♀Mary Esther Schneck

Mary Esther Schneck (17 January 1900 – 25 January 1968) was a physician’s daughter from Mount Carmel, Illinois, who took a science degree in zoology at Northwestern University and a master’s degree the year after, spent the middle of her life in New Jersey, and the last years of it moving through the American West. She was the mother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Early life

Mary Esther Schneck was born in Mount Carmel, Wabash County, Illinois, the daughter of Sereno Watson Schneck, a physician, and Mabel Wilkinson. She grew up in Mount Carmel.

Northwestern

She went to Northwestern University in Evanston, where the yearbook for her junior year lists her major as zoology; she was one of seven women among the eleven zoology majors in her class. She belonged to the Alpha Chi Omega sorority and was its delegate to the university’s Panhellenic council. She also sat on the Y.W.C.A. membership and Bible study committees, played in the Strummers, and took part in the May pageant. In her senior year she was chairman of the social committee of the class of 1921, one of the five senior class officers. In November 1920 the student newspaper reported her committee’s plans for the first senior party of the year, a sport party at Patten Gymnasium with “several novel stunts” and the customary cider and doughnuts. The same issue named her on the Alpha Chi Omega team that won the cup for selling the most subscriptions to the next year’s yearbook.

She received a Bachelor of Science at the university’s commencement on 15 June 1921, and a Master of Arts at the commencement of 19 June 1922; the programme does not name the subject of the master’s degree. The family remembers that she studied biology and worked as a laboratory assistant.

By 1923 she was a teacher, living again in Mount Carmel; teaching is the only occupation ever recorded for her. In the spring of that year, aged twenty-three, she applied for a passport and sailed for Europe, returning that September aboard the S.S. Rochambeau from Le Havre, which landed her in New York on 6 September; for a young woman from a small Illinois town, a summer abroad was still unusual. In the 1920s she also joined a lineage society, as her mother had done before her, on a descent she traced from a Revolutionary War-era ancestor of her father’s family.

Marriage and family

She married Kenneth Blanchard, a physician, on 1 November 1926 at the Methodist Episcopal Church in Mount Carmel. The couple settled in South Orange, New Jersey, by 1930 and were in Newark by 1934; by 1945 the family was back in South Orange, at 484 Harding Drive. They had three children: Barbara (1928–2008), Nancy Jane (1929–2006) and Robert Watson (1934–2006). In the summer of 1947 the family drove out from South Orange for two weeks at Longs Peak Inn, near Estes Park, Colorado.

In later years she moved west. In the spring of 1953 her husband joined the Great Falls Clinic in Montana, and her mother died at her home in Great Falls in May 1954. By 1956 the couple were in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he worked at the Veterans Administration hospital. In March 1959 they bought a lot in the Grand Estates subdivision at Estes Park and built a house there that year, on Grand Estates Drive; on 29 December 1959 their daughter Barbara was married in the new house. For some years it was a summer home, and in 1964 the local paper still called them “of Cheyenne”, before they settled there to retire. She joined the town’s community bridge group and the women’s association of the Community Church of the Rockies, and she was at one time regent of her chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The couple spent the winter of 1965–66 in the Southwest, where she stayed with Barbara’s family at Los Alamos while her husband volunteered at the Embudo Presbyterian Hospital in New Mexico.

Death

Mary Esther Schneck died early on the morning of 25 January 1968 in a motel in Nogales, Arizona, having been in the state for one day. Her husband gave the particulars for the certificate. The county coroner recorded it as an unattended death, and a Nogales physician certified the cause: a loss of oxygen brought on by a convulsive disorder attributed to epilepsy. The Estes Park paper reported that she had “died quietly in her sleep”, leaving her husband, three children and twelve grandchildren; that August her husband sold the house on Grand Estates Drive. She was buried on 29 January 1968 in the Schneck family mausoleum at Rose Hill Cemetery in Mount Carmel, alongside her parents; the mausoleum, built by her father, has since fallen into disrepair.

Notes

A 1923 ship’s manifest spells her surname “Schnick,” a clerk’s transcription rather than a form the family used, and it has not been carried into her name.