Katherine Maxwell

Katherine was born Sally Katherine Hirschberg in 1941 in San Francisco 10 months before Pearl Harbor was bombed and the United States entered World War II. Growing up in a Catholic family but with a Jewish grandfather, Katherine heard many stories whispered about her great grandmother, who had immigrated to San Francisco as an indentured servant in 1964 from Ireland.

When Katherine Maxwell, in 1977, interviewed her aunt Miriam (born in 1911) and her great aunt Marga’s daughter, Estelle Hetherington (born in 1899), to find out how her ancestors lived in early San Francisco, Katherine discovered that the lives of the Costellos and the Hirschbergs were part of significant historical events and San Francisco’s neighborhood districts.

Along with the colorful descriptions of the family from these interviews, Katherine’s research at the San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco Historical Society made her realize that relatively few accounts had been written about San Francisco’s working class. Most of the history books and historical memoirs highlighted the rich, the famous, and the infamous. Katherine discovered that the westward movement in San Francisco of her family followed the same pattern of expansion into developing districts of the city.

Katherine tells the story of her ancestors alongside related San Francisco history in “A San Francisco Portrait, Three Generations of a Family and the City’s History: 1864–1948.”