Elizabeth Angier

To those who knew her, Elizabeth Mary Angier was gentle, loving, and caring. She was also fiercely protective of her family and quietly determined with a sense of adventure that inspired her love of travel around the world and across all fifty states.

Born Elizabeth Mary Smallshaw in Manchester, England, she was the baby in a close and loving family, with two older brothers who spoiled her rotten when they weren’t trying to throw her off their trail. She grew up in a 600-year-old haunted house and was a passionate, self-taught historian for all things British, sharing wonderful tales of kings and queens and famous battles.

Her own history was colored by war. By age sixteen at the end of World War II, Mary (as she was always called) walked the moors to a school that was ultimately bombed. To her dismay, her teachers were back in the classrooms only a few weeks later in temporary lodgings. She also lived through the severe rationing of food in the 1940s. At age 11, she was issued her first weekly ration of one egg, two ounces each of tea and butter, an ounce of cheese, eight ounces of sugar, four ounces of bacon, and four ounces of margarine. She was acutely aware of why food was rationed, giving up sugar in her tea for life after her mother had admonished her not to be greedy since sailors had died bringing it to her.

After the war she met Derek Angier, the love of her life. They married at the age of 21 and started life together in London where Mary helped support his PhD studies at the University of London. In 1956, with a toddler and babe in arms, she came to the United States for Derek’s first professional job, a “temporary move” that ended in a 66-year stay in the United States and citizenship for the family.

Our mother loved her adopted country, although she didn’t always agree with the how it’s run. Her wonder and historical interests inspired her to visit every state in America, stringing together experiences (and incredibly long drives) from New England to Florida to the plains of the Midwest and the Western Rockies.

Mary was the silent force behind international travel that took my parents around the world on a series of adventures to every continent but Antarctica. They rode a balloon across the Serengeti (which crashed, and Mom had a long bumpy jeep ride to the hospital); tried tofu in China (not fans), hiked at Machu Picchu (“exceptional”) and flew Aeroflot to Russia (“terrifying”). In their sixties, my parents put their possessions in storage and joined the Peace Corp with assignments in Belize.

During her 93 years, Mary watched her children, and a new generation of grandchildren grow up and have children of their own. She lived a long and interesting life, but she would argue that her greatest joy was her seventy-year marriage to a man she admired and deeply loved, her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

Mary lived the last seven years of her life at Rolling Green Village in Greenville, SC.

She is survived by her daughter, Jennifer Angier; son and daughter-in-law, John and Mary Angier. She was proud of her grandchildren, Andrea Angier (and husband Clayton Angier), Hillary Black, Alec Unis, Patricia Angier, Graham Unis (and wife Ashtian Hobusch-Unis) and delighted by her seven great grandchildren, Ava, Aliester, Ainsley, Annika, Aliza, Odysseus, and Persephone.

Mary’s family is most grateful to the caregivers who devoted themselves to her comfort and care.

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