Margaret Jane Thomas, Detective

Long before V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Milhone, there was Margaret Jane Thomas of 636 Butler Street, Brooklyn, in the 1880s and 1890s.

She specialized in divorce cases and contested wills, and employed an all-female staff. She was famous enough to warrant a front-page obituary in the local papers when she died in 1895.

She emigrated to the US when she was a girl, and married a Brooklyn shirt-manufacturer. "How she drifted into her ostensible occupation is not known," sniffed the Brooklyn Eagle - but she did indeed become a detective.

She was born about 1850 in Ireland and married English-born William P. Thomas - the shirt manufacturer. They were in Brooklyn by the late 1870s. They had no children - Margaret, who is listed in the 1880 census as "Keeping House" - was actually doing far more than that. She was keeping track of men who strayed from their wives, dubious fortune-tellers and generally of Brooklynites who were doing things that they shouldn't.

Her methods were a little dubious, if the Eagle reporter is correct. She hired young women to "entrap" wealthy, philandering men so that "when the divorce case was ready, Mrs. Thomas was ready with her evidence."

She seems to have gone in for blackmail, too, gathering evidence and discovering secrets about a targeted man, and then demanding money. For example, a "jovial stone mason" who was rich "and fond of company" found himself pursued by Margaret Jane, who was herself arrested "for causing a disturbance and held in bonds to keep the peace." She threatened his wife too, but the particulars of the case are not mentioned (and I haven't found them - yet- either).

Margaret Jane was imposing physically as well - a large, broad-shouldered woman with "a violent temper...who would not hesitate to fight if sore pressed."

There were several other female detectives working from the 1860s on in Brooklyn and New York, and I'll be writing about these women in other posts. In one 1884 court case, Margaret Jane Thomas was fighting it out against a rival detective, Elizabeth Bingham.

And we'll eavesdrop on that case a little later this week.

Coming Attractions in the Dime Museum:

Silent Film Actor of the Week (for Wordless Wednesday)
The Rival Female Detectives
Lulu, the Georgia Wonder

Image from NYPL Digital Gallery - a still from the 1921 film, A Woman of Mystery (the titular character resembles Margaret Jane not at all!)

Source: "A Woman Detective's Death," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 9, 1895, p. 1.