By George P. Hassett

The gala celebrating St. Ann’s 125th birthday included food cooked by Somerville High School culinary arts students, a DJ playing music from all eras of the church’s lifetime and comedian Jimmy Tingle supplying the laughs.

Former priests and teachers of St. Ann’s attended the event, alongside parishioners and old students of the closed St. Ann School.

Sarah Dinan, a St. Ann’s parishioner since 1961, said it is the people of the church that have made it special for over a century. “In any parish, it’s the people and the priests who make it unique,” she said.

In 1981, Dinan helped write a book documenting St. Ann’s first hundred years. And today, 25 years later, she is working to update it to cover the church’s last quarter century. She said she was asked to help with the first book by Father Francis O’Hare, who started his work at the church in 1975. “I don’t know why he asked me but he did and that’s why I did it,” she said.

Dinan said she met with former St. Ann’s priests and interviewed them about their experiences. She also took out advertisements asking people to send in their old St. Ann’s pictures and dug through church archives. When she was finished she had created a document that stretched back to the church’s first days when it was “a plain one-story wooden structure.”

The book documented the church’s first mass and the fire that left nothing of the original wooden structure except blackened walls. A new church was built in 1897 and was better suited to hold Winter Hill’s growing Catholic community, according to the book.

Last Saturday, 125 years after that first wooden building opened for prayer, the St. Ann faithful gathered to celebrate the parish many have known their whole life. Dinan said in another 25 years when it is time to write the 150 year history of the church, she will probably not be the one to do it.

‚ÄúThen again, you never know,‚Äù she said. ‚ÄúI said that when I finished the 100 year history.‚Äù