Patrick M. Quinn

Patrick Michael Quinn died on Friday, January 3rd in his home in Lake Geneva.  He was 82 years old, and is survived by his wife, Mary Janzen Quinn, his daughters Abra and Rachel Quinn, his son-in-law Tim Marshall, his granddaughters Ruby Quinn Marshall and Rosie Frances Marshall, all of Oakland, California, and two cousins, Will Malsch, of Lake Geneva, and Betty Emery, of Monona, Wisconsin.

Patrick Quinn was in many ways the living memory of Lake Geneva.  As anyone reading this knows, he wrote many columns in the Lake Geneva Regional News, chronicling Lake Geneva’s history, from its founding to the modern period, or at least the 1960s.  His subjects covered Lake Geneva’s original European settlers, including the Irish wave in the 1850s during which his own family arrived, Civil War regiments and veterans, the Great Depression, World War I and World War II and the home front, prominent founders and townspeople, Lake Geneva’s growth, its schools, business, architecture, the Lake itself, and the very notion of history in Lake Geneva.

His paternal great-grandfather, Michael Quinn, emigrated in 1850 from Ireland at age 25. He came three years before his whole family,  and while one brother stayed in upstate New York, the rest of the Quinns traveled, likely via the Erie Canal part of the way, to Wisconsin, and took up farming where the Grand Geneva is now.  One of the early Lake Geneva school houses was on their farmland.  Michael Quinn married a widow, Polly Dinsmore Enos, and he and his brothers and sisters settled all over Walworth County, but especially in and near Lake Geneva, and in Elkhorn.

His maternal grandparents, Lillie Wardingle and Thomas Wardingle – who raised him – moved up to Lake Geneva from Chicago in 1912.  They bought a small white house on Maxwell Street that had been built around 1877.  There Patrick was born in 1942, in the last years of “the Silent Generation” – though Patrick’s life was anything but silent.  He loved Lake Geneva as a child, and as an adult, and though he moved away – first to Madison, Wisconsin, where he got his BA at the University of Wisconsin, and then to Evanston, Illinois, where he was the Northwestern University Archivist from 1974 until he retired in 2008, he never lived more than 70 miles from his home place, and he came back frequently, bringing his family, who learned to love the town and the Lake as well.

He attended Badger High School, and his graduating class of 1960 still holds well-attended reunions.

Patrick Quinn was a trained historian and a socialist who nevertheless bowed to voting for Democrats from Obama onwards.  He believed that history was the history of EVERYONE, not of Great Men, or dry political processes.  He wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about how the growing interest in genealogy – long before Ancestry.com made such research easier by basing it in the cloud and using automated bots to cull uploaded records – showed a true social history, made up of the collective lives of families over generations.

When he retired as University Archivist at Northwestern University, he and Mary moved back to Lake Geneva, and he was able to buy his childhood home.  They merged back into the life of Lake Geneva, and Patrick became active with the Historic Preservation Commission, organized public programs at the Geneva Lake Museum, and was an active member of the Friends of the Geneva Theater.  He even role-played in costume as a town character, John Edgar Barton, in 2020.  For Patrick Quinn, history was a living thing which new generations needed to grapple with and understand.  He passed that love on to his children and grandchildren, along with a love for this small town, Lake Geneva.

Visitation will be held at the Derrick Funeral Home, 800 Park Drive, Lake Geneva, on Saturday, January 18th, from noon to 2 PM. The service is at 2 PM.

In lieu of flowers, you can honor Patrick with a donation to the Friends of the Lake Geneva Public Library or to the International Institute for Research and Education – links below:

https://lglibrary.org/friends

or

https://www.iire.org/

To post an online condolence please click the "Share a Memory" box on the left side of your screen.

Derrick Funeral Home of Lake Geneva is honored to be assisting the Quinn family.