Mary Anne Corkey (1870 - 1942)

Born 29 Apr 1870 in Ballylane, County Armagh, Ireland

Ancestors

Died 1942 at about age 71 in Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States

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Biography

Mary Corkey was born in Ireland.

Mary Corkey migrated from Ireland to the United States.

Mary was born in 1871 in Ballylane, County Armagh. She was the daughter of Samuel Corkey and Sarah Jane McDowell.^[1]

Mary did not accompany her three sisters when they emigrated in 1896 but sailed from Londonderry in 1906, arriving in New York on the ship Caledonia in April. She spent a short time with her sisters, Sarah and Ellen, in Lowell but then joined Lizzie in Los Angeles.

There, she worked as a domestic servant with the Hunt family in a middle class Los Angeles neighbourhood. They owned a Packard motor car, which in those days was a symbol of affluence but Mary had a spartan existence, living in a tiny house in the back yard with no electricity or running water.

Perhaps it was the lack of other distractions that prompted her to write home with reminiscences about her family from earlier generations that may have been forgotten, going all the way back to her great-grandfather Samuel and his six sons.

Her sister Lizzie died in 1908 but Mary kept in touch with her young daughters and visited them at the water company where their father worked after 1914, just as they visited her in her spartan hut. David McReynolds (a son of Lizzie's daughter Elizabeth Grace) remembers visiting with his mother many years later. “Her servant quarters were down the driveway at the back. It wasn’t a mansion and her employers didn’t treat her that well. I loved her accent and her serving of tea. What hurt me was the pure hatred great Aunt Mary had for the ‘papist southern Irish’. She was a wonderful person, able to quote Shakespeare from memory and the hatred seemed so out of place.”

She passed away in 1942 and is buried in Los Angeles beside her sister.

Sources

1. ↑ https://civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/images/birth_returns/births_1870/03350/2228133.pdf

• Correspondence she wrote to family back home "Mary's Letter"
• Always Turn The Page: The Corkey Story 1600-2000 by David Robinson (public domain 2010)