The importance of heirlooms

A few months ago, my sister asked me to bring an old piece of furniture back to my parents' house when she was rearranging her apartment. It was a small end table that had belonged to our 2x great-aunt, Mary Rose Mulvaney Daniels, or Auntie Mae.


Although Auntie Mae died before either of us was born, she looms large in our family's collective consciousness. She had no children, and her husband died young, so she spent a lot of time with her nieces and nephews and their families, and stories about her are told frequently to this day.


Auntie Mae would end each dinner with "Thank God and the O'Haras for another good meal."

Auntie Mae would compliment you on what you were wearing when it was something you'd received from her as a gift.

Auntie Mae would drink Presbyterians, and remark on my grandfather's bar tending skills: "You make a strong drink, Bill O'Hara."

Auntie Mae would send my dad $5 in a card when he was in college, with an admonition not to spend it on beer. (It was always spent on beer.)

Auntie Mae and her good friend, Sally, would go for a "constitutional" around the block in the evening. As they got older, the ritual moved into the backyard, and consisted of a stroll around the pool - but it was still their constitutional.


As Laura loaded Auntie Mae's end table into my car, she asked me to put it in the attic at my parents' house - "unless you want use it?" 15 seconds of considering the limited space in my apartment and the table's small size and concealed storage capability, and I was in. It was only later that I realized how fitting it was: Auntie Mae had lived for years in the small Queens neighborhood where I've lived for 18 months. After a detour through our childhood home in the suburbs and my sister's Brooklyn apartment, the end table would be going home.

          

I'm sure Auntie Mae never kept a PlayStation3 on top of this little end table, or had it filled with bad movies and TV on DVD. Still, there was a certain sense of continuity, of relationship, of her being a real person and a part of our lives, when my husband asked me yesterday - he was preparing for a boys' night of watching said bad movies -  "What happened to our copy of The Room?" and I responded "I think it's in Auntie's Mae's end table." It was as natural as if I'd said "I think it's in the bag your mom gave us" or "Check under my sister's books." And it was equally as natural that he responded a few minutes later, "You were right. It was in Auntie Mae's table."

Ben has a hard time keeping my ancestors straight (meanwhile, I know some of his very well), but a tangible object - a whole piece of furniture - the thing that holds our DVDs - sitting right in our living room is hard to ignore, and hard to forget. Ben had never heard of Auntie Mae before 5 years ago. I had always known about her, but never known her. But being privileged to have this heirloom in our home allows us to keep her memory alive, in some small way, in even the most mundane parts of our daily lives.

Auntie Mae's Baptismal Certificate

[GB 26457]

COPY OF RECORD
IN BAPTISMAL REGISTER OF
VISITATION CHURCH
RICHARDS AND VERONA STREETS, BROOKLYN, N.Y.

NAME Mary, child
OF Patrick Mulvaney AND Julia Toner
BORN Jan. 18, 1897 BAPTIZED Feb 4, 1897
SPONSORS John V. Murphy AND Rose McGuine
DATED 10-8-35

REV. Wm. Galloway

A copy of the record of Auntie Mae’s baptism. I’m not sure whether the sponsors are John V. Murphy and Rose McGuine or John D. Murphy and Rose McGuirre, or some combination thereof, but they both intrigue me. We know that the Mulvaneys had cousins, on Julia’s side, named Murphy, and we know that at one point, a McGuirre/McGuine was boarding with the family and working in the same field as Patrick. I’m not sure what the number in the upper right hand corner refers to, but it might end up being a useful reference or index number if we were at the actual church looking up records. (Which is something I ended up not being able to do this Christmas break because of a bad cold that sidelined me this last week, the week I’d planned on dedicating to wandering Brooklyn doing in-person research. Maybe next time I’m home.) The certificate was requested in 1935. I don't know when Auntie Mae was married. Could it have been 1935? She would have likely needed a record of her baptism for that - but did she marry that late, at 38?

Mulvaney family pictures

My mom sent me these, which I believe were scanned by either Joseph or John Griffin a few years ago. The one above has Julia in the middle, in a polka-dot dress, surrounded by her grandkids. Nan is the littlest one in front, with the doll, with her cousin Florence to her left. The other girl is Joan, and behind Joan is her brother Donald. The boy with glasses is George Kessell. In the back row on Julia's left is Grace Mulvaney Jones, and in front of Grace is Steve Kessell. On the far right, with the tie, is Tom Mulvaney.
This is Julia Mulvaney, again in the polka-dot dress, surrounded by her kids. I can identify Nana in the back row, and James is the man in the front row, which means I'd assume that Thomas is standing next Nana in the back. Auntie Mae is second from the left, to the right of Julia, and Grace is on the far right. As far as dates go for these pictures, and I assume they were taken the same day, I'm going to guess somewhere in the area of 1935 or just before? Can anyone tell for sure how old Nan is in the first one? I can't think of any other way to date them. Also, does anyone recognize the house in the background? Where were they?

This is Patrick Mulvaney. He looks like a young man, so the best I can say is late 1800s, early 1900s.

(In the top two pictures, Florence, Joan, Donald, and their father James were identified by Donald's daughter Maureen, whom I stumbled upon on ancestry.com when I noticed that her family tree had our (shared) Julia Toner Mulvaney on it! The wonders of technology and genealogy! Betty and John helped with everyone else.)