William James Brown (1909–1994)
A Massachusetts Tradesman and Veteran
Let me tell you about your great-grandfather William Brown. He was born on March 7, 1909, in Concord, the second son of Mary Ann Foran and James Francis Browne. His big brother, Thomas Brown, had come along in 1907, and William grew up in an Irish-American family that kept on growing. Concord back then was still mostly country, a town of farms that never forgot its part in the Revolution.
By 1910 the Browns were living in Everett, and that’s where William’s little brothers were born: Fredericus, who later went by Frederick, in 1910, and Edward Vincent in 1912. Everett in those years was a crowded factory city, full of rail lines and immigrant neighborhoods. So William spent his earliest years in an ordinary working family, in a city that was growing fast all around him.
By 1920 the family had moved again, this time to Framingham, a town that had both mills and farms and good trains into Boston. William was eleven, going to school and growing up in the years just after World War I.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, William settled with his family in Dover, and Dover was a whole different world: quiet country, big estates, and not many people. The 1930 census lists him as a laborer’s helper, single and living at home, and that work likely meant keeping up the estates or helping out with skilled jobs. Over the next ten years he learned a trade, and by 1940 he was a plumber. That was skilled, dependable work, and it gave him something solid to stand on while the Great Depression was still hanging on.
When William filled out his World War II draft card at thirty-one, it gave us a good picture of him. He stood 5 feet 10 inches tall, with brown hair and blue eyes, and he was living with his parents on a farm or estate property in Dover. The card names his employer as Wellesley College, which suggests he worked on the buildings or in the trades that kept the college’s big grounds and buildings running. That fits right in with his growing career as a plumber. It was the kind of steady work, for institutions and estates, that kept a lot of skilled men going in the late Depression years.
On November 19, 1942, William joined the United States Navy, while the country was building up its forces for World War II. He served three years, on active duty through much of the war, and he was discharged on December 1, 1945. We don’t know yet what his particular assignments were. Like millions of other men, he had his working life put on hold for the war, and then he came home to pick up his trade and his family life again.
On April 6, 1947, William married Dorothy Claire O’Brien in Dover. The next year changed everything. Their oldest daughter, Jenepher Ellen Brown, was born in 1948, and she brought William new responsibility and a family to carry on. But that same year he lost his father, James Francis Browne, and his younger brother Edward Vincent died too.
By 1950 William and Dorothy had moved to West Yarmouth on Cape Cod. William was listed as head of the household, and he was still working as a plumber. After the war, Cape Cod was changing from a quiet seafaring place into somewhere people came to live and to vacation, and that meant plenty of steady work for a good tradesman. In 1953 their second daughter, Sara Theresa Brown, was born in Hyannis.
Later on William went back to Dover, the town where he’d spent so much of his grown-up life and where he still had deep ties. He outlived both his parents. His mother, Mary Ann Foran, died in 1967 at the age of ninety-seven. William James Brown died on August 3, 1994, in Dover, Massachusetts, at the age of eighty-five.
When you look at his whole life, it’s a real New England story. He went from old Concord to factory Everett, from suburban Framingham to country Dover, then off to the Navy in wartime, and on to life on Cape Cod after the war. He worked with his hands, he served his country, and he loved his family. William had the quiet strength of a generation that lived through hard times, a world war, and then a new start at home.