Mary Agnes Kenny Robertson: Twelve Days
Mary Agnes Kenny
Robertson
Her husband died on a Monday in January. She died on a Saturday, twelve days later, in the same house where she had watched him die. She was forty-one years old. She had been orphaned at five, raised by an aunt who never married, married at twenty-one, and had given her three children the stability she herself never had. All of it collapsed inside twelve days.
The Mat Maker's Daughter
Born Brooklyn · February 8, 1882Mary Agnes Kenny was born on February 8, 1882, in Brooklyn — the second surviving daughter of John Kenny, the mat maker, and Margaret McKenny. Four days later, on February 12, she was baptized at St. Patrick's Church on the corner of Kent and Willoughby Avenues, a few blocks from the family home. Her sponsors were James Kenny and Mary A. Dunne. The priest was Father Thomas Taaffe.
She was the great-granddaughter of four Irish immigrants. On her father's side: Richard Kenny and Eliza, who had married at St. Paul's Church in Brooklyn in 1843. On her mother's side: George McKenney and Ann Lynch, who had come from Ireland by the late 1840s. All four of those grandparents would be dead within six years of Mary Agnes's birth — Ann Lynch McKenna being the last, in May 1888.
Baptism Certificate — issued May 7, 1924, four months after Mary Agnes's death. Her eighteen-year-old daughter Lillian went to St. Patrick's for the record of her mother's birth.
By the time the certificate itself was written out in 1924, there was no one left to remember the February morning it described. Mary Agnes was dead. Her parents had both been dead for decades. Her sponsors were dead. Her daughter went to the church because the church was the only place that still held the fact of her mother's beginning.
Orphaned at Five
1884 – 1888 · Four Deaths Before She Turned SixMary Agnes was two years old when her mother Margaret McKenny Kenny died of pulmonary consumption on May 24, 1884, at 39 Nostrand Avenue, Brooklyn. She was too young to remember her mother's face. Her sister Elizabeth, five years old, may have had faint memories. The mother who had chosen her name, baptized her, and held her at two was simply gone.
Seven weeks after Margaret died, her infant sister — also named Margaret — died of cholera infantum at 39 Sanford Street, age six months, and was buried in the same plot as their mother at Holy Cross Cemetery. Mary Agnes had lost her mother and her infant sister in seven weeks.
Three years later, in December 1887, her paternal grandmother Eliza Kenny died at Kings County Hospital. In May 1888, her maternal grandmother Ann Lynch McKenna died at 847 Kent Avenue. And in November 1888, her father John Kenny died of pulmonary tuberculosis at St. Catherine's Hospital in Brooklyn. He was forty; she was five.
Four deaths before her sixth birthday. Mother, infant sister, both grandmothers, father. In November 1888, Mary Agnes and her older sister Elizabeth were completely orphaned — and their aunt Mary F. MacKinney, their mother's younger sister, took them in.
Raised by Aunt Maime
1888 – c. 1903 · The Woman Who StayedMary F. MacKinney — "Aunt Maime" to the family — was unmarried, in her late twenties, and had just spent the previous year nursing her own dying mother through a stroke that had left Ann Lynch McKenna bedridden for six months. When Mary's sister Margaret had died in 1884, Aunt Maime had already become the aunt who helped. When the three grandparents and the widower father all died between December 1887 and November 1888, Aunt Maime stopped helping and started raising.
She raised Elizabeth and Mary Agnes for the next thirty-two years. She never married. She supported them through decades of domestic service, factory work, and eventually as a forewoman at a lace works. The full story of that choice — what it cost her, what it gave them — is told in Episode 4: The One Who Stayed. Here, what matters is simply this: Mary Agnes grew up. She survived. She learned to be a daughter to a woman who had chosen to raise her rather than have her own children. And she grew into a young woman who, around the turn of the century, met and married a young Brooklyn man whose family had its own grief story to tell.
