Elizabeth (Betty) O'Neil
(née Noone)

Elizabeth (Betty) O’Neil (87) passed away peacefully in her sleep at home in Glenview, IL beside her husband Dan. Betty had fought valiantly for a 12-year period with Parkinson’s Disease. Betty was born on March 26, 1937, the first of seven children of Bill and Bridget (Babe) Noone in the town of Foxford, County Mayo in the West of Ireland. Betty was born to nurture and love not only family but the myriad and diverse range of friends around the world who were blessed by her innate goodness. Her mother urged her to pursue excellence in school. She was educated locally and regionally through secondary school and achieved placement in nursing at the prestigious Sir Patrick Duns Hospital in the capital city of Dublin. There she began a lifelong love of art, literature, music and theatre. Betty lit up many a party with her sweet voice while playing harp and guitar.

 

Upon completion of her RN, Betty successfully pursued training as a certified midwife at the Royal Maternity Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland where she delivered 34 “bairns” (babies) within the city’s tenements (her Call the Midwife experience.) Her extended family in Manchester, England was a retreat during that period and set the stage for her affinity for travel. Within a short time after a visit to relations in the U.S. in 1962 she was recruited for a one-year contract by a suburban Boston, Massachusetts hospital joining former classmates and other graduate nurses from Ireland and the U.K. That set the stage for the beginning of a romance that began within weeks of her arrival in Boston and her marriage to a Bostonian Danny O’Neil on November 14, 1964. Thus began an odyssey of life that built around academic and professional pursuits but with the pinnacle being the births of their three children, Eliesh (California), Danny Boy (Dublin), and Dara (Dublin) and Betty’s emphasis on their bicultural growth with their Irish and American family. Betty and Dan resided on the Connecticut shore and Southern California coast before a seven-year period with Trinity College Dublin, where she supported her husband’s PhD degree and played a major role in welcoming and facilitating the assimilation of international faculty at the creation of the University of Limerick. They returned to the U.S, and moved to Atlanta (Tucker) where Betty was an active docent at the High Museum of Art and later at Emory University’s Carlos Museum. The family was delighted to return temporarily to Limerick, Ireland in 1981 as part of a start-up research institute. On return to the U.S., Betty concentrated on homelife and the growth and education of her three children, two of whom Eliesh and Dara were awarded PhDs from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Danny Jr made a career in the hospitality industry in France and England. She was a Girl Scouts’ Troop leader in both the U.S. and Ireland, member of the Atlanta Harper’s Society, and taught Sunday school. She earned a BSHA degree from St Francis University in Joliet, IL in 1990. Betty’s ex-Atlanta life (the ATL becoming the nominal ancestral home of the O’Neils since 1975) included residences in the university cities of Oklahoma City, OK and Albuquerque, NM where she regaled in her interests of Southwestern culture and archaeology. She loved people from all cultures and traveled to the USSR, including Ukraine (just before the fall of the Iron Curtain), Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, all over western and eastern Europe, Canada, and numerous other countries. Betty retired from nursing as case manager for the Wesley Woods geriatric center for Emory University in Atlanta. Following frequent visits to Glenview to continue her role as the caring and loving grandmother of her five grandchildren, she and Dan left their home in Atlanta in 2019 and established themselves permanently in Glenview.

 

Betty is survived by her husband Dan, her daughter Eliesh Lane (James) and Dara O’Neil (Kyle Knight), her grandchildren Eoin, Graeme, Niamh, and twins Cadhla and Aodhan Lane as well as her siblings in Ireland, William, Mary (Kelly), Martin, Terence, Thomas, and Margaret (Conneely) Noone. She was predeceased by her parents, her son Danny Jr., her brothers-in-law Christy Kelly & Tom Conneely, sister-in-law Sheila Noone, and nephew Justin Noone.

 

Rest in Peace Betty

 

Funeral Mass for Betty will be celebrated in St. Michael's Church, Foxford (F26 WO85) on Sunday 8th September at 1pm with the interment of Cremains afterwards in the family grave at Craggagh Cemetery.

 

The funeral Mass may be viewed at https://www.churchtv.ie/foxford