I Am a Tate

Some time ago I mentioned that James H.J. Tate (below), the mayor of Philadelphia in the 1960s, was my grandfather's cousin.  Allow me to elaborate.

My father told me when I was a kid that Mayor Tate was related to us, but he didn't specify how.  I grew up thinking he was a distant relative.  My father's immediate family settled in northern New Jersey in the fifties after moving there from Philadelphia, where the rest of the Maginnis family remained.  When I started researching my ancestors at the turn of the millennium at the local Mormon ward - yes, I live in New Jersey, not Utah, but the Mormon Church is everywhere now - I learned that my paternal grandfather's mother was a Tate, and only then did I take my father's insistence seriously.  After 9/11 happened, I got distracted from my family research.  

Then, while looking up my surname in the archives of my paternal grandfather's hometown paper in the New Jersey town where he moved his family to from the Philadelphia area, on Newspapers.com just a few weeks ago, I found the obituary from a Philadelphia newspaper for my great-grandmother Maginnis from 1967, which identified her as Mayor Tate's aunt!

If I had stuck with my family research at the Mormon ward - at a time when I didn't have the Internet - I would have found that out earlier.  But why didn't my father tell me before?  Come to think of it, why didn't my grandfather tell me before?

After serving as mayor of Philadelphia, Jim Tate retired to the seaside town of Longport, New Jersey, which is just across the short strait connecting Great Egg Harbor to the Atlantic Ocean from Ocean City, a seaside resort my father took me and my sister every summer during the seventies.  Former Mayor Tate lived in Longport until his death in 1983 - and my father never thought to take us to meet his father's cousin?

Jim Tate is generally regarded as one of the best mayors Philadelphia has ever had, as he was able to govern what is usually an ungovernable city.  He opened jobs on city-contract infrastructure projects to black construction workers during the civil rights era, and he was able to quell the 1964 race riot in Philadelphia.   A longtime city councilman, he loved Philadelphia, a city native Philadelphian Joe Queenan once called a tough city to love, and his service to the city brought about an uncharacteristic period of good governance for Pennsylvania's largest city. 

And no one in the family would tell me more than the fact that we were related to him somehow.  I feel cheated not knowing of Mayor Tate or knowing him when he was alive.

But now I know, and I and fact proud to say that he was and is my first cousin twice removed.  I'm also proud of my great-grandmother, Mary Marcella Tate Maginnis, who was a force in her own right.  Active in many charitable causes, she also served as president of the Alliance of Catholic Women, a now-defunct ladies auxiliary group of the Philadelphia Archdiocese that operated a shelter for girls and women that helped them find employment, promoted education through funding scholarships, and assisted poor families.  She and her nephew exemplified service in the City of Brotherly Love by living up to the city's name.

And she was clearly an influence on her oldest child, my grandfather, as he was known to give back to the community in Montclair, New Jersey by buying and rehabilitating apartment houses for affordable housing.  An electronic engineer by trade, he thought providing affordable housing was more rewarding than designing TV sets.

I have volunteered for the occasional arts group, and of course I gave money to help a friend in Spain get back on her feet.  Politically, I have supported Martin O'Malley, a former Maryland governor who, like Jim Tate, saw public service as noble and had effectively governed an ungovernable city (Baltimore in O'Malley's case), and I supported him in the interest of seeing a repeat of John F. Kennedy's rise to power - O'Malley wears his Irishness on his sleeve.  Though I know I can never live up to my ancestors' record of service, I still have their understanding of the greater good as well as a sense of Irish political identity. 

When I buy a product and hang on to it for as long as I can to avoid buying a replacement for as long as possible, my mother says I have my maternal grandmother's family in me, because that family would be just as miserly with the things they bought.  When I indulge myself in Irish identity politics or help a friend, I feel I have my paternal great-grandmother's family in me as well.  Therefore, as a descendant of my great-grandmother's family, I take pride in the words, "I am a Tate."