Joseph and Mary Agnes
Where Two Brooklyn Families Meet · c. 1903Around 1903, Mary Agnes Kenny married Joseph Robertson. She was approximately twenty-one. He was approximately nineteen. He was the tenth and youngest child of David Paterson Robertson, a Scottish stone cutter who had come from Edinburgh to Brooklyn around 1869, and Elizabeth Gray, who had died of a stroke the previous year (1902). Joseph had known his own share of loss — five of his older siblings had died before he was born, and his mother had died when he was eighteen. Within six years of his marriage to Mary Agnes, his father would disappear on a trapping expedition in the Georgia swamps and never be found, leaving Joseph placing newspaper appeals in October 1910 for any word of him. (Joseph's full story is told in The Son Who Searched, Episode 7 of the Robertson series.)
The tenth child of the stone cutter married the daughter of the mat maker. Two Brooklyn immigrant families — Scottish Presbyterian on his side, Irish Catholic on hers — joined in one marriage. The religious difference would persist to the grave, literally: Joseph would be buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn with his mother Elizabeth; Mary Agnes would be buried at a Catholic cemetery in New Jersey.
Joseph Robertson
c. 1905 · Brooklyn
Mary Agnes Kenny
M. V. Carberry Studio · 179 Myrtle Ave, Brooklyn
Three Children, Three Addresses
1905 – 1920 · The Brooklyn YearsJoseph and Mary Agnes began their married life at 125 Ryerson Street, Brooklyn — in Ward 7, the same neighborhood where Mary Agnes's parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had lived. Their first child was born there on July 9, 1905: Lillian Josephine Robertson. Mary Agnes was twenty-two. Joseph was a shipping clerk, twenty-five.
Lillian's birth certificate — the eldest, born on Ryerson Street. The granddaughter who, eighteen years later, would be the informant on her mother's death.
Two years later, at 808 Marcy Avenue, their second daughter was born on August 29, 1907: Helen Gladys Robertson. Mary Agnes was twenty-three. Joseph had been promoted to clerk.
Helen's birth certificate — second daughter, 808 Marcy Avenue. Helen would inherit the McKenny face.
Thirteen years passed. Joseph moved from shipping clerk to clerk to salesman, eventually managing the block department at the Coston Supply Company of Manhattan, well known in steamship circles. By 1920 the family had moved to 68 East 5th Street, Brooklyn. And on January 9, 1920, fifteen years after Helen, Mary Agnes gave birth to their third child: Joseph Jay Robertson. She was thirty-seven. Joseph was thirty-six. The 1920 census, taken weeks later, recorded "Naturalized Citizen" next to Joseph's name — the son of Scottish immigrants had formalized his American identity. There is no obvious record of Mary Agnes's naturalization, presumably unnecessary as she had been born in the United States.
Joseph Jay's birth certificate — the third child, born fifteen years after Helen. Four years old when his parents died.
The Photograph on the Lawn
12 Elm Road, North Caldwell, New Jersey · c. 1923Sometime in the early 1920s — perhaps after Joseph Jay was born, perhaps for reasons of Mary Agnes's health — the family left Brooklyn for North Caldwell, New Jersey, settling at 12 Elm Road. Joseph continued to commute to Manhattan. The country air of North Caldwell may have been intended as respite from Brooklyn's density and smoke. Tuberculosis, the disease that had killed Mary Agnes's mother and her grandfather, was already taking hold.
Around 1923, someone — we do not know who — took a photograph on the lawn outside 12 Elm Road. It was taken approximately one year before the twelve days that ended everything.
12 Elm Road, c. 1923 — Elizabeth "Aunt Lillie" on the left, Mary Agnes at center back, an unidentified woman on the right. Helen kneels in the foreground with her arm around young Joseph Jay. Taken approximately one year before the twelve days.
In the same photograph, if you look carefully at Helen kneeling in the foreground, you can see a face that had been passed forward through three generations. The tintype of Helen's grandmother Margaret, taken at Nichols Studio on Broadway around 1870, shows a young woman with the same oval face, the same direct bearing, the same strong cheekbones as Helen here at fifteen in 1923. Margaret had died of tuberculosis in 1884 at thirty-three. Mary Agnes would die of tuberculosis in January 1924 at forty. Helen would die of tuberculosis in 1942 at thirty-five. The same disease, across three generations, traveling with the same face.
