'FitzSimons Rites at Trinity Today' — The State, 15 November 1937 (death of Frances Motte Huger FitzSimons)

Brief obituary in The State (Columbia), Monday 15 November 1937, page 16, for Mrs. Christopher FitzSimons — Frances Motte Huger (1863–1937), Kit’s widow, the matriarch of the Columbia branch of the family for the twelve years following her husband’s 1925 death. The notice is short and procedural rather than reflective, but it pins three precise facts. (1) Exact death: ‘died at 2 o’clock yesterday morning’ = Sunday, 14 November 1937, 2 A.M. (2) Residence: 1724 Gervais Street, Columbia — a different address from Kit’s last residence at 1117 Barnwell Street (see book-004/013), suggesting the household moved during her widowhood. (3) A surviving sister: ‘Mrs. H. V. Sampson of Cincinnati, Ohio’ — Frances’s only named surviving sibling, of the Charleston Huger family. The grandchildren list confirms five known grandchildren (3 Allisons + 2 FitzSimons) and identifies Christopher FitzSimons 3rd by his birth-order ordinal (the Gen-6 Christopher in the family’s seven-generation numbering chain). The 8-name pallbearer list shares 5 names with the active-pallbearer list at her husband’s 1925 funeral (Eugene S. Read, J. Waties Thomas, James B. Murphy, Frank J. Dana, James H. Hammond — see book-001/p308), establishing a tight social circle in 1920s–30s Columbia.

The notice is signally short — half a column — for a woman who had been a leading Columbia matron for nearly fifty years. The brevity is consistent with the absence of a formal “Charleston Huger” identifier in the family record: she was almost always “Mrs. Christopher FitzSimons” in print, and her Charleston childhood (which the obit acknowledges only in passing — ‘spent her early life in Charleston’) receded once she joined the Columbia cottonseed-oil establishment in 1890. A longer encomium-style obit may exist in a later edition of The State or in a Charleston paper; this brief notice ran in the same edition as the funeral itself.

The Huger sister ‘Mrs. H. V. Sampson of Cincinnati’ is a notable detail: Frances’s only named surviving sibling in 1937, otherwise unrecorded in the album. Frances was a daughter of Cleland Kinloch Huger of Charleston; the Sampson surname is unfamiliar in the Charleston Huger record, suggesting Mrs. Sampson’s husband was a Cincinnati Sampson (a marriage out of Charleston, hence the migration north). Worth cross-checking against Cincinnati city directories of the 1930s.

Address change. Kit died at 1117 Barnwell Street in Columbia in October 1925 (book-004/013); Frances died at 1724 Gervais Street in November 1937. Either the household moved after Kit’s death (Frances downsizing once the household contracted to herself), or one of the two addresses was the family town house and the other a daughter’s or son’s residence to which she retired in widowhood. The 1724 Gervais address is in Columbia’s Shandon neighborhood; 1117 Barnwell is in the Statehouse / college blocks.