I scored this little hand colored tin type on Ebay about 7 years ago. I was looking through the hits that came up for my search of, "Manchester, NY", and came across this picture of Mary "Sathbury". I have read every census for Manchester line by line, (it's that small a place), and I knew there was never any family named Sathbury in residence there. Looking at the back of the image, I found the seller had misread the old handwriting and turned the L in Lathbury to S.
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| Miss M.A. Lathbury Manchester, NY |
I knew there was indeed a fairly well known, (in Methodist circles), family by the name of Lathbury who once lived in Manchester, and the price was right so I purchased it. The photo was in perfect shape when I bought it, but one of the crazy Yorkies bit it. Luckily the image itself was unscathed, only the paper surrounding it shows tooth marks.
Mary Artemisia Lathbury was born in Manchester in 1841, the daughter of a preacher, whose sons were also ordained ministers. A religious person herself, she wrote hymns, was active in the Chautauqua movement, where she became known as the poet laureate of Chautauqua, and later lived in New York City where she wrote and illustrated books. The girl got around for a single woman in the Victorian age. Mary never married, she passed away in 1913 in New Jersey. She is buried at Rosedale Cemetery in Orange, New Jersey.
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