Margaret Jean Young
Margaret Jean Young was born on 31 December 1930 at Braman, in Manchester Township, Wayne County, Pennsylvania. She was the fourth of the six children of Coe Finch Young Jr. and Dorothy Pearl Layton. Her father was a dairy farmer who had been widowed twice before he married her mother. So she grew up with an older half-sister, Ada, and an older half-brother, Horace, as well as Dorothy, Vera, Everett, and later Madelyn and Charles Edgar.
The 1940 census finds her at nine in her father's house at Equinunk. Her father died on 23 December 1940, eight days before her tenth birthday. Her mother raised the younger children alone after that.
She went to the one-room schools at Braman and at Equinunk, then to Hancock Central High School across the river in New York. She graduated as valedictorian of the Class of 1949. She wanted a secretarial course, and she paid for it herself. For several summers she had worked at local boarding houses and at the Hotel at Camp Equinunk, and she saved the wages. With them she paid the tuition at the Central City Business Institute in Syracuse, New York. While she studied there she worked as a mother's helper for a family near Syracuse in exchange for her room and board.
On 3 July 1950 she married C. Lynn Snyder at Smithsburg, Maryland. He was the son of Abraham Lincoln Snyder and Kathryn Lepulica, an Equinunk woodsman and carpenter who had served in the Army. They made their home in and around Equinunk for more than fifty years. They had a son, John Harvey Snyder, and a daughter.
Her working life began at the United States Post Office in Equinunk. In the 1950s she was its clerk and then its acting postmaster. She kept the books for the Bisbee Lumber Company in Hancock and worked as legal secretary to a local attorney. Then she went to the First National Bank of Hancock. She rose there from secretary to administrative assistant, then assistant cashier, and in the end vice president of the bank and its successors. She retired from the bank in 1981. She then started a second career selling real estate for Klimchok Real Estate in Hancock. She earned a license to appraise property and did appraisals on her own for several years. She retired for good in 1994, though as late as 2005 she still took temporary office work at Wayne Bank and at the Rutherford Law Offices in Honesdale.
She was a long-time member of the Equinunk United Methodist Church. She taught Sunday School there, served as Sunday School superintendent and kept the treasury of the Equinunk Charge. Later she joined the First Presbyterian Church in Hancock and served as its treasurer too. She was a life member, director and officer of the Equinunk Historical Society and sat on its Heritage Committee. She sat on the Preservation Committee of the Wayne County Historical Society, volunteered at the Wayne County Public Library, and worked the gift shop and "The Other Shop" for the Wayne Memorial Hospital Auxiliary.
She and Lynn traveled across the United States and Canada. They visited England and Scotland and took a Caribbean cruise. The trips they liked best were summers in Maine and winters in Florida. In 2003 they moved to a small house in Honesdale. Lynn died there the next year, on 2 July 2004, the day before their fifty-fourth anniversary.
She stayed on in the Honesdale house alone. She died there on Thursday, 18 June 2020, after a brief illness, at eighty-nine. Every one of her eight brothers and sisters had died before her. She was buried beside Lynn in Hillcrest Cemetery at Galilee. Their shared stone reads "MARGARET Y.", with the Y for Young, and carries two joined rings with the year 1950.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Margaret Jean Young (1930-2020)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/margaret-jean-young-1930-2020-490edc.