At the age of 14, Mary Rafferty, an Irish Catholic from Tuam, County Galway, Ireland, sailed aboard a three-masted clipper cargo ship from Liverpool, England, around Cape Horn to San Francisco in 1864. Her father had arranged passage by contracting Mary into seven years of indentured servitude. After serving her seven years with a family in exclusive South Park, Mary Rafferty married Michael Costello, an Irishman born in Boston and 15 years her senior. Mary and Michael Costello had four children: Mary Bessie, Margaret Ann, Catherine Frances (my grandmother), and William.

When Michael died in 1881, his younger brother, John Frederick Costello, arrived from Boston to manage the family affairs and assist Mary and her children. A year later, Mary married John and began a "second" family. Mary's youngest daughter, Catherine, met a dapper Jewish Prussian on the Mission Street car on her commute to work. When Catherine married Barney Hirschberg in 1902, Mary would have nothing to do with them. In the aftermath of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, the Costello and Hirschberg families came together.

This is the story of an Irish Catholic immigrant, who raised seven children, struggled through econmic crises and natural disasters, bought property in San Francisco and Marin County, and did not read or write.

Interviews with my aunt and great aunt's daughter provided the backdrop for my book, "A San Francisco Family Portrait." The lives of this family were intertwined with San Francisco history and districts, the Irish Catholic community, the labor movement of the 1800's, the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, the expansion of housing into the sand dunes toward Ocean Beach, and the coming of electricity, the telephone, and the automobile.

Est. publish date: October 2012
Sally Katherine Hirschberg Maxwell, May 2011