The three-generation thread: Margaret McKenny Kenny (1851–1884), pulmonary consumption, age 33. Mary Agnes Kenny Robertson (1882–1924), pulmonary tuberculosis, age 41. Helen Robertson Verhoek (1907–1942), tuberculosis, age 35. The McKenny face and the McKenny disease traveled together through three generations of women.
Monday, January 14, 1924
Mountainside Hospital, Glen Ridge, New JerseyJoseph Robertson died on Monday, January 14, 1924, at Mountainside Hospital in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. He was thirty-nine years old. The cause was cerebral hemorrhage — the same type of stroke that had killed his mother Elizabeth Gray Robertson twenty-two years earlier, in July 1902. He had been a patient for less than two days. He had been admitted on January 13. By the afternoon of the 14th he was dead.
Death Certificate — Joseph Robertson, January 14, 1924. The same cause of death that had killed his mother twenty-two years earlier.
The Brooklyn newspapers carried his obituary:
Joseph Robertson Dies — Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 1924.
The Masonic lodges issued their notices. Brooklyn Elks Lodge No. 22 and Cosmopolitan Lodge No. 585 called their brethren to Masonic services at Fairchild Funeral Parlors, 86 Lefferts Place, Thursday evening January 17 at 8 o'clock. Interment was at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn on January 18 — where Joseph joined his mother Elizabeth and his brother William and, in a separate grave, his sister Elizabeth who had died as an infant. He did not join Mary Agnes, who was still alive, at her Catholic cemetery. They would never be buried together.
Mary Agnes was dying when they buried him.
Saturday, January 26, 1924
12 Elm Road, North Caldwell · Twelve Days LaterTwelve days after Joseph's death, on Saturday January 26, 1924, Mary Agnes Kenny Robertson died at the family residence at 12 Elm Road, North Caldwell. She was forty years old, eleven months, and eighteen days. The cause was pulmonary tuberculosis. Duration: one year. Contracted: Brooklyn. She had been attended by Dr. Geo. E. Harrison of Caldwell, New Jersey, from November 1923 to January 26, 1924 — the same three months in which her husband had gone from apparently well to dead.
The death certificate named her father as John Kenny and her mother's maiden name as Margaret McKenny. It named her birthplace as the United States, her mother's birthplace as Ireland. It recorded that she had given birth to three children and that three were still living. The informant was Lillian Robertson, her eighteen-year-old daughter, at 12 Elm Road. The burial was at Immaculate Conception Cemetery, Upper Montclair, New Jersey, on January 29, 1924. The undertaker was Thomas H. Ireland of East Orange — the same undertaker who eleven years later would bury Aunt Maime in Brooklyn.
Death Certificate — Mary Agnes Kenny Robertson, January 26, 1924. Pulmonary tuberculosis. Informant: Lillian Robertson, her eighteen-year-old daughter.
Obituary — Mary Agnes Robertson, January 26, 1924. "Wife of the late Joseph Robertson." The late Joseph Robertson was twelve days dead.
The Three Orphans
18, 16, 4 · January 26, 1924When Mary Agnes died on January 26, 1924, her three children were left without either parent:
The pattern Aunt Maime had established in November 1888 — when Mary Agnes herself was the orphaned five-year-old — now repeated. Elizabeth Kenny, Mary Agnes's sister, stepped forward. The VA Master Index Card Elizabeth held would later list her permanent address as 12 Elm Road, North Caldwell — not her own Brooklyn address at all. When Lillian needed a guardian, Elizabeth became one. When Mary Agnes died, her sister — herself just married to John Corbett four years earlier — moved toward the Robertson children and stayed there. Mary Agnes had inherited her life from Aunt Maime's decision in 1888. She bequeathed the same pattern, inside twelve days, to her own sister.
