Margaret O'Brien Lastinec
Margaret O'Brien was born on 20 September 1911 at Green Street in Callan, County Kilkenny, Ireland, the date her own Social Security records give. Callan is a small market town in the south of Ireland, about ten miles south west of the city of Kilkenny. Her father, John O'Brien, was a labourer born in Callan in 1877. Her mother, Emily, formerly Schunt, was a cook born in Switzerland in 1875. Her parents had met as servants in the same house in Westchester County, New York, married there in 1906, and moved to Callan. Margaret was their first child: on census night that April her parents had been married five years and had no children. Emily registered the birth herself a month later, and the registrar wrote the baby's name as Margerita.
In 1924, when Margaret was twelve, the family went back to America. She sailed from Cobh with both parents on 23 August 1924 on the Samaria, listed as a child of 12, and named her grandfather John O'Brien of Green View, Callan, as her nearest relative in Ireland. They landed at Boston on 30 August, bound for the home of John Smith of West Cornwall, Connecticut, and settled in New Haven. In April 1930 Margaret, 18, was living with her parents in the twelfth ward of New Haven and working as a clerk in a department store. Her father became a citizen in 1931, and she became one through him. She held a United States passport issued on 25 June 1931, and that summer she went to Ireland with her parents, sailing home from Cobh on 2 October 1931 on the President Roosevelt. By 1935 she had moved with her mother to Philadelphia. In April 1940 the two of them shared a house in the twenty fourth ward of the city: Emily, 65, worked at a distillery, and Margaret, 28 and single, kept the house. Her Social Security number was issued in Pennsylvania.
That the Margaret O'Brien of Philadelphia in 1940 is the Margaret O'Brien who married in New Jersey three years later rests on her name, her age, her Irish birth, the Pennsylvania Social Security number and the birth date of 20 September 1911 in her own records. No document names her parents and her husband together.
In 1943, as Margaret O'Brien, she married Stephen Michael Lastinec in New Jersey. He was 40, born in 1903 in the Slovak lands of the Kingdom of Hungary, and had worked as a machinist at the Navy Yard. He had four children from his first marriage, to Catherine Welsh, which had ended in divorce. He had married a second time in 1940, to a woman named Rose. Margaret and Stephen had three children of their own: Eileen M., born about 1944, Alice M., about 1947, and John S., born on 1 March 1949.
On 15 April 1950 the census found the family at 111 Nicholson Road in Gloucester Township, Camden County, New Jersey, a house Stephen had owned since before 1940. Margaret was 38, born in Ireland, and kept the house. With her were her stepdaughter Lillian, 17, and her own three, Eileen, Alice, 2, and John, 1. Stephen worked forty hours a week in a metal factory.
Stephen died in November 1963, when Margaret was 52 and her youngest was 14. She did not remarry. In September 1973 she applied for her Social Security benefits from Woodbury, Gloucester County. She died on 14 January 1995, aged 83, with her last home in the Woodbury area.
Her stepson Stephen Jr. was described at his death in 2016 as the stepson of the late Daisy. Daisy was a common nickname for Margaret, so this is probably her.
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Cite: Heirology, "Margaret O'Brien Lastinec (1911-1995)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/margaret-m-lastinec-1911-1995-45e28d.