Judith Irvin Hymes

Judith I. Hymes, 81, of Chestertown, MD, died on July 21, 2023 at Compass Regional Hospice in Centreville, MD. A funeral Mass will be celebrated at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, 508 High Street, Chestertown, MD, 21620 at noon on Wednesday, July 26, preceded by an open visitation, 9:30-11:30am, at Fellows, Helfenbein, and Newnam Funeral Home, 130 Speer Road, Chestertown, MD, 21620. A graveside Service of Final Commendation will be held at 11.00am, Saturday, August 5 at Evergreen Cemetery, 71 Old Keys Road, Tioga, PA, 16946, preceded by an open visitation, 9:30-10:30am, at Carleton Funeral Home, 11470 Route 6, Wellsboro, PA 16901. Judy was born in Blossburg, PA on September 20, 1941. She is predeceased by her mother, Madeline E. Hymes (née Irvin), her father Raymond J. Hymes, and her younger sister, Jane H. Schroeder. Growing up in the rural north-central Pennsylvania town of Tioga, she acquired the love of music, books, family and local history, wildlife and gardening, church life and friends that sustained her all her life. She was a 1959 graduate of Tioga’s Williamson Junior-Senior High School and went on to earn a BS (1963) in School Librarianship and History from Mansfield State University, an MS (1967) in Library Science from Drexel University, and a Certificate of Advanced Study (1983) from the University of Pittsburgh. Judy spent fifty happy years (1964-2014) in what she liked to call “Library Land.” As an academic librarian, she oversaw and successfully managed sweeping changes in the world of information storage and retrieval. She was always at the vanguard of innovation in collections development and technical services. In her first post, she built collections and services from the ground up for seven elementary school libraries in Lancaster Co., PA. Then in 1967 an opportunity to move into librarianship at the higher education level took her to Puerto Rico. There she became fluent in Spanish and helped three different university libraries navigate the shift from Dewey Decimal to Library of Congress classification. By the early 1980s she was eager to join the digital revolution; after updating her skills at the University of Pittsburg, she joined the staff of Clifton M. Miller Library at Washington College in Chestertown, MD. At Miller Library, Judy was a leader in the great transition to automation, phasing out the old card catalogue and migrating to a new integrated computerized system. At the same time, she nurtured an acquisition project close to her heart as a local historian: she created Miller Library’s Maryland collections, emphasizing the Eastern Shore and Kent County. She retired as Director of Technical Services in 2014 with the title of Associate Professor Emerita. Alongside books, Judy’s other great passions in life were music and genealogy. Through every phase of her life she contributed to musical organizations in her communities, playing the violin in school orchestras in Pennsylvania and Puerto Rico and singing with the Chester River Chorale in Chestertown, MD. She was active in numerous historical and genealogical societies, especially the Upper Shore Genealogical Society of Maryland, of which she was a past president. She not only documented her own family history but also became a noted resource to others through public lectures and hands-on help with record searches. A symbol of the lasting value of her work in this area is the multi-volume publication, Tombstoning in Kent County, for which she conducted much of the primary field research. A person of deep Christian faith and generosity of spirit, Judy was remarkable for her ability to make and keep friendships and family connections and to bring together the people who loved her. She is survived by a niece, Stephanie S. Landis (James), of Mount Joy, PA; a nephew, Charles E. Schroeder (Deborah) of Appleton, WI; cousins Allison Patterson Cullen (Michael) of Frederick, MD, Margaret O. Woodside (Sam) of Annapolis, MD, and Krista L. Ovist (Michael Scott) of London, UK, and numerous relations she kept in touch with from childhood or knew through her family history research. In lieu of flowers, please consider supporting the things that Judy loved. The Upper Shore Genealogical Society of Maryland: http://usgsmd.org Or send checks made out to USGS to P.O. Box 275 Easton, MD 21601 The Chester River Chorale: (https://www.chesterriverchorale.org/support/support-crc/ Or send checks made out to Chester River Chorale to P.O. Box 275 Easton, MD 21601 The Clifton M. Miller Library: http://www.washcoll.edu/giving/index.php Or, contact Mary Alice Ball, Dean of Library and Academic Resources Washington College 300 Washington Avenue Chestertown, MD 21620 WORDS OF REMEMBRANCE FOR JUDITH IRVIN HYMES (1941-2023) Good afternoon, everyone. It’s wonderful to see so many of you here, brought together by the gift for making – and keeping – human connections that, in Judy, was like a force of nature. I stand here keenly aware that many of you have no idea who I am, or who I was to Judy that I should presume to offer the words of remembrance at her funeral. Many of you spent far more time with her than I did. You have worked with her, travelled with her, sung with her, prayed with her, mapped cemeteries with her, dined and laughed with her, and talked with her into the small hours of the morning, again and again. It was shortly after my mother died, back in October of 2021, that Judy asked me if I would give the eulogy at her own funeral when the time