I love a good obituary.
Not the ones that list just the facts, the kind that really give you insight in to who a person was.
Fred Deane had a great obituary:
Fred was my great-great grandfather on my father's side. His obituary tells us of the great accomplishments of Fred's life: Not only was Fred a well known banjo player, he was also the head of the drapery department at R.H. White and he traveled throughout New England and further afield to designs homes, hotels, yachts and ocean liners, including, while he was with the firm A.H. Davenport and Company, the interior of the luxury liner Leviathan, his piece de resistance.
The list of architects whom A.H. Davenport and Company collaborated with is impressive: H.H. Richardson, and McKim Mead and White. In the earlier half of the 20th century "Davenport" was slang for sofa, such was the strength of their brand.
Fred married Marcia Emery, my-great-great grandmother in Maine in 1896. They had three sons, Richard, George and Russell. Richard died in infancy, but George and Russell grew up to get married and have children of their own.
I am the great-granddaughter of Russell Emery Deane, who followed in his father's footsteps in the design and build trade. My great-grandfather was an architect with a degree from Wentworth. He went on to work for A&P where he designed their retail locations. In the middle of the last century he was on Nantucket Island, supervising the building of the A&P there. In 2005 when I moved to Nantucket Island to work for BPC Architecture I shopped for my groceries in the store he designed, albeit rebranded to a Grand Union supermarket at that time. Today it's a Stop and Shop.
Russell's daughter, my grandmother Dorothy was a Fine Arts major at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Art, architecture and design are in our blood.
After Marcia and Fred divorced my great grandfather Russell moved in with his mother's father. He is a 7 year old on the 1910 census, living with his grandfather Ezekiel Emery (another fascinating man), in Biddeford, Maine. Also living in the home were his grandfather's much younger wife and his 16 year old step-uncle. His mother Marcia and brother George are not listed on this census and were presumably living elsewhere.
I was blessed to know my great-grandfather Russell, a very good and kind man. He lived in the same town where I grew up, and I knew him better than my actual grandfathers, both of whom had retired out west. He passed away when I was 16 and he was 93. His drafting equipment was passed down to me, some of which I used in my college studio classes, shortly before hand drafting became entirely obsolete.
Back on Nantucket, the firm I worked for when I was fresh out of college had a very important client, Jennie Mellon Scaife. She was descended from the influential Mellon family of Pittsburgh. Reading through Fred's obituary I noticed we had something in common, he had also designed homes for the most elite of families during the gilded age, including the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and the Mellons.
Realizing we both worked for the same Mellon family, a century apart, in the same capacity of architectural design feels a bit like destiny.
R.H. White, the company where Fred worked as head of the drapery and design department is still in business to this day and, being in the industry, I receive regular alerts from Indeed telling me they are hiring and my qualifications would be a good fit. I also see their trucks on the road quite often, one even pulled in next to me during my lunch break recently. I considered approaching the man who stepped out of the company vehicle to tell him about my great-great-grandfather and his career at R.H. White, but then I reconsidered: Too weird!
Although Fred had a stellar career, his family life was not as good. His obituary reads "Only survivor was believed to be a son, John, address unknown." There was no son named John. By 1953 when Fred died he only had one living son, my great-grandfather, Russell.
I once made the mistake of asking my great-grandfather about his father (I was interested in family history even as a child). He clearly did not want to talk about him.
I cannot find a burial location for Fred, and I do not know what became of his body. Since he had no surviving family to speak of when he died it's also a bit of a mystery how such a long and detailed obituary came to be placed in the New Bedford paper.
