My maternal great-grandmother Margaret Mary Barry was born in Kinsale, Ireland on January 4, 1877. According to the Registrar General of Marriages, Births, and Deaths in Ireland: Fourteenth Annual Report 1877, there were 100 baby girls born in Kinsale between January and March 1877. Two women died in childbirth during the same time period. The report is available at this link.
Sadly, one of those women was my great-great-grandmother Margaret Mary Coleman. She was 18 years old when she died the day after giving birth to her first child.
In 1877, the leading causes of maternal mortality were infection from unsafe birthing practices, excessive bleeding without the benefit of transfusions, and convulsions due to high blood pressure. The registration of Margaret Barry’s (née Coleman) death is available online at this link. The cause is listed as puerperal peritonitis (postpartum infection). Her husband Thomas Barry, a farmer, was present at her death.
My grandmother told us that newborn Margaret was swaddled in her grandmother’s apron and brought home to be raised by her grandmother until Thomas remarried several years later. The birth registration for my great-grandmother Margaret Mary Barry is available at this link.
Like many young Irish women, Margaret Mary Barry left Ireland to work as a maid in Boston, Massachusetts. She met and married Cornelius Finbar Deasy on August 22, 1901, in Boston. Margaret and Cornelius returned to Ireland to start their family. They made their immigration journey in the 1910s to settle in Melrose, Massachusetts. Margaret had eight children in 17 years. Her baby Cornelius died during the flu epidemic of 1918.
Margaret died on May 9, 1964, at the age of 87, and is buried in Mattapan, Massachusetts.
To my mother’s mother’s mother–because you endured, I am here. I did not know your voice, your dreams, or your fears, yet I know that you lived.
Tracing North 