Most of us know little about our great-grandparents, eight distinct people who, on average, contribute 12.5% of our DNA. That’s a lot of genes that make us who we are. Maybe it’s a crooked smile, a cowlick, a sense of humor or a strength you didn’t know you had. It came from somewhere.
And so we begin Year Three of a global pandemic, and I go searching online for resiliency. I find Mary Kennedy Clifford, my mother’s paternal grandmother. Born in St. Louis in 1877 to Irish immigrants John Kennedy and Catherine McKenna, at 22 she married Tom Clifford, a young man from the neighborhood who thought he might give it a go as a pro baseball player. That’s another story.
In this one, love prevails over baseball, and they marry in 1899. Within a year, they have their first child — a boy also named Tom. Two years after that comes John, then Ed, Bill, Rich and Hugh. Six boys in 12 years, all living under one roof on 11th Street, part of an acre now occupied by an exit ramp of Interstate 70. Her mother, now widowed, lived with the family, too. Can you imagine running that house? Cook, clean, mend, eat, pray, love — day after day, with no modern amenities. A life centered around family and St. Michael’s Catholic Church.
And then came a day that would change Mary forever. It was always a vague family story, but this confirms it: Newspapers from Sept. 9, 1912, detailing the drowning of Tom Clifford, age 12, who told his parents he was going to play baseball one Sunday afternoon. But the other team never showed up, so the group decided to go swimming in the Mississippi River. For Tom, it was his first, and last, time.
The wake was at the family home. “Please omit flowers,” the obituary read. At the time, Mary was five months pregnant with her seventh child — a girl, Margaret, who would be born in January and die less than seven months later. “Cholera infantium,” the death certificate read. A year after that, Mary’s mom, Catherine, died at 71. “Arterio sclerosis.”
How do you survive a three-year stretch like that? I like to think faith had something to do with it. And family. And rising every day to take care of business. Cook. Clean. Mend. Eat. Pray. Love. Mary would have her youngest child the next year, 1915 — a boy named Joe. She’d live through World War I, the Spanish Flu and half of the Great Depression until dying at home on Oct. 24, 1936. “Chronic endocarditis,” the death certificate read. A broken heart.
Her six surviving sons would live for decades, see many wonders of the 20th century and spawn 15 grandchildren and close to 50 great-grandchildren. I’m one of them. So are some of you reading this newspaper.
The current stretch we’re in? We can make it through. It’s in our DNA.
Originally published in the Webster-Kirkwood Times Jan. 24, 2022.
Click here to read a newspaper account of the drowning of Tom Clifford:
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