Ancestors

Elizabeth Terriberry

Elizabeth Terriberry was born in Manhattan on 31 August 1895, a daughter of Dr. Joseph Frederick Terriberry, a New York neurologist, and his wife, Margaret Isabella Haddock. Her father had been born at Clinton, New Jersey, and raised in Princeton, Illinois, and had come to New York to study medicine at Bellevue; he practised there for fifty years on the diseases of the mind and nervous system. The family lived at 120 West Seventy-third Street, on the Upper West Side, and kept a summer home at Canaan, Connecticut, near the Berkshires. The censuses of 1900, 1905 and 1915 find her in that household with her parents and her sister Margaret.

The two sisters studied piano, and they rode. In the spring of 1912, at sixteen, Elizabeth won two events at the Barnard Riding Club's last meeting of the season, riding alongside her sister's college friends. In May 1910 both girls played at a pupils' musicale, and at a recital in the spring of 1912 Elizabeth played Niemann's transcription of Jensen's "Murmuring Zephyrs" while Margaret played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C sharp minor.

She followed Margaret, a class of 1915 graduate, to Barnard College, the women's college of Columbia University. Her obituary says she graduated in 1916; the Barnard alumnae lists of the 1930s and later place her with the class of 1919, and the yearbook pictures her among the juniors of its 1917 volume, so the year is uncertain. Her classmates called her Terry. From the autumn of 1915 to the spring of 1918 she was the college agent for Cotrell & Leonard of Albany, the official makers of caps, gowns and hoods, and the college paper ran her name in their advertisement week after week. The Barnard yearbook, the Mortarboard, printed her photograph on a pen-drawn cartoon body, as it did for every girl in her class, with a verse that teased her for slouching and called her "no grouch, but merry."

In December 1917 the Canaan paper in Connecticut reported Miss Elizabeth Terriberry of New York City visiting a friend there. Her sister Margaret married Walter Grant Thomas of Wollaston, Massachusetts, at the family's house on 29 January 1920. In September 1920 the Canaan paper noted that "Dr J D Terriberry and Miss Elizabeth Terriberry spent last week in New York city", the doctor's initial misprinted, and on 30 September the New York Times printed the engagement: "Dr. and Mrs. J. F. Terriberry of this city and the Berkshires announce the engagement of their daughter, Miss Elizabeth Terriberry, to Reynold Barlow Hoyt, son of George Hall Hoyt."

She married Reynold Barlow Hoyt, the son of a New York leather merchant, on 18 November 1920 at her parents' home on West Seventy-third Street. The Rev. Dr. Kirkwood of the Broadway Tabernacle performed the ceremony, and there were no attendants. The couple were to set up house at 862 West End Avenue after the first of January. Their daughter Betty was born in Massachusetts about 1921, and their son Robert Barlow Hoyt, called Barlow, in New York on 10 August 1923.

About 1925 the family settled at Pelham Manor in Westchester County, on Bonmar Road. She lived in Pelham for the rest of her life, forty-three years. She joined the Manor Club of Pelham, the Pelham Country Club, the American Yacht Club at Rye, the International Garden Club and the Huguenot Memorial Church. In 1938 she sat on the Maternal Health committee. She was recording secretary of the Pelham Woman's Exchange in 1939 and its chairman in 1945. A woman's exchange was a shop where women sold their own needlework, baking and handmade goods on commission. In 1940 she helped host a gathering of Barnard alumnae at Pelham Manor.

Her father died at the summer home in Canaan on 28 July 1932, aged 75. Her mother died at Canaan on 15 August 1946, aged ninety-one. The 1940 census lists her as forty-four, in the Pelham Manor house with Reynold, Betty, Barlow and a live-in servant, Mirande Goshe. In 1942 the local paper noted "Betty Hoyt and her mother Mrs. Reynold Hoyt of Bonmar road." In January 1943 Betty married Lt. Kenneth McGovern at St. Andrew's Chapel in the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis.

Reynold died in 1953. By April 1954 she had moved from Bonmar Road to the Fairways Apartments in Pelham. She died on Saturday, 5 October 1968, at New Rochelle Hospital, aged 73. Her funeral was held at the Huguenot Memorial Church, and she was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

The Scarsdale Inquirer printed her obituary on 10 October 1968: "Mrs. Elizabeth T. Hoyt, 73, who lived in the Fairways Apartments died Saturday in New Rochelle Hospital. She was the mother of Mrs. Kenneth McGovern of Oxbridge Road. A resident of Pelham for 43 years, Mrs. Hoyt belonged to the Manor Club of Pelham, the Pelham Country Club, the American Yacht Club, the International Garden Club, and the Huguenot Memorial Church in Pelham. Born in New York City in 1895, Mrs. Hoyt was graduated from Barnard College in 1916. Her husband, Reynold, died in 1953. Besides her daughter, Mrs. Hoyt is survived by a son, Robert D., of St. Petersburg, Fla., and a sister, Mrs. Walter G. Thornes, of New York City." The sister was Margaret, Mrs. Walter G. Thomas; the paper misprinted the name.

If Elizabeth Terriberry is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Elizabeth Terriberry (1895-1968)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/elizabeth-terriberry-1895-1968-d6a6cf.