Margaret Quigley Leather Lawson died several years before her mother, a death hastened doubtless by the accidental death of her son William Lawson, Jr.  

My father Basil H. Leather Jr. was born, the oldest of 5, in NYC in 1900. 

His mother, Margaret Quigley, was born in Derry in or about 1880, married Basil H. Leather, Sr., of Liverpool in Derry in 1899 and emigrated immediately to New York.  Her  children always called her "Ma Dear", and hence also did all we grandchildren.  Her mother and brother accompanied them, leaving her father (we were told) to fend for himself.

Margaret Quigley's mother (whom I knew in the 1930's only as Grandma Quigley)  had been born a Murphy in or about 1853 in Boston, to a family  that had fled the great famine in 1846.  No trace of the rest of the Murphy relatives has ever surfaced.

At 21 Grandma Quigley returned to Derry in 1874 for an arranged marriage to Michael Quigley .  It proved not a happy joining, as evidenced by his being left by wife, daughter, and son Michael Jr., , when Basil Sr. and Margaret moved to New York.

Grandma Quigley  never lost her very pronounced Boston accent.   Ma Dear and   Michael Jr. never lost their determined brogue; nor did Ma Dear lose her fondness for her harp and her large collection of Gibson Girl hats. 

Grandma Quigley lived independently to age 93, in a railroad-flat in upper Manhattan.  Michael lived nearby, and never married.  Three years after Basil Sr.'s premature death in 1912,  Ma Dear remarried -- to NYC mounted patrolman William Lawson, a Belfast native of surly disposition (and a more dense brogue than Ma Dear).  He was at best indifferent towards Ma Dear's four Leather offspring and still more so to us grandchildren, but a doting father to their son William Jr.  William Jr. was a wonderful uncle to me and to my older brother, and enjoyed mimicking his parents' Irish voices.