A Gloucester Irish Story for St. Patrick’s Day 2020

I was tickled to find a picture from the Gloucester Daily Times (Oct 6 1943) to accompany this obituary for Mary (Ryan) Brotherton.  It seems appropriate to share her story today especially since many of you have a little extra time to do some reading these days!

Mary was my Irish immigrant Timothy Ryan’s daughter–she was born in 1866 and died 1943.  Her story is a very typical one of my Gloucester Irish fishing families. She lived her whole life in Gloucester, Massachusetts. This Mary appears to have been named after a sister Mary who died when she was 2 a few years before this Mary was born.  It may also have been a tribute to her mother Mary Squires Ryan.  This picture was obviously from later in her life but I see a little resemblance here to her brother William, my direct Ryan ancestor.

I recently obtained some new information about Mary after one of those “dope-slap” moments that often occur in life.  The Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters was originally based in Boston after its founding in 1879 by Irish immigrants to provide life insurance for its members.  It soon spread to other cities, so Gloucester Irish were among its target demographic.  In the past, I have found a couple of our ancestor’s files in this collection (now being housed at the University of Massachusetts).  Their applications for membership have been scanned and made available.  They are several pages long and provide intimate details of their lives at the time of the application.  They are especially helpful because applications were often made in a range of life span that often lacks detail in normal research.  Often, the applicants are heads of young families with living siblings and parents.  These details are extraordinarily helpful in pinning down the lives of the applicant as well as the life of their families.

And I made the CLASSIC mistake of only seeking the males in these files.  Since the files were recently transferred to UMass, more have become available and it finally dawned on me that I should look for some of the females (cue the dope-slap).  And Mary was my first discovery!

This is one page of the file showing the status of Mary’s parents and siblings as of 1913 when this application was made.  This helps establish her life circumstance in a period that is sometimes hard to research: “mid” life.  These policies paid $1000 upon the death of the member.  Mary’s Foresters file contains 16 pages all together and they are extraordinarily valuable and interesting.  You can bet I’ll be looking for others.