MacDonald was born in 1938 in Glace Bay, N.S., one of three children of Frederick and Helen Mugford.
It was while she was in Toronto that MacDonald met her first husband, Giorgio DiGiorgio from Pescara, Italy. They were married for 20 years and had three children: Carla, Giulia and Frederick. “I did nothing to discourage him from the priesthood, and when he departed for the seminary, I made the decision to move to Halifax.”
The couple married in 1984. With her three children, they began a new life on what she calls Charles' hobby farm, located on Sydney's North West Arm, overlooking the harbour and the port of North Sydney. "In the aftermath of mad cow disease, our focus required changing from the marketing of purebred, registered cattle to marketing them as beef, which in turn entailed an entire new outlook that required slaughter, processing and packaging, freezing and transportation to and from the government-licenced facility," she explains.
The movement was aided by the year-round Cape Breton Farmers' Market Co-op eventually joining in the formation of the Farmers' Market of Nova Scotia Co-op based in Halifax. The exponential growth of that co-op influenced the addition of many in Cape Breton and province-wide, she adds. "As a child, I attended the Anglican church and Sunday school and, in later years, had my questions answered and attended Mass with my Irish Catholic maternal grandmother. On becoming 21, with my Dad's consent, I became christened in the Roman Catholic faith.”Another farm-related activity was participation in a program based in Vancouver where farmers who would welcome workers on temporary assignments.