Margaret Marie Madigan

Born October 17, 1879 in Portland, Oregon. She married February 15, 1911, at the Cathedral Parish in Portland, Oregon and worked as dressmaker. She died September 25, 1959 in Ideal Rest Home, Gresham, Oregon.

• Working as a nurse at 40 Ella Street by 1896, aged sixteen.

Becoming Head of the House

Margaret Marie Madigan was born on October 17, 1879, in Portland, Oregon, to Irish immigrants Cornelius Madigan and Anna Murphy. She worked as a young woman minding children, packing brooms at Zan Brothers, and as a dressmaker, and in 1901, at twenty-one, became the practical head of the household after her mother's death, a role her grandson said made her into “a very practical hard-worker.” She married John Baptiste Leineweber at the Cathedral Parish in Portland on February 15, 1911.

A Portland Irish-Catholic Life

Margaret was deeply woven into Portland's Irish-Catholic social world for half a century, serving as founding president of Division No. 2 of the Ladies' Auxiliary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in 1908, helping organize its dances at the old Murlark Hall, and later remaining active for decades in the Cathedral Altar Society and the mothers' clubs of Columbia University and the University of Portland, where her sons studied. Her son Peter remembered her as a fatalist with “a heart as big as all outdoors” who fed and sheltered anyone who came to the kitchen door hungry during the Depression, insisted the family put forty percent of its income into life insurance (a decision that proved its worth when her husband died relatively young), and held the household's purse strings, doling out money to family members as needed. She loved card games, especially “500,” which she preferred to the more fashionable bridge.

Later Years

During the Second World War, Margaret and her daughter and sister filled “ditty bags” of small comforts for the Red Cross to send overseas after her son Thomas, serving on Guadalcanal, wrote home describing how appreciated they were. In her later years she lived with her brother and cousin at the family's longtime home on NW Glisan Street before moving to a Gresham nursing home. She died at the Ideal Rest Home in Gresham on September 25, 1959.