came. I was surprised and even slightly abashed. “Who, me?” was my first inward reaction. I felt like the misidentified recipient of a gift that shouldn’t be mine. It was just like the time, in fact, when I was preparing to marry and set up my own home, and Judy mailed me a small, carefully packaged box – which I still have – full of beautiful, hand-sewn, animal-shaped Christmas ornaments. There were bears – a whole family of them, wearing little Santa hats – and geese, and mice galore in all shapes and sizes. And, of course, there was a story behind them. They had all been made and passed down to Judy by an aunt on her father’s side – an aunt, that is, who was a Hymes and, therefore, no blood relation of mine. To come into possession of them felt literally out of line, especially in light of Judy’s research on genealogy. Shouldn’t they go to a Hymes, I thought. But, no; strange wonder, Judy chose me to be the keeper of the Christmas critters, which is a vocation I still delight in, annually, when I wake them up and take them from them their little box – the one with Judy’s handwriting still on the address label – and place them on my tree. Always first on and first off. And the gift-giving spirit of Judy is always present with me as I decorate, because…well, because that’s just how spirits operate, it seems. That’s what spirits are, I believe: the fine yet tensile ties between us that Judy was so good at weaving. Through gifts like these – her eulogy request and the Christmas critters – Judy has taught me the meaning of unmerited grace and how to accept it, and how to accept – and rejoice – that we are all loved, not only for who we are, but also – and sometimes even more – for the sake of others. Judy has always loved me, I know, for the sake of my mother, her first cousin Beverly Ovist – whom some of you got to meet, thanks to Judy’s special spirit-weaving magic. Judy’s mother and my mother’s mother were sisters – sisters whose unique bond produced offspring of its own in the form of a deep sympathy between their daughters. I think it is fair to say that I stand here as both my mother and myself, and indeed as the whole Irvin clan, which Allison will tell you more about in just a few minutes. My formative teenage years coincided with Judy’s years in Puerto Rico in the 1970s. This made Judy something of an exotic personage to me, and interesting. Here was a member of my family who had chosen to strike out on her own and move away to a different cultural and linguistic world. Her exciting visits from afar always triggered two things: the baking of a butterscotch pie – Judy’s favorite and mine – and a recounting by my mother of the Summer of her Great Disappointment. When my mother was a girl, she often spent her summers in Tioga, PA, with her beloved Aunt Madge and Uncle Raymond, Judy’s parents-to-be. Throughout the summer of 1941, Aunt Madge was preparing for the imminent advent of her first-born, and my mother, who turned twelve that summer, was desperate for the baby to arrive before she had to go back to school. But alas, Judy took her time and didn’t appear until September, a tardiness for which my mother never tired of teasing her. For my mother, that long summer wait for the eagerly anticipated but elusive Judy was the beginning of a great attachment. And because of that, I have always felt that something like a secondary umbilical cord runs from my great Aunt Madge through my mother, connecting me to Judy in a kinship relationship that has no name. My mother underwent a kind of sympathetic gestation, I think, that summer. And Judy, after she finally came along, reciprocated in her own ways, supporting the different phases of my mother’s life. As a flower girl – aged eleven – she was a spritely attendant at my parents’ wedding, and then she invested herself unconditionally in me and my sister from the moment she knew we were in utero. Her loyalty to my mother in her declining years was nothing short of holiness. Judy seemed exotic to me, even mysterious, when I was growing up not only because she had chosen to live in Puerto Rico but also because she had chosen to become a Roman Catholic, something that in my mother’s family of largely Protestant Ulster Scots and Germans was frankly quite daring, downright rebellious. I knew my grandmother disapproved. And despite the closeness my mother felt for Judy, she treated the subject as tabu, a potential source of friction too sensitive to mention. My father was not allowed to play his record of the comedian Tom Lehrer singing the satirical song “The Vatican Rag” when Judy was around; it might offend her. All kinds of things might offend her, my mother thought. It was best not to talk about religion at all. So, I never got to ask Judy to tell me the story of how she fell in love with the Church of Rome. But she clearly did, and that inspired me. When I decided, after college, to reclaim my lost paternal Lutheran heritage and get baptized, her example of maverick faith encouraged me. It isn’t easy being the only religious person in the family. But then there was Judy; I knew that Judy understood. And, over the years, I came to think of her as the godparent I’d never had. I have often wished that I were more like Judy, that I had her ability to be both amazingly self-reliant and enmeshed in a wide network of supportive friends and relations. Her house in Chestertown is a powerful symbol of this for me. After Judy returned to mainland USA in the early 1980s and settled on the Eastern Shore, she wanted very