Lettie and Mary
22. Lettie and Mary Loven
25. Mary's Children
40. Richard, Lettie, Phyllis, Mr. Pierce
d. Phyllis Pierce taken May 10, 1946 Age 13 yrs. 11 mo.
41. Phyllis
Lettie and Mary are Anna's nieces, daughters of Anna's brother Mathias Loven and Anna Odell. Six-month-old Mary was living in Deerpark, Orange County, NY with her parents in 1910. By 1920, the family was living in Walton, Delaware County, NY.
Mary Christina was born 8 November 1909 and married LeRoy Davis in 1927. They had two children, Eleanor and LeRoy (perhaps 10 and 6 in the photo), and the family lived for a time in Bristol, VT. LeRoy (the father) died in 1988, and Mary died 3 July 1991, both in Worcester, MA.
Lettie was born 10 October 1911 and married Richard Pierce in Amherst, MA in 1931. Richard was born in Belchertown, MA 25 October 1906. He died in Northampton, MA 28 March 1993. Lettie died in November of 1977 in Belchertown and is buried in Quabbin Cemetery in MA.
For a long time, I'd assumed that Mr. Pierce
was Richard's
grandfather Peter, in part because, as a widower in the 1940's, it would
explain the absence of his wife in the photo. But it's much more likely this
is Richard's father Henry. In the 1940 census, Henry is living with Richard
and Lettie while his wife Carrie is working as a live-in housekeeper in a
different Amherst household. Henry and Carrie died within a few days of each
other in August of 1944.
As a teenager, Lettie apparently lived with William and Anna. In 1925, she appears in several brief newspaper articles as Lettie L. Lapp, a seventh-grade student at P.S. 16 in Troy, and under that surname she is listed as a daughter in William's obituary in 1926. It's possible she was helping to care for William in the months before his death.
