Susan Inches Lesley

Susan Inches Lesley (1823-1904), was the daughter of Judge Joseph Lyman, of Northampton, Massachusetts. She married Prof. Lesley in 1849, and devoted herself to the work of organized charities in Philadelphia. She published Memoirs of Mrs. Anne J. Lyman (Cambridge, 1876; 2d ed., entitled Recollections of My Mother, Boston, 1886). The couple's daughter was the painter Margaret Lesley Bush-Brown, whose first job was creating geological models for her father.

(Note: What follows is from the same source listed below, an extensive and detailed memoir -- Jessica German)

October 30, 1811, Judge Joseph Lyman was married to my grandmother, Anne Jean Robbins, daughter of Edward Hutchinson Robbins, of Milton, near Boston.

On her mother's side my mother traced her ancestry through her great-grandfather, James Murray,* to Scotch sources, reaching back to a certain "Outlaw," Murray, naturally much prized by the youthful members of the family of later generations; and through her grandfather, Edward Hutchinson Robbins, to that notable Anne Hutchinson, the "sectary," exile and martyr, in which relationship she herself took much satisfaction. She loved also her kinship to her great-grandfather, Nathaniel Robbins, the pastor for forty years of the old church in Milton; and she delighted, when she was an old woman herself, to look from her chamber window, when the autumn winds had cleared the view from leafy foliage, at the white spire of that old church where he had so long and faithfully served his people. Her grandfather, Edward Hutchinson Robbins, was a man of much force and sweetness combined. "A man of noble character and warm heart, who has left to his descendants the richest of inheritances, in the fine flavor of humanity that has kept his memory green, even to the third and fourth generation," she writes in her volume in memory of her mother (page 17).

To her mother's memory Susan has written this notable volume, and it is impossible to condense into a few sentences an adequate description of so strong and varied a character. Anne Jean Robbins, married at twenty-two to a man twice her age, became at once his cordial companion in all his active work, the head of an already large household, a power in the village life, a mover in social activities, and foremost in such reforms as the time demanded. As a girl, she had shown great capacity in practical matters. She came of a large family herself, being the third of seven sons and daughters.* She had a vigorous mind and a perfectly healthy body, and was rather intolerant of weakness in any form; but her warm heart prevented this intolerance from becoming hardness, and only caused her presence to act as a tonic upon weaker natures. She and her husband were very unlike temperamentally, but sympathized wholly in their spiritual outlook and their principles of life.

They had five children:

Joseph, born August 14, 1812;

Anne Jean, born July 7, 1815;

Edward Hutchinson Robbins, born February 10, 1819;

Susan Inches, born April 7, 1823; and

Catharine Robbins, born January 12, 1825.

My grandmother says in a letter written to a favorite niece, Abbie Greene, in September, 1823, "My baby was named Susan Inches; and a lovelier creature I never saw." Another little daughter, Catharine Robbins, born about twenty months later, was also an exquisite little child. The two sisters grew up together in united loveliness of person and spirit, until at eighteen Catharine was married to Warren Delano, Jr., and left the simple life of the Northampton home to live in New York, and later China, under much changed surroundings and circumstances.

Bibliographic information:

• Title Life and letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, Volume 1
• Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, Mary Lesley Ames
• Library of American civilization
• Editor Mary Lesley Ames
• Publisher G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1909
• Original from the University of California
• Digitized May 4, 2010
• Subjects Geologists
• Page 172
• https://books.google.com/books?id=YSAuAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA173&lpg=PA173&d...

https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/2:1:MCVN-6XM