badly to own a home of her own – that quintessential measure of individual self-possession and freedom. So she bought herself a real fixer-upper, in need of everything, and proceeded methodically, phase by phase, to transform it into her dream house. She made a plan and she stuck to it, saving money for each major renovation. I confess I envied her her self-sufficiency and independence and the scope they afforded her to suite herself. To this day I remain in awe of Judy’s tool closet. I took pictures of it, in fact, just this past Monday to record its orderly beauty for posterity: the rows of screw-drivers, pliers, and spanners hung lovingly on a wall of eminently sensible and unpretentious peg board. What ecstasy! What promise of autonomy! Who knew you needed so many combination wrenches in so many different sizes? It’s like having a small hardware emporium all to yourself. This woman was not daunted by any project; she was ready for just about anything. Believe me, if you haven’t seen Judy’s tool closet, you have missed a real shrine, a luminous grotto, in the cult of Sisters Doing it for Themselves. Yet for all her desire to carve out a space for herself where she could be herself and pursue her own goals, Judy was not the modern heroic individualist I sometimes imagined her to be. She knew better than to think that anyone ever really does it for themselves. Just about everyone she knew pitched in to help her with that house in one way or another. I remember one visit my mother spent pulling out scrub from the overgrown backwoods. And over the years that house has been at once Judy’s private sanctuary and an open hospitality center. It has been a virtual member of Judy’s social circle in its own right, full of light and life – surrounded by the birds and deer and turkeys and racoons and all the blooming things she loved to photograph and share with us. Judy found the secret to interdependent independence, or independent interdependence, whichever you like. She showed us that active, assertive self-determination and patient, vulnerable engagement with others are not incompatible opposites, but two mutually generating and sustaining sides of one coin. And letting the two sides morph freely into one another without worrying too much about which is the better face may well be the secret to a good life, to a life like Judy’s. JUDITH I HYMES FINAL COMMENDATION EVERGREEN CEMETERY, TIOGA, PA SATURDAY, AUGUST 5, 2023 A small ceremony of leave-taking Greetings and good-afternoon to you all – good friends and family of the gift to us that was Judith Irvin Hymes. Father Jacek has given us the final blessing, for which I thank him very much. But before we disperse, we who have accepted the privilege of organizing this ceremony on Judy’s behalf, invite you to linger for one last gesture of leave-taking. For those of you who don’t know us – which is to say, for most of you – my name is Krista Ovist, and this is my big sister, Meg Woodside. We are Judy’s first cousins, once removed. Now, we realize that – especially in this corner of the world – such a relationship to Judy does not do much to distinguish us from quite a few others – including, Jim Carleton, our funeral director today, and probably some of you, we imagine. Judy had many first cousins in the Tioga area, and thus many first cousins once removed in the wider Tioga diaspora. So, to be more specific, our mother’s mother, Margaret Irvin Haischer, and Judy’s mother, Madeline Irvin Hymes, were sisters. We are maternal Irvins, returned from the diaspora to Irvin territory. And it is largely owing to the special bond between Judy and our mother, Beverly Patterson Ovist, that Judy asked us to help her plan and carry out her wish to come home to Tioga and rest always beside her parents, Madeline and Raymond Hymes. With the help of Father Jacek, we have assisted Judy on her way home with our prayers; now we want to assist her with a few tangible things – a few symbolic objects through which we show our affection for her and our respect for the people, places, and projects that mattered to her. As I describe each object, Meg will place it in the vault to keep Judy company. We take comfort in the idea that, with each object, we are performing with love the duty of burying Judy, and we hope that all of you will feel you are helping in the performance and will be comforted too. The first two objects belonged to Judy’s parents. We found them, carefully wrapped away like hidden treasures, among her jewelry and childhood mementos. We have, first, her mother’s well-worn leather key case with only one key left inside it: the key to Post Office Box 131. I wonder if, in holding on to this particular object – with the familiar address inked on the inside lining as a reminder – Judy was keeping an old channel of communication open with her mom. If so, that channel can now be closed down and the key finally turned in, as Judy has moved back home for good. And, second, we have her father’s employee identification badge from Ingersoll-Rand, with his picture and clock number on it: number 1547. The grit and grime of 30 years’ hard toil as an overhead crane operator are embedded deep inside the casing of this badge; it can now be truly retired. Next we have two pairs of objects that remind us that, wherever Judy is, there also is her sister, Jane. Siblings forever create and define each other, through their differences and their shared points of reference. To Judy’s great sorrow, her younger sister, Jane Hymes Schroeder, predeceased