We continue our family trek thru the Arbuckle garden with an ambitious young lady named Anne E Mason, a pioneer of the early 20th century!
Anne was the daughter
of John Stephen Mason and Margaret Jane Arbuckle, the great granddaughter of
Ole Willie Arbuckle and Mary Vincent.
In the early 1900s,
women were becoming more independent and many knew they were capable of more than just needlepoint. Anne was one of those girls, and she struck off to Massachusetts around 1913 at the age of 17.
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| Drawing of school on Trenton St |
She eventually enrolled in
a private school, more accurately, the only
law school for women at the time, the Portia
Law School in Cambridge, MA
(now known as the New England School of Law).
Imagine tuition in 1908 was about $75yr – as of 2014, it was
approx $67k/yr – gotta love inflation!
Another historical note to hammer home how extraordinary Anne was, in 1920 women were
granted the right to vote in the US.
I do not know when Anne graduated but she was
a practicing attorney in Boston,
Massachusetts at a very exciting
time in history to be sure!
In 1926, Anne met and
married an ambitious New Yorker, Dr Joseph Armao Brusch – the son of Anthony
Brusch and Mary Armao who immigrated from Santo Stefano, Palermo,
Italy and settled in Troy, NY.
In the “Leading Americans, of Italian Descent in Massachusetts” by Joseph W Carlevale (1946), the
short biography for Joseph indicated that he was an MD of Internal Medicine and
a Heart Specialist having graduated from Manhattan
College and Tufts Medical
College. He interned at a few hospitals and then was
on staff at Cambridge City Hospital
and Charlesgate Hospital. He was a Public Health Officer and a local
school physician. He and his younger brother
Charles both worked as Medical Examiners for insurance companies for a while as
well.
Joseph’s equally
ambitious brother Charles was reported to have been JFK’s family doctor before
he was elected into office and was godfather to a child of the Morrisseys –
Francis Morrissey was secretary to US Senator, JFK!
Despite their ambitions,
Joseph and Charles were both very civic minded – such as they both worked to
erect the Church of the Infant Jesus in Brookline, NH and donated to the
diocesan.
They joined forces to open
the “Brusch Medical
Center” in Cambridge, Massachusetts
and it appears that the center’s focus was on research and alternatives to
traditional or popular medical treatments of the time.
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| Troy Record, 23 Jan 1963 |
I couldn’t find an obit
for Anne but she died 11 months after her husband on the 17th of
December in 1963.
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