Rooney Family Tree

Obituary in the Fargo Forum:
Mrs. Mildred Flannery, 54, of 1449 10 St. N., Fargo, died Friday in a local nursing home. She was born at Villard, Minn., April 7, 1909
Requiem Mass will be at 10 Monday in St. Bartholomew Catholic Church of Villard, with burial there.
Mrs. Flannery was the former Mildred Gaffaney. She taught school before her marriage April 7, 1931, at Glenwood, Minn. She came to Fargo in 1950.
She leaves two daughters, Mrs. Gary (Mary) Bietz, 408 10th St. S., Moorhead, and Patricia A. Flannery, 419 8th St. S., Moorhead; three brothers; five sisters and a grandchild.
Parishioners of the Catholic Church of the Holy Spirit and friends will recite the Rosary at 8 tonight in Boulder and Hughes Capel.

Catherine Gaffaney Becker says:
As a teenager I would spent a couple of weeks in the summers for 2-3 years with Millie and Mark when they were still together [in Moorhead, Minnesota]. They separated in about 1962 or before.
One summer there was a terrible storm. The big old oak tree in Mark and Millie's yard was uprooted and fell on the house next door. I was so scared, I wasn't use having houses so close to each other, I was from the country!!
Another summer I was probably 13 or 14 and I got to go to the city swimming pool û I had probably not seen one before. Millie brought me a two piece swimming suit. It was red, she dared me to jump off the high diving board, and of course I did. I jumped and when I hit the water and went under, my bathing suit top came off and floated away. I never went swimming there again.
We [Catherine and her husband Norbert] moved to the Fargo - Moorhead area in September 1961 from Minneapolis. Millie was working for Dillard's Department store and Mark was Road Master for the Great Northern RR.
Millie and Mark were my godparents and I was with Millie when she died. I had got a hold of Mark, he was working on the railroad. I only lived about a mile from the nursing home she was in, so saw her almost everyday. She had arteriosclerosis so bad. She was trapped in her own body. She couldn't speak or move in the last few months of her life.
The obituary said they were married in Glenwood, but I think it was Villard, because that is were Mark's Family went to church also, his par ents are buried there.

Kelly Sturtevant-Smith says (in our 3-way email exchange): Millie and Mark were separated when she passed. I am mostly sure Mother had moved by then (she would have been 18 and I think she finished High School in Moorhead).
Mother also had hardening of the arteries pretty severely. I don't think it is listed on her death certificate though. Do you remember, Anne? I think there were 3 causes listed. I just remember her surgeon telling us how hard her arteries in her abdomen were. I did not know of any ALS diagnosis in the family. That is news.
I was surprised to see how normal Millie and her sisters looked in her pictures [the ones taken June 29, 1958 on Ambrose's farm that I sent to them]. She always chastised us for our weight and said all of her mother's family were "as wide as they were tall". They look very normal to me. Maybe our values about weight have just changed that much .

Anne Sturtevant: "Mother was 16 and living in an apartment while finishing high school when her mother passed. She told me once that her landlord pretended not to know that she was under 18." [In her subsequent email Anne corrected the age to 18.] I do not believe her death certificate mentions the arteries. But the surgeon was pretty shocked by them. But she as a heavy smoker so it was not too much of a surprise for us." [She's referring to her mother Patricia, who was 64 when she died.]