her in 2016. With these two small photographs – their school portraits for the academic year 1955-1956 – we reunite them in spirit and revivify their days together at Williamson High. After graduating from Williamson, Judy and Jane both went on to Mansfield State College, as it was known in those days, and both intended to train to become music teachers. As those of you who knew them both will recall, things went to plan for Jane: she served for 21 years as an instrumental music teacher in Lancaster. But for Judy – by her own admission – the challenges of music theory and the complexities of grand staff musical notation compelled her to turn instead to her second love – the love of books. She wound up majoring in School Librarianship and enjoyed a 50-year career as an academic librarian. But music remained absolutely essential to her life and was a language in which she and Jane could always communicate and understand each other. Now, Jane liked to collect little porcelain angels – like these; and when Jane died, Judy inherited her collection. Today, two of those angels go with Judy: one that, like Judy, plays the violin, and one that, like Jane, plays the flute. Through Jane, moreover, and her marriage to a church organist, Carl Schroeder, Judy acquired a whole new – and very musical -- immediate family, with a niece, Stephanie, and a nephew, Charlie. These angels index them as well, because they are objects from Jane’s marital home where Judy was hugely loved as “Aunt Judy”, an integral part of the Schroeder home for many Christmases and special life events. Charlie and Stephanie, and Stephanie’s husband, Jim Landis, all helped us plan and lead the funeral Mass for Judy last Wednesday in Maryland. Charlie and Jim were pall bearers, and Stephanie and Jim both read from the Scriptures. Their love is here today as the power of their prayers for us and for Judy. Our mother, Bev Ovist, died back in October of 2021, and at that time, my sister Meg was inspired to create a set of keepsake bracelets out of one of our mother’s favourite necklaces: a strand of beautiful turquoise beads. She made one bracelet for me, one for herself, one for our first cousin, Allison, who is also a first cousin once removed to Judy through her dad, Philip Patterson, and one for Judy. These custom-made cousins’ bracelets beaded the four of us together tighter than ever on the common thread of having loved, and having been loved by, my mother. We want Judy to take hers with her, and we will remember her always – along with our mom – when we wear our own. Also turquoise in colour – one of Judy’s favourite colours – is this delicate ceramic bear. It was given to Judy by two of her dearest and oldest Maryland friends, two professors at Washington College, Jeanette Sherbondy and George Shivers. We have selected it to stand for the amazing breadth and depth of friendship throughout Judy’s life. The artist who created the bear wrote that it signifies the power of eternity, so we call it “Eternity Bear.” It makes an apt symbol for what friendship with Judy meant. Friendship with Judy is eternal. Few people, I am certain, have had the power to elicit so much love from so many for so long. Of course, we could not omit to include symbols of Judy’s life as an academic librarian who was always at the forefront of developments in technical services. Into what amounts to her last handbag, therefore, we place the ID cards she carried at – and held onto as souvenirs of – the two institutions she served the longest: the University of Puerto Rico (1973-1983/10 years) and Washington College in Chestertown, MD (1984-2014/30 years). Alongside library science, Judy found a tandem vocation in genealogical research. Perhaps some of you have been her sources and have corresponded with her about innumerable local families and their antecedents. You may not know, however, that we are standing on the spot where Judy’s passion for genealogy began, right here in Evergreen Cemetery. As a young girl she used to accompany her dad when he came here to mow the family plot, and while he worked, she read the head stones and began to wonder about all those bygone generations – who were they and how had they brought her to where she was? Judy truly loved nothing better than to uncover new information about her ancestors and to help others do likewise. Accordingly, we don’t want her to be without one of her trusty Papermate Sharpwriter #2 mechanical pencils – the kind she used to transcribe information from painstakingly accessed vital records onto meticulously annotated Family Group Sheets and Pedigree Charts. The mugs in Judy’s home office were always packed with these handy – and always sharp – notation devices. I suspect that Judy pictured heaven as a place where all ancestral connections might be revealed and the whole human family tree re-assembled, a place where painstaking research to know your ancestors is as obsolete as The Book of Revelation suggests the sun and moon will be to light the blessed. But just in case, she’d better have this pencil ready-to-hand. Everyone who knew Judy knows she had an impish sense of humor and loved to laugh. We’ve all had those cards and letters from her with wry and wise cartoons tucked inside, or emails that share funny images, stories, and jokes. As a token of that side of her, it seems fitting to include this little book among her grave goods. It’s called The Last Word: Tombstone Wit and Wisdom. I found it on a shelf in her home library, beside the genealogy