Josephine Sherman Evans
Josephine Sherman Evans was born in Chicago on 27 January 1888. Her father was William Douglas Evans, born at Clayville in Oneida County, New York, the son of Welsh parents. Her mother was Mercer Pool Little, born in New Brunswick, Canada. Her parents had married at Indianapolis two years before. Where her middle name, Sherman, came from is not known. No Sherman appears among her known forebears on either side.
She grew up in a large household in Chicago. The 1900 and 1910 censuses both find her there with her parents. Her brothers and sisters included Esther, Humphrey Marshall, Dorothy, George, Agnes, Meredith, Mercer, Elizabeth and William Douglas Jr. Her aunt Frances Evans, her father's sister, also lived and died in Chicago.
She has a card in the Veterans Administration master index for 1917 to 1940. It gives Chicago as her residence and as the place of her military service. Such a card was made when a person had a claim or a service record with the government. What she served in during the First World War, and when, is not recorded on the index.
On 21 October 1919, in Manhattan, she married Osbert Croome Roach, an Englishman who had founded a boys' school at Tarrytown-on-Hudson. She was thirty-one; he was thirty-nine. Their son Malcolm Bruce was born in New York City on 15 July 1920. Their daughter Mercer Radcliffe followed on 10 August 1922. Mercer carried her grandmother's name.
The family lived at Ossining and then in Bronxville, where the Bronxville Review reported an exhibit she organized in December 1926. In 1930 the census found them at Greenwich, Connecticut. By 1931 they had a house at 64 Sagamore Road, Bronxville. Her husband worked in personnel for the United States Rubber Company and was busy with the town's schools and its new Community Forum.
Osbert died at Lawrence Hospital on 4 December 1934, after a short illness. She was forty-six, with a son of fourteen and a daughter of twelve. Six weeks later, on 15 January 1935, her father died in Manhattan.
She stayed in Bronxville and went to work. In May 1935 she was elected third vice president of the Parent-Teacher Association. From November 1935 into February 1936 a small advertisement ran every week in the Bronxville Review under her married name, offering life insurance from the house on Sagamore Road.
She later moved within Bronxville, to Park Avenue and then to Midland Gardens. In the 1940 census she was a widow there, with Mercer at home. Malcolm went to Princeton in 1938. Mercer won a Smith College Club scholarship in 1940. By 1942 Josephine's address was 109 Elm Street, Northampton, Massachusetts, the town where Smith College stands. Her mother died in Queens in November 1943 and was buried at Chappaqua, New York.
In 1937 she and Francis George Playne were granted probate of her husband's estate in England.
Josephine died on 3 December 1949, a resident of Northampton. She was sixty-one. A notice appeared in a Springfield, Massachusetts, paper on 5 December. She was buried in Fair Ridge Cemetery, Chappaqua, with her husband and her mother.
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Cite: Heirology, "Josephine Sherman Evans (1888-1949)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/josephine-sherman-evans-1888-1949-7546a0.