Anna O'Brien
Anna O'Brien was born on 15 August 1912 at Castletownroche, a village on the River Awbeg in north County Cork. Her birth was registered in the Fermoy district as Hannah O'Brien, daughter of a mother whose maiden name was Flynn. The one O'Brien and Flynn couple living at Castletownroche in those years was Cornelius O'Brien, a labourer, and Ellen Flynn, who had married in the Castletownroche chapel in January 1905. In April 1911 they were living in house 13 in the village with five children, Mary, Margaret, Ellen, Cornelius and William. Hannah was the sixth. When she emigrated in 1930 her brother Cornelius was still at Castletownroche, a sister was already in Hartford, and the uncle she went to was a Flynn.
She left Ireland in 1930, at seventeen, with an American immigration visa issued at Cobh the November before. On 16 March she sailed from Cobh on the liner Arabic, and she landed at New York on 24 March. The passenger list calls her a domestic servant, 5 feet 4, with a fresh complexion, brown hair and blue eyes. It names her nearest relative at home as her brother, Cornelius O'Brien of Rahard, Castletownroche, and says her passage was paid by her sister, Miss M. O'Brien of 18 Cedar Street, Hartford. She was going to join her uncle, Eugene Flynn, at 89 Martin Street in Hartford. A few weeks later the census found her there, in the house of Eugene, an Irishman of 47, with his wife Katherine and their six American-born children, the eldest only five years older than she was. In 1937 she married Robert H. Waters, a Hartford man two years older, and they were married 57 years. Their daughter Ellen was born in September 1938, Barbara in June 1941, and then a son, Robert William. In 1950 the family was living at Hartford.
She was Ann to her friends and Anna O'Brien Waters in print. Her husband died in October 1994. She died on Saturday, 6 July 1996, aged 83, at a convalescent home in the Hartford area, after her last days in the Greenwood Rehabilitation Unit. The funeral went from the Farley-Sullivan Funeral Home at Wethersfield to a Mass at St. Augustine Church in Hartford, and she was buried beside her husband at Rose Hill Memorial Park, Rocky Hill. She left her three children, eight grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren.
Sources
If Anna O'Brien is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "Anna O'Brien (1912-1996)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/anna-o-brien-1912-1996-5c248f.