books. It contains quotations from actual funerary inscriptions. Judy, as a person who spent many hours reading headstones and mapping cemeteries for local history publications, was uniquely situated to appreciate this book. Here is a small sampling of its contents before it too lies under a graven rock: (read marked selections). Thank you, Judy for sharing a last laugh. When Judy wasn’t putting in long hours at Washington College’s Miller Library, or doing genealogy, she was renovating her house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland – inside and out. This was a great work, a labor of love that created a peaceful home and a haven for friends, family and wildlife. She loved to share photographs with friends and family of her plantings in bloom and the deer and wild turkeys that visited her. She can’t take it with her, of course, but these two snapshots – a before and after contrast of the front exterior – are our tribute to her vision for transforming a tired old house into an enchanted and enchanting dwelling, and to her industry in realizing that vision. Our leave-taking would not be complete without symbols of Judy’s Roman Catholic faith, a faith that she chose as a young woman, departing – on her own – from the Presbyterian orientation of her early upbringing. Only she knows if there were struggles at first, and we salute her for seeking after God where she was able to find the divine and loving light. Here is the crucifix that hung on the wall in her bedroom, providing a focus for her daily devotions. Judy’s nephew, Charlie, presented this same crucifix as a symbol of Judy’s faith at her funeral Mass last Wednesday. And here is something called an “angel coin” – one of several that we found among her things. It is a coin bearing the image of an angel and the words “Guardian Angel, protect me.” I doubt that Judy has anything to fear, but now, when I think of Judy, I will think of a woman who kept angel coins, and that will make me happy. I am keeping another one that we found for myself. And finally, one last thing goes in: a mystery object. It is a frankly grubby, old, and much-folded-over envelope, with Judy’s name written rather crudely in one corner, and containing a key to we-know-not-what. There are many such mystery objects among Judy’s belongings – things saved and laid away for reasons only Judy ever knew. We have picked this one to stand for them all and for the irreducible part of Judy no one could ever fully know. With this lockless key, then, we reverence that mystery in her, and in all of us, and prepare to say good-bye. And so ends our ceremony of leave-taking. But anyone so inclined is now invited to come forward and help lay Judy to reset by adding a single red carnation – like this – to these assembled tokens of Judy’s life. It is an ancient belief that the dead are grateful for such gestures. It is a sure and certain truth that we are grateful for the life of Judith Irvin Hymes. Thank you all for coming. A tribute to Judy Hymes, Hello everyone and thank you for being here. I’m Allison Cullen, Judy’s cousin- once-removed. More on that later. Anyone who knew Judy would easily recognize her superpowers: her love of family and friends, world and family history, genealogy, nature, gardening, music and her faith. I’d like to share a few thoughts on Judy’s passion for genealogy, family, and family history, topics near to my heart as well. Judy honored her living family by actively engaging with us. She kept in touch, she visited, and was visited by, family near and far. She shared the news, good and bad. She also honored her ancestors through her genealogy research, documenting and sharing information and stories so this knowledge and appreciation would live on. Judy had a passion for genealogy for most of her life. She told me that she started her genealogy hobby at about age 12 and that this was long before genealogy programs, internet, digitized books and public records existed. It involved detective work in court houses, libraries and cemeteries. Borrowing rolls of census records on microfilms, no indexes- just hunt where you thought your ancestors may have resided. I can see her in my mind’s eye searching through records to find the next piece of the puzzle. She pursued this hobby into the digital age and was actively researching in 2023. She stipulated that her family research should be donated to the Tioga Historical Society upon her passing. For those not well versed in ancestry, cousin-once-removed means that we are separated by a generation and our closest common ancestors are our great-grandparents. Charles Levington Irvin and Anna E. Dann were those great-grandparents. They brought into this world Madelaine Irvin, Judy’s mother, and Dane, David and Margaret Irvin, Judy’s Uncles and Aunt. Aunt Margaret was Meg, Krista’s and my Grandmother. Uncle Dane’s descendants were known to us as the Oklahoma Irvins. Judy kept in touch with them and shared the news. Growing up we heard stories about Charles Irvin’s General Store in Tioga and the apartment above it where Madelaine and Margaret lived at various times. We had old photos to help guide the story telling. The family history was remembered at most every gathering. I am sure that Judy viewed these stories with a more scholarly eye than I had imagined at the time, but she modestly kept her technical knowledge to herself and let the stories flow. That was Judy. The memory of her and the stories will live on.

Judith Irvin Hymes

September 20, 1941 - July 21, 2023