Mary, Liam and Ann's oldest daughter, spent two thirds of her life caring for her parents. The years of back breaking labor were not kind to Liam and Ann. All through Mary's childhood her parents toiled on their small farm. Almost as soon as she could walk, she was put to work doing household chores such as cooking, cleaning, and mending clothing. She was also charged with various other tasks around the farm. As a child of five, Mary's mother had taken her out to the potato field. Mary would set on a small tree stump and watch her mother hunched over digging for potatoes. However, it was not long before she herself was digging for potatoes. The years of potato digging and almost continuous child baring damaged Ann's health, so it soon fell to Mary to do many of her mothers chores. Her brothers of course had their share of work as well, but as they got older they began to marry and start their own families. Mary, as was the custom of many Irish women at that time, expected to wed late in life, if at all.

Ann MacGilligan died at the age of 50, an average life span for an Irish peasant. At that point all of the household duties fell to Mary. Her father's health was also failing, and almost all of the duties of running the farm were left to her. However, a few years after her mothers death Mary got married to a local man named Paul Twomey. Paul was a landless laborer who saw marriage into the MacGilligan family as a step up socially. For Mary, the marriage brought another pair of working hands into the family. Since Liam was essentially an invalid, Mary needed the extra labor to administer the farm. In spite of her marriage to Paul, Mary was still the undisputed power on Liam's farm. Mary oversaw the planting of crops and caring for of animals, as well as the bartering or sale of the farms produce.

Mary was in charge of collecting rent from her brothers. As Liam's sons had grown up and married, they had begun to sublease small sections of land from Liam, who in turn rented the land from Plunkett. When Mary took over the operation of what remained of Liam's farm, she also became responsible for collecting her brothers' rents. These rents were usually payed in produce or services. Paul's role in the marriage was simply to carry out Mary's instructions. The members of the community joked that Paul Twomey had gotten more than he bargained for when he married Mary MacGilligan. The community attributed Paul's tendency to drink heavily to his subservient position in the family.

Almost exactly five years after the departure of his wife, Liam died in the cottage he had built almost forty years earlier. He was buried in the local cemetery next to his wife. Three months later, Mary had the first of her three daughters whom she named Margaret, Ellen, and Ann. She also had two sons. The first son, James, died at age one when his father, who was drunk at the time, dropped him. Mary never forgave Paul for this. The death of James was commonly seen in the community as the point when Mary and Paul's marriage went from being a simple business arrangement to being an adversarial relationship. Mary had always seen to it that Paul kept his nose to the grind stone, but after the death of her son, she became a virtual slave driver. In spite of this, Mary had a second son several years later who she named Matthew.