May 7, 1924
Lillian Walks to St. Patrick'sFour months and eleven days after Mary Agnes died, her eighteen-year-old daughter Lillian Josephine Robertson walked to the rectory at 285 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn — the parish office of St. Patrick's Church. She asked Rev. John F. Buck, the pastor, for a copy of her mother's baptismal record. Rev. Buck turned to the baptismal register, found the entry for February 12, 1882 — Mary Agnes Kenny, parents John Kenny and Margaret McKenny, sponsors James Kenny and Mary A. Dunne — and copied it onto a Certificate of Baptism form. He signed it. He dated it May 7, 1924.
That certificate is the document reproduced in the gallery of this page. It is the oldest surviving document that names Mary Agnes directly, even though it was created forty-two years after the event it records and four months after the subject's death. Lillian went to the church that day for reasons she did not explain in any surviving record. Perhaps for the Social Security application that would eventually follow. Perhaps for settlement of the estate. Perhaps simply because her mother was dead and she needed to hold, in her hand, a piece of paper with her mother's beginning on it.
She was the same age her mother had been when her mother's parents died. She had, as her mother had, an aunt who would take her in. Lillian went to the church and brought her mother's birth home.
Immaculate Conception Cemetery
Upper Montclair, New Jersey · The Plot That Would Hold ThreeMary Agnes was buried at Immaculate Conception Cemetery in Upper Montclair on January 29, 1924, following a High Mass of Requiem at St. Aloysius Church in Caldwell. There is no headstone marking her grave. The family had lost two income earners in twelve days; the stone that should have marked her resting place was never purchased. What would come in the next two decades would fill the same plot.
Three Robertson women — grandmother, mother, infant daughter — in one Catholic plot in Upper Montclair. Joseph Robertson never joined them; he remained at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn with his Scottish-Presbyterian family. The religious divide of the 1903 marriage persisted in death. Lillian would later be buried with her husband John Miles O'Brien, separate from both parents. Joseph Jay Jr., the boy in the sailor suit, would live to adulthood and be buried elsewhere as well.
The Disease That Traveled
A Three-Generation ThreadThe disease that killed Mary Agnes had killed her mother. The disease that killed her mother had killed her grandfather. And the disease that had killed her mother would kill her daughter Helen in 1942. Tuberculosis moved through the female line of the McKenny family the way some families pass down inherited jewelry. It was there for George McKenney in 1870, for Margaret in 1884, for John Kenny in 1888, for Mary Agnes in 1924, and for Helen in 1942.
This is not the kind of pattern a researcher wants to name. It is the kind of pattern the records force the researcher to name. Four death certificates in five decades, across three generations, give the same cause: pulmonary consumption, pulmonary phthisis, pulmonary tuberculosis. Brooklyn Irish Catholic families of the late nineteenth century lived with this disease at such consistent levels that it was simply part of the household. Mary Agnes contracted it in Brooklyn, according to her own death certificate — before the family moved to the North Caldwell country air that came too late. She lived with it for one documented year. She died of it at forty.
The McKenny line of tuberculosis: George McKenney (1870, age 42) — Margaret McKenny Kenny (1884, age 33) — John Kenny (1888, age 40) — Mary Agnes Kenny Robertson (1924, age 40) — Helen Robertson Verhoek (1942, age 35). Five deaths in seventy-two years, all in the same family, all of the same disease. The face that reappeared in Helen in 1923 carried, with it, the end Helen would share.
