Biography of Mary Ballard

Mary Barbara Ballard, Bruce's grandmother, was born in Arkwright, New York in 1885. Arkwright is about an hours drive south of Buffalo, near Dunkirk. She died 75 years later in 1961 in Williamsville, NY.

Mary, known as Mamie, was one of twelve children of Thomas Ballard and Catherine Bohn. She also had three half siblings from her father's first marriage to Katherine Krebs.

In 1907, when she was 22, Mary married Theodore J Heintz, a Buffalo NY butcher. They lived in a home on the west side of Buffalo, a block away from Theodore's butcher shop on Delavan Avenue. Theodore died of cancer in 1915.

Two years after Theodore's death, when she was 32, Mary married John Benjamin Kirsch, a widower. Their marriage license was announced in the Buffalo Enquirer on September 15, 1917. They were married on the 18th in St. Peter's French church. John's father Peter Kirsch owned the Frontier Hotel at 981 Niagara Street in Buffalo until his death in 1914. Mary and John lived at the hotel at least until 1920, renting out rooms to boarders. Their first two children, John and Thomas, were born there.

Later they moved to a house at 228 Englewood, where Bruce's mother Delores was born in 1924. Shortly after that they moved to 84 West Royal Parkway in Williamsville.

John Kirsch died in January of 1948 when he was 67 and Mary was 62. She sold their house and moved into the Kensington Village apartment complex, where her daughter Delores and her son-in-law Robert Watkins were living.

During the 1950s she moved to Montana and lived with her son John who was ranching and building a log cabin home.

After her return to Buffalo, she lived with her son Paul and his wife Ethel, and later with her daughter Rita and her husband Mike. She was at Rita and Mike's apartment in Williamsville when she passed away in February of 1961 at age 75.