This website is the first draft of the story of the Freitas–McNamara family of San Francisco. This family’s story in America began with the immigration of Frank Freitas I (aka Francisco Antonio Lopes de Freitas, born 1841)), an Azorean Portuguese who arrived in Massachusetts aboard a whaling ship in the 1860s. In Massachusetts he married Maria (aka Mary), and their journey would carry them and their growing family first to Florida, then Nevada, and finally to Port Costa, California.
From there, Frank and Mary’s eleven children would fan out in various directions. Some stayed in the East Bay. Others ventured elsewhere in California. One went to Seattle, one went to Montana. But the first son, Frank Freitas II (aka Francis Albert Freitas, born 1878) found his way across the bay to San Francisco, where he lived in the Bernal Heights neighborhood with his wife Maude Virginia McNamara (born 1884), the daughter of immigrants from County Claire, Ireland.