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Fanny Elizabeth Stark was born on February 6, 1831, to Lathrop Stark and Fanny Saxton in Bozrah, Connecticut, a small town outside of Norwich. She was the oldest of the six children in their farming family. In June of 1836 the Starks had their third child, Nelson Hicks Stark. Nelson died just 4 days shy of his fifth birthday, or as Fanny’s sampler states “in his 5th year of life” on June 3, 1840. The following year when Fanny was ten years old, she sewed this mourning sampler in memory of her little brother. She created it under the tutelage of her teacher R. A. Hall. It’s possible this could be her relative Rebecca Ann Stark Hall, but this could not be conclusively verified. In 1842, the Starks gave birth to their youngest son naming him Everett Nelson Stark, possibly in memory of their older son which was a common practice at the time. Fanny married Simeon Abel in 1851, (her sister Mary married Simeon’s brother Elijah). She lived in Bozrah for the rest of her life passing away in 1895 at the age of sixty-four. Nelson Stark is buried beside his parents in the Stark family cemetery. The probate records of Lathrop Stark, who died in 1877, detail the work done on the cemetery including a headstone for Nelson and himself for $43.34, two days of drawing stone for $5.50 and using that stone to stack and build up the cemetery wall for $44.00. 1 That stone wall still surrounds the small rural cemetery. Fanny’s embroidery is a testament to the high child mortality rates in the 19th century. Of the sixteen marked graves in Stark Cemetery six are children under the age of five.

Genesee Country Village and Museum