Mary Agnes Kenny Robertson
Vital Statistics| Born | February 8, 1882, Brooklyn, New York |
| Baptized | February 12, 1882, St. Patrick's R.C. Church, Kent & Willoughby Aves, Brooklyn. Sponsors: James Kenny and Mary A. Dunne. Officiant: Rev. Thomas Taaffe |
| Parents | John Kenny (c. 1846 Brooklyn – November 30, 1888, tuberculosis, age ~42); Margaret McKenny (1851 Brooklyn – May 24, 1884, consumption, age 33) |
| Older sister | Elizabeth "Aunt Lillian" Kenny Corbett (July 28, 1879 – February 25, 1950) |
| Raised by | Aunt Mary F. "Maime" MacKinney (c. 1860 – April 5, 1935) from November 1888, age 5 |
| Married | Joseph Robertson (September 7, 1884 Brooklyn – January 14, 1924 Glen Ridge, N.J.), approximately 1903. Son of David Paterson Robertson (Scottish stone cutter) and Elizabeth Gray |
| Children | Lillian Josephine Robertson (July 9, 1905 – April 24, 1991); Helen Gladys Robertson Verhoek (August 29, 1907 – 1942); Joseph Jay Robertson Jr. (January 9, 1920 – after 1955) |
| Residences | 125 Ryerson Street, Brooklyn (1905); 808 Marcy Avenue, Brooklyn (1907); Queens, Ward 29 (1910); Brooklyn Ward 19/24 (1915); 68 East 5th Street, Brooklyn (1920); 12 Elm Road, North Caldwell, New Jersey (c. 1922–1924) |
| Final illness | Pulmonary tuberculosis contracted Brooklyn; documented duration: one year. Attended by Dr. Geo. E. Harrison, Caldwell, N.J., November 1923 to January 26, 1924 |
| Widowed | Monday, January 14, 1924 — for twelve days |
| Died | Saturday, January 26, 1924, approximately 11:00 A.M., 12 Elm Road, North Caldwell, N.J.; age 40 years, 11 months, 18 days |
| Requiem Mass | Tuesday, January 29, 1924, 9:00 A.M., St. Aloysius Church, Caldwell, N.J. |
| Buried | Immaculate Conception Cemetery, Upper Montclair, New Jersey, January 29, 1924. No individual headstone. Later joined in the same plot by infant granddaughter Janet Verhoek (1931) and daughter Helen (1942) |
| Undertaker | Thomas H. Ireland, East Orange, New Jersey |
| Informant | Lillian J. Robertson (daughter, age 18), 12 Elm Road, North Caldwell |
Mary Agnes Kenny Robertson was the great-grandmother of the researcher. Her daughter Lillian Josephine Robertson O'Brien was the researcher's grandmother. Many of the documents used to reconstruct this biography — the portrait at the M.V. Carberry Studio, the 1923 photograph on the lawn at 12 Elm Road, the 1882 baptism certificate that Lillian obtained on May 7, 1924 — were preserved in the researcher's family archive, passed down through Lillian and through Lillian's daughter Barbara O'Brien Hamall. The Immaculate Conception Cemetery burial information, including the absence of an individual headstone and the shared-plot burials of Janet Verhoek (1931) and Helen Robertson Verhoek (1942), was confirmed directly with the cemetery. Research by Mary Hamall Morales, 2018–2026.
Continue the Series
Six generations of women who stayed, kept, and remembered. One Brooklyn family, 1810–1942.
Return to Series Index Episode 4: The One Who Stayed Companion: The Son Who SearchedDocument Gallery
Primary sources documenting Mary Agnes Kenny Robertson (1882–1924) · Click any image to enlarge
Mary Agnes — Portrait
M.V. Carberry Studio, Brooklyn
Joseph Robertson — Portrait
c. 1905, Brooklyn
1882 — Baptism Certificate
Obtained May 7, 1924 by Lillian
1905 — NY State Census
Weeks before Lillian's birth
1905 — Lillian's Birth Cert
125 Ryerson Street, Brooklyn
1907 — Helen's Birth Cert
808 Marcy Avenue, Brooklyn
1910 — Federal Census
Queens Ward 29 — salesman
1915 — NY State Census
Brooklyn — family stable
1920 — Joseph Jay Birth
68 East 5th Street, Brooklyn
1920 — Federal Census
"Naturalized Citizen" — Joseph
c. 1923 — The Lawn Photo
12 Elm Road, one year before
Jan 14, 1924 — Joseph's Death
Cerebral hemorrhage, age 39
1924 — Joseph's Obituary
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
1924 — Masonic Notices
Brooklyn Elks & Cosmopolitan Lodge
Jan 26, 1924 — Her Death
Pulmonary tuberculosis, age 40
1924 — Her Obituary
"Wife of the late Joseph"
