My grandmother
Daisy Alice (Tansey) McDonald
1884–1974

Autumn 2024.

John Tansey was the licensee of the Coach and Horses hotel at  Saddle Hill from 1900 to 1912. He was my great grandfather.  

This memoir, however, is really about my grandmother, his first  child to survive beyond infancy, his daughter, Daisy Alice  (Tansey) McDonald, known to my family as Daisy May,  perhaps after Louisa May Alcott’s Daisy in her 1868 Little  Women. 

In the song “You’re on your own, kid”, Taylor Swift sings, “I  see the great escape, So long, Daisy May” and I think my  grandmother also disdained the dutiful domesticity her nickname suggests. She was no Stepford Wife. 

Her mother, my great grandmother, was Ellen Keating,  baptised 28 August 1860 in Borrisoleigh, Tipperary, the  daughter of Thomas Keating and Ellen Power. On 24  September 1879 at age 18 she embarked on the ship Auckland  bound for Port Chalmers. She gave her occupation as “servant”.