death of both of her parents as well as her baby, and her own near-death illness. “We have had so many reverses that I have become used to almost everything,” she said. Everything except, it seemed, the news that day that her husband and his siblings had come into an inheritance of more than $1 million (more than $13 million in 2020 dollars). “I do not know what to think of this report, whether it is real, or whether someone is playing a confidence game on us,” she said, but refused to discuss the matter any further. It was learned that a letter notifying Joseph Ody of the inheritance had somehow reached a distant relative named Francis X. Ody, president of the Farmers’ Alliance in Minneapolis, who immediately came to Albany to hand deliver the news. He allegedly bore a striking resemblance to Joseph Ody’s late father and knew personal information only a family member would know. The letter said that a wealthy merchant in England had recently died and the Ody family of Albany were his next of kin. All of his estate, including a successful asbestos mine, was to go to Joseph Ody and his family, his brother, Mark Ody, of Cleveland, and his sister, Catherine Ody, who had mysteriously disappeared seven years before.