My grandmother, Margaret Teresa Costello, was born to John J. Costello, a blacksmith, and Honora Brown in Newark, NJ on the 3rd of August 1903. She was baptized on the 12th of August at St. James Church with her father’s sister Margaret and his ‘adopted’ brother John O’Brian serving as godparents.
At the time of her birth, her parents were living with her paternal grandparents and their youngest children at 80 Jackson St. in Newark, NJ. She was John & Honora’s 3rd child. Her brother William was born in 1899 and her brother John in 1901. Its not clear that Margaret would have remembered or perhaps even known about her eldest brother William, as he died in infancy or very early childhood.
By June of 1905, just before her youngest sister Eleanor was born, the family moved to its own home at 88 Prospect Street, Newark, NJ. Sadly, they didn’t stay there long. Within a year, Margaret’s father passed away at his parents home from pneumonia and Bright’s disease. Margaret was not yet 3 years old.
Plum Street
Margaret’s childhood memories would have been of a house at 23 Plum Street where her mother moved in the wake of her father’s death. Altogether, she spent 21 years living there with her mother, sister, 3 aunts, 2 cousins and occasionally her brother, who sometimes lived with his grandparents. There was also a parade of boarders in the house, one of whom became her stepfather in 1920.
Plum St. was named for Samuel Plum, a founding settler of Newark and the Plum family owned most of the brick row houses on that street. Many people, Margaret’s mother included, ran boarding houses in this area which was nicely situated near several colleges.
When Margaret was about 24 years old, the entire road was sold by the Plum family and incorporated into Rutgers University campus. But during Margaret’s time there, it ran from Washington Street to Plane Street – now called University Avenue – between Raymond Boulevard and Warren Street.
After Plum St. and for 3 years before her marriage, she lived with her mother and sister at 94 Smith Street in Newark.
Votes for Women
The 19th Amendment passed when Margaret was 17 years old – making her part of the first generation of women to vote since the Revolutionary War.
New Jersey women were the first women to vote in the United States largely due to the egalitarian influence of Quaker legislators. The state’s 1776 constitution declared that ‘free inhabitants’ meeting property criteria could vote and women did, in large numbers, until they were disenfranchised by the legislature in 1807. From about 1848 on, there was a movement to restore voting rights at the state and local level.
Its not clear what a young Margaret would have made of the suffrage movement but a major turning point for women’s voting rights happened just a few blocks from her house in Newark. Suffragettes marched 180 miles in the dead of winter to Washington DC as part of the Women’s Suffrage Procession. This march turned what was a state by state struggle into a national constitutional issue.
War, Flu & Work
Two events, WWI and the Spanish flu, shaped the demographics of Margaret’s generation and radically expanded the opportunities available to her. When the United States entered WWI (1917-19), Margaret was 14 years old and women were mobilized in unprecedented numbers. For the first time, they were allowed to enlist in the regular armed forces and the percentage of women working on the home front rose from 24 to 37% as women took over roles left behind by conscripted men. After the war, 21% of all employed people were women and the range of work available to them was much broader than before.
When Spanish Flu erupted (1918-20), Margaret was 16 years old. It killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years. It killed somewhere between 50-100 million people, or about 3-6% of the world population. It originated in Kansas and was rapidly spread worldwide through military deployment. Mortality rates for flu are typically higher in the very young and very old, but the 1917 flu was most aggressive in young adults. 50% of US fatalities were in the 20-40 year old age bracket – which is to say it killed 1 out of every 11 people in Margaret’s generation.
Margaret was in the workforce for at least 11 years before she married. By the age of 16, she was sewing at a ribbon factory but she spent most of her working life as a policy clerk for the Prudential Insurance Company.
Prudential found its niche selling to working and middle class people, and it was one the first large scale employers of women as office workers in NJ. The average salary of a female clerk was about $10-12 a week – at a time when a 1lbs of coffee cost $0.47, and a gallon of milk cost $0.66.
Marriage & Children
John Patrick O’Mullan managed a grocery store in Newark at the end of the 1920’s and one of his favorite customers was Margaret’s mother, Eleanor Wagner. Eleanor introduced John to Margaret and on 19 SEP 1931 they married.
They lived in 4 homes in the first 10 years of their marriage – some in Orange and some in Newark before settling at 623 Thomas Street in Orange, NJ. They lived at 623 from 1942 until 1961 or 62, when they purchased a home at 92 Burchard Ave in East Orange, and then retired to a condo in Cheesequake Village, Matawan on August 7, 1971.
They were married for 47 years before he passed away in 1978 and, together, they had 8 children.
Margaret lived to be 94 years old and passed away from natural causes on October 17, 1997 at John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Edison, NJ. Radio, television, washing machines, insulin, hearing aids, ‘Talking’ pictures, penicillin, jet engines, nuclear weapons, credit cards, electric razors, dialysis, computers, satellites, and the World Wide Web – were all invented in her lifetime. She lived to see women get the vote, she lived to see men walk on the moon, and she lived to see the birth of 30 grandchildren and 35 great-grandchildren.
