Family Fortunes: A Limerick mother of 13 who ended up with none

Over the past few years I have been researching my family history and have marvelled at the sacrifices and hardships of my ancestors.

I have huge admiration for my great-grandmother Mary Burke. She was born in 1843, just before the famine. Aged 17 she married John Burke, who came from a neighbouring parish and was 10 years her senior. They rented a farm near Croom in Co Limerick, and over the next 25 years she had 13 children, all of whom lived.

However, in 1885 the children began to emigrate to the US. In all, nine of them emigrated. That was only the first of the tragedies this woman endured. Of the nine who emigrated, she only met two of them again.

One daughter, Kitty, returned home in 1904 for a short visit after almost 10 years in the US, only to leave again in a few weeks, taking her 18-year-old sister Margaret with her to Chicago. Three of Mary’s emigrant children died in her lifetime, all succumbing to TB in the US.

In 1908 her husband died, and she continued to live on the farm with her son Michael and his family. The most poignant loss was yet to come, when in 1928 Michael died of a stroke. It is incredible to think that, after having 13 children, she ended up living on the family farm with her daughter-in-law.

She died in December 1930. The newspaper notice of her death is very sparse and gives no hint of the life she led, even referring to her, in the convention of the times as “Mrs John Burke”.

There is no mention of a funeral Mass. She was taken from the house directly to the graveyard in Kilmacow. There was no Mother’s Day in her era, but if anyone deserved a bunch of flowers, she did.

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