By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
There are fifteen women from the past two centuries—a mother, two grandmothers, four great grands, and eight great/great grands—who by law and blood I can call “mother.” I’ve met only two, but I’ve tried to get to know them all.
How does one go about getting acquainted with long-dead women?
Mainly using old newspaper archives, family stories, and Ancestry.com. I was lucky to have one other unusual source.
For about a decade in the late 1940s and early 1950s, my grandfather Donald R. O’Brien penned a column for his hometown newspaper The Burlington Free Press. He wrote vignettes of local interest/history and occasionally mentioned family.
Why go to all this effort to meet the dead? Curiosity, mainly.
I grew up in Northern Utah, far from their New England and New York abodes. I never heard much about any of them when I was young.
Why else? Perhaps a search for self-awareness.
Writer Michael Crichton explained, “If you don’t know history, you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.” The poet Maya Angelou said, “We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors wisdom.”
In other words, good advice likely lurks within the stories of how these formidable women faced the challenges of their own times. And personal family history also is interesting, especially the collective details.
For example, the average age of death of these 15 women I can call mother was 76.2. One of them died at age 24, but another lived to be 86. They all were born into and buried out of the Catholic Church.
They all got married. Six of the fifteen marriages reached the golden anniversary mark. Several other unions probably would have done so too, except one partner died too soon.
None—except my own father/mother—ever got divorced, but I’m sure some of the other marriages also dealt with domestic strife. When once asked if she ever considered leaving her husband, Ruth Graham (married to the preacher Billy Graham) said, “Divorce? Never! Murder? Yes!”
Going back to the first of these four generations, seven of my eight great/great grandmothers were born in Ireland. The other one—who married an O’Brien—was French Canadian.
These Irish great/great grands hailed from many different parts of the Emerald Isle, including Limerick, Tipperary, and County Wicklow. All of them emigrated to the United States in the 1800s.
At least three of these immigrant women left Ireland to escape starvation during the Potato Famine. Some entered the country through Canada, others via the American Eastern Seaboard.
Some were naturalized citizens, others not. (Oh my, undocumented persons in the family!)
As proof that the Irish stick with a few good names, over one-third of these women bore the name “Catherine” or a derivative thereof. (The male example of this Irish name favoritism, of course, is “Patrick,” see my Father’s Day article for June 2024.)
As might be expected given their times, most of these female ancestors worked in the home caring for their families. My own mother, however, had a different path forced upon her, a story I tell in my 2021 memoir Monastery Mornings.
Fate also forced one of my grands—Annie McCarthy O’Brien—into the working world after she was widowed in her twenties. She owned and operated several millinery (hat) shops.
Her sister Mary McCarthy (known as “Mame”) never married. A talented tailor, she also owned her own shops.
I imagine they referred a lot of customers back and forth. They did well enough in business to eventually build and own a home on the lovely Maple Street in Burlington, Vermont.
Although none technically qualify as my “mothers,” there were some interesting aunts and female cousins in the family tree too.
Many agonized as their men fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. One aunt’s touching but tragic love story ended when her newlywed husband died in France in 1918 during the waning days of WWI.
My aunt Mary Winslow was the first woman in her family to go to college. Another aunt was a bootlegger. Another married a man who was close friends with Babe Ruth. Yet another married someone who was a prominent supporter of the crosstown Brooklyn Dodgers. (More details on that family baseball rivalry here.)
One wonderful aunt joined the Sisters of Mercy convert in Burlington and devoted her life to teaching, serving the poor, and even staring down the great flu epidemic of 1918. Her fellow sisters elected her the leader of one of the nearby convents.
Perhaps the most interesting aunt of all—Mary Leonard—crossed the Atlantic by herself while just a teenager and worked as a domestic servant in the home of Middlebury College’s president. He helped her save money to bring the rest of the family over too.
The children she tended remembered her so well that one included her in a charming novel about growing up in New England during the late nineteenth century. Mary Leonard never married, but was so beloved that the local Catholic bishop presided over her funeral.
It is an interesting group indeed. Each Mother’s Day now, I am honored and happy to remember these fifteen women from the last two centuries whom I can call mother.
***
Kathleen Gleason (O’Brien) (1930-2007). My dear mother (pictured below with my siblings).
Catherine Sullivan (Gleason) (1892-1939). My maternal grandmother. She died young, and so clearly was the glue holding her family together that it splintered apart when she passed.
Florence Duffy (O’Brien) (1894-1974). My paternal grandmother was a great athlete and known for her etiquette and manners.
Catherine (“Kate”) Leonard (Sullivan) (1868-1892). A maternal great grandmother, my only one born in Ireland. She died tragically just after childbirth.
Margaret Flaherty (Gleason) (1861-1938). A maternal great grandmother. She had eight children, one of whom was a nun.
Annie McCarthy (O’Brien) (1866-1951). A paternal great grandmother. She lost her husband to tuberculosis about a year after having their only child, and then raised their son with her sister.
Catherine Doyle (Duffy) (1862-1929). A paternal great grandmother. She had ten children and lost a son in the final days of World War I.
Bridget Kennedy (Gleason) (1823-1899). A maternal great/great grandmother. She had eleven children.
Eliza Gleason (Flaherty) (1836-1903). A maternal great/great grandmother. I don’t know much about her yet.
Catherine Barron (Sullivan) (1836-1908) A maternal great/great grandmother. She had eight children.
Catherine Barrett (Leonard) (1840-1921) A maternal great/great grandmother. The priest who presided over her funeral also was her son.
Bridget Coolon (O’Brien) (1832-1918). A paternal great/great grandmother. She was the lone French-Canadian in an Irish crowd.
Alice Fitzgerald (McCarthy) (1834-1911). A paternal great/great grandmother. After she passed, her grandson immortalized her bountiful gardens in his weekly newspaper columns.
Mary Bolger (Duffy) (1827-1908). A paternal great/great grandmother. Her sons founded and ran a successful Brooklyn construction supply company. Two grandchildren became priests and one a nun.
Mary MacDonald (Doyle) (1830-?). A paternal great/great grandmother. I don’t know much about her yet.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
