Maher connected people with their past
During her 95 years, Jane Maher lived very much in the present, but her greatest impact might have been on the past — not by changing it, but by bringing it to families in search of their own.
As co-founder and former president of The Irish Genealogical Society of Wisconsin, Maher firmly believed that by connecting people with the experiences of those who preceded them, they could learn lessons that would help them live their lives, those who knew her recalled.
“She would take them on a journey,” said Kris Mooney, Maher’s friend, colleague and herself past president of the society.
“She opened a lot of windows and a lot of doors.”
A funeral Mass will be held Monday for Maher, of Wauwatosa, a former Milwaukee Public Schools teacher and coordinator of the genealogy tent at Milwaukee Irish Fest. She died March 28 after a long illness.
“Many people look at genealogy as simply a matter of dates, deaths and names,” said John Maher, her son.
“She sought to understand how people, her ancestors, worked, how they died, what issues were important to them at the time and to their families.”
She was born Jane Catherine Mahar on July 24, 1920, in Rockford, Ill., the daughter of Walter Gregory and Irene Mahar.
Her family eventually moved to Milwaukee’s Washington Heights area in the early 1930s. She attended St. Sebastian’s Grade School in Milwaukee, what was then Holy Angels Academy in Milwaukee and later Marquette University, where she earned a bachelor of science degree and a master’s degree in education before beginning a career as a biology teacher for MPS, her son said.
She taught at several elementary and high schools, including Dover and Bay View, before retiring in the late 1950s to raise her children and later assist in her husband’s dental practice, John Maher said.
In 1981, three years after being diagnosed with breast cancer, Jane Maher began volunteering at Milwaukee’s Irish Fest, and in 1983 became the coordinator of the festival’s genealogy tent, where, without the aid of computers or the Internet, she began launching the curious on journeys through their family history.
“She chipped away at puzzles and brick walls,” Mooney said. “She was just a delightful presence who embodied grace and kindness.”
In 1991, she and others founded the genealogical society, with Maher as its first president.
She later edited the society’s quarterly journal and, with her husband and others, oversaw the development of the Irish Emigration Library.
With a keen intelligence and remarkable memory, Maher “remembered and recognized virtually every library visitor and Fest genealogy volunteer, recalling with ease their families and their stories,” said a statement posted on the society’s website.
Maher continued to direct and staff the library until this year, despite, according to her son, another cancer diagnosis about a dozen years ago.
“She just kept moving ahead,” her son said. “She was truly a remarkable woman.”
Maher was preceded in death by her husband, William P. Maher. She is survived by sons John and Michael Maher and daughter Catherine Preussler.