Margaret Magill, née McNeill, died on April 6, 1943, at 36 Atlantic Avenue, Belfast, of myocarditis resulting from bronchopneumonia. the 1943 Belfast Street Directory lists 36 Atlantic Avenue as
the residence of her son, Arthur H. Magill. The death certificate gives her age, impossibly, as 73. She had lived at 37 Hamilton St., Belfast, from 1908 through 1939, but in 1943 the home was listed as 'vacant'. One presumes that, an aged lady, she moved in with one of her children.
Our first direct record of Maggie is her marriage in 1876, at St MacNissi's in Larne, Co. Antrim. Here's the civil certificate:
Note that while her husband's father, Arthur Magill, is listed as 'deceased', her father Daniel is not.
Maggie and Daniel lived in a tenement in Trow Lane, Larne. They proceeded to have 10 children in the next 19 years.
Her streak was interrupted when her husband died of a cerebral hemorhage in 1895, at the listed age of 50. He was a carter, which meant he likely operated a hand-cart; I expect aneurisms were an occupational hazard.
Left with 10 kids and no visible means of support, Maggie went to work. In the 1901 census, her family was split in two. She was living as a housekeeper for a single sailor, Patrick Blair, at 61 Pound Street in Larne, with five of her kids, including the youngest. The other five were at 100 Lindsey Street in Belfast; the Belfast street directory lists the owner as 'A Magill, clerk', almost certainly 20 year old Arthur. They were gone by 1907; but by the next year Maggie had acquired a house at 37 Hamilton Street in Central Belfast.
The reunited family (nearly; Nora was working as a domestic elsewhere) had some fun with the 1911 Census by answering it entirely in Irish (which made it very difficult to find.) One can see the distracted annotations of the census taker, trying to translate this into English.
Most of the kids married, three of them to three siblings of the Anglin family, which meant my mother had several double-first-cousins. I'm pretty sure Arthur also married, but I haven't found the documentation. I don't know what happened to Margaret Anne.
