Annie Gertrude Costigan

Her early life

In 1901, the Costigan family was destitute. The census has them living at an unspecified address in Duke Ward. They may have moved so as to be closer to the home for incurables where Denis Costigan lay dying. Of what he was dying we cannot be certain. The given cause of death was rheumatism but that is not a fatal disease. It is, however, possible to die from complications arising from rheumatism. We have no way of knowing whether that is what killed him. All we know is that he was suffering from rheumatism when he died.

Things had gone very badly for Denis (pronounced Dennie) in recent years. His empire of sailor boarding houses had slowly collapsed with the replacement of sailing ships by steam. The last had been closed and had reverted to a family dwelling. He would shortly die and his wife Mary would follow him a year later, a victim of tuberculosis. His eldest son, James, was a “clerk", which was probably just a euphemism for a boy who hoped to be a hustler as his father had been. (Shocking as this is to us, none of the Costigan children could have had more than a Grade 5 education, if that.) John and Mary, both in their teens, were apprentices at a bottle-brush factory—if that sounds Dickensian, it’s because it was. Catherine (so baptized but known to us as Kathleen) was seven years old and Josephine was five. None of these was earning enough money to support the family. Annie, more about her later, was not living with the family in 1901. In the normal course of events, the soon to be orphaned children would have been put up for adoption and the family would have disappeared. That isn’t what happened.

What did happen is that the family held together. They would get set up in life and would have children who would rise to prominence. That rise is so impressive as to be inconceivable. Even in the good times, the Costigans had been ghetto dwellers far excluded from polite society. And yet the children of the youngest surviving daughter Kathleen would be friends with the Hazen family, who were from the very upper crust of Saint John. No one living in the Irish Catholic ghetto in Saint John in 1901 would have thought such a thing possible and most people in upper reaches of Saint John society would have done everything in their power to prevent it happening.

The heroine of this story lived at this address in 1901.

I can’t be certain it was that house because I don’t know when it was built. Streets also get renumbered. But the address we know for certain: 264 Germain Street. This was the home of John S Thomas. A ship’s pilot, he lived here with his wife, his brother, his sister in law a lodger and an Irish servant, Annie Gertrude Costigan.

As a maid of all work, Annie’s day started at six am, when she would have gotten up to light the fire. Then she would make breakfast and, while the family was eating, she’d make all the beds. Her day would continue like that until the family had all finished dinner and the dishes were cleaned and put away. That’s 13 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. She would have been allowed to leave the house to go to church on Sunday morning for mass and perhaps to attend a dance on Saturday night after her work was done.

In 1901, Annie Gertrude was thirteen years old!

We look down on domestic service now but her getting that job was a major achievement on her part. Domestic service was the best-paying job an Irish girl could get in those days. She was the principle breadwinner for her family. When her brother James died, Annie was the one who purchased a grave. She kept working as a domestic until all her brothers and sisters were set up in life. Only then, in her early thirties, does she gets married. Once married, she gets the heck out of Dodge, and who could blame her. Now, Annie Campbell, she moves first to Halifax and then to Boston. Her story after that is pretty well known in the family. I don’t know that she ever told anyone about her time in service.

Her name

In later years, Annie gave her name as “Anna” when filling out official documents, probably out of shame thinking that her parents had made a mistake in baptizing were with a diminutive. They had not. “Annie” is a good Irish name (one that would be good to bring back in the family). It is derived from “Nainsí” which is the Gaelic form of Agnes. That, in turn, is derived from the Greek hagios and Hebrew qâdosh. When applied to a person, it meant “hallowed, consecrated, set apart for a sacred purpose or office, made ‘holy to God’.” (It’s the feast of Saint Agnes today.)

Aunt Annie had a harder childhood that you can imagine. At home, she lived in conditions that you only find in third world countries today (the atmosphere on Germain would have, despite the hard work and long hours, been considerably more sanitary than the cholera- and tuberculosis-infested slum she grew up in and that may have saved her life). She saw her mother and father and nine of her twelve siblings die horrible, lingering deaths. She worked long, hard hours to support her family when no one else could and she put off her own happiness until everyone else was taken care of. If you are descended from her, her sister Kathleen, or her brother John, you owe her a huge debt.