Anne Mackey Nelson

Birth Name: Anne Phyllis Karen Mackey
Name preference: Anne
Born: December 26, 1940, Brooklyn, NY; Passed through the veil: August 27, 2003
Parents: John Edward Mackey, Phyllis Zaremba (Mackey) Wilson
Siblings: John Edward Mackey, Jr, Dorothea Lorraine Gallagher, Frank James Mackey
Grade school: PS 140 and PS 140A, 1947-1955
High School: Fort Hamilton High School, Brooklyn, NY, 1955-1958
College: None
Military Service: None
Married: Eugene Ronald Nelson, January 21, 1961, South Reformed Church, Brooklyn, NY
Children: Sandra Nelson Fite, Karen Nelson Jewell, Christopher John Nelson

Anne was born three months premature, and weighed in at one pound nine ounces. Both of her parents had the same birthday, July 12th, two years apart. Her father was a first-generation American born in 1915 of Irish parents, and her mother was a first-generation American born in 1917 of Polish parents. John’s mother was Anne Mackey, and he had a brother Timothy. Phyllis’ parents were Frank Zaremba and Stella Zaremba Jeziorkowski, and she had three brothers: Walter Zaremba, Yosh and Freddie Jeziorkowski.

John Mackey was an accomplished truck driver for Consolidated Freightways, and the recipient of a million-mile safe driving award.

Frank Zaremba was an accomplished amateur violinist who worked in the coalmines in Poland. He was from Lwow, which is now Lviv, a city in western Ukraine near the southeastern border of Poland. Stella was from Gdansk, a city in northern Poland on the Baltic Sea. She came from a large family, and for years she ran a candy store in Brooklyn, saving her money to send back home for passage for her brothers and sisters to migrate to the US. When Frank passed through the veil at the young age of 29 from lung disease, Stella married a Jeziorkowski, circa 1920. Stella passed through the veil in 1954.

John Mackey Jr. was born March 26, 1936, and passed through the veil circa 1986.
Dorothea was born January 3, 1937 or 1938.
Frank was born November 4, 1948.

In the mid fifties young John Mackey, Jr. headed for California, where he met and married Rosie (?). They had two girls, Laura and (?). With his second wife John had a son Ryan.

Also in the mid fifties Phyllis and her brother Yosh opened a fish and chips store on 58th Street near 3rd Avenue. One of their steady customers, John Wilson, an engineer with the Long Island Railroad, took a shine to Phyllis and they were married circa 1959. In October 1958 Dorothea married John Gallagher from 46th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. After their first child, Phyllis was born in 1960, they moved to Hauppauge, Long Island (where they still live, as of this writing), where their daughter Rosemary was born. Phyllis and John moved to Commack later that same year with Phyllis’ twelve-year-old son Frank in tow. Frank became the son John never had, and Frank, who saw little of his biological Dad, found a new Dad in John. Frank loved cars and became a whiz mechanic as a young teenager. A few years later he found his wife-to-be, Jackie Hoffman of Brentwood, and they were married circa 1967. A year later they had Bonnie, their only child.

All three of Phyllis’ brothers married girls of Italian descent. Walter married Ann (?), and while living in the borough of Queens they had four boys: Ricky, Tommy, Frank, and Walter. Walter passed through the veil young at age 46. Yosh married Lovey (?) and they had two boys, John and Robert. They soon moved to Commack as well. Freddie married Chickie (?), and they had a son Freddie and a daughter Winnie, and they moved to Lake Ronkonkoma, Long Island. Freddie also passed through the veil at the young age of 41.

John Mackey, the elder, passed through the veil in 1968 at age 51 while living with Anne and Gene in Pinecliff Lake. John Wilson passed through the veil at age 72, circa late eighties. Phyllis passed through the veil in 2006 at the age of 89 after having lived at the same house in Commack for 45 years. She never had a driver’s license her entire life. Who says you can’t get by without driving a car?

In 1973 Frank and Jackie temporarily moved in with Gene and Anne in Pinecliff Lake in preparation for their move to a new life in Spencer, North Carolina. Frank struggled to find appropriate work in Spencer, so he partnered with Gene’s brother Dick as a handyman/painter. A scary accident caused Dick to abandon the business, and Frank, a quick learner, soon had the embryo of a successful contract painting business in motion. In time he acquired a reputation as being Rowan County’s best painter. Since his teen years, Frank had always been self-employed. Somewhere in the late eighties-early nineties Frank and Jackie moved to Marathon, Florida, and opened a carpet and paint store, which they later sold when they moved to Cape Coral.