Featured Vatican Letter: I Hope it Worked

This was a curiosity to me, and, fingers crossed, I'm hoping it worked.

I am finding various people with the same last name, Ahern, in Portland Oregon, but have not yet dialed this in. I'm hoping that @Debora with her insane research skills might be able to (again) help me.

My wife thinks this is a weird thing to buy, but I'm hoping it turned out well, and that there are relatives around.

Thanks for looking.

 

Interesting that the stationery is not customized for a particular Vatican Secretary of State or the Pope he served, in this case Pius XII. Very thrifty.

 

Complicated to be Pope during WW2, for sure.

 

There were Aherns in Portland including a mother and daughter Mary but the daughter, who seems to be about the right age (b. 1886), had no issue. In terms of etiquette, "Mrs. Mary" would indicate a widow (although it's possible an uneducated woman of the period might refer to herself as such.) The framing may well be contemporary to the letter as Gunnary's was in business as early as the 1940s and telephone exchanges were eliminated in Portland in the mid-1950s.

Debora

 

Thanks @Debora. As always, appreciate your help.

 

My pleasure.

Debora

 

As a whole, and, as a high school English teacher, it's a helluva single sentence. 68 words, 6 commas, 13 prepositions, and only a couple of adjectives.

A throughly 19th C sentence, it seems to me.

 

It seems that the family would have had such a letter framed because it was a successful intervention. We can hope.

 

today would have been a text..........
" Pope prayin for ya....stay frosty ! "

 

He had to negotiate a very difficult diplomatic situation but managed to get quite a lot done, given that he harboured thousand Jewish refugees in the Vatican and had to think of the well-being of Catholics in occupied countries as well (Hitler was anti-Catholic). He also managed to get countless visas for Jews in occupied countries.

 

There is a second Mary Ahern of an appropriate age who lived in Portland. Her entry in the 1950 U.S. census shows her as a widow, born about 1882, living with one daughter and a sister with the last name of Brown.

There is a record in Find A Grave for Mary Agnes (Brown) Ahern. See https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/120712389/mary-agnes-ahern

She lived from 1882-1960, and is the same person listed in the 1950 census. Somebody copied a brief obituary into the Find A Grave record. It says she was survived by four children, all four of whom have memorial records in Find A Grave. (It is possible that there were other children who died earlier. Find A Grave is a volunteer project, and is never considered to be complete.)

The records of the four children in Find A Grave also include some obituaries at times. At least one of them was survived by children. So this Mary did have grandchildren. Also, her husband died in 1941, so the "Mrs. Mary" did indicate that she was a widow.

The other Mary Ahern also has a memorial in Find A Grave. Her name there is listed as Mary J "Minnie" Ahern. It appears that she was not married, and had no children, as @Debora determined. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/44627881/mary-j-ahern

 

Great information! I didn't find her but she seems like a great fit for what we know.

Debora

 

Thank you @Figtree3! Wonderful information.

 

Maybe you mean the wartime memo from a US civil servant in which it was suggested the Vatican played a role in channelling Serbian and Jewish funds from Ustasha-controlled (Croatian fascist) wartime Yugoslavia to South America? I haven't heard of a Swiss connection, but it is something that needs to be investigated further anyway.