She said her favorite part of volunteering for the FHC are the friends she has made and meeting and talking with people. “I get very excited when young people come in and are interested in history,” she commented.
Through the years, Ruthan has fielded requests from the normal – adoptees seeking a picture of a birth mother, or homeowners wanting to know more about their house – to the unusual. She mentioned a man creating a model of Richardson-designed Framingham train station and looking for architectural details.
She recalled, “A family from Gross Pointe, Michigan contacted us. Their grandmother had died years earlier, but they did not know how because it was always only whispered about.”
Ruthann’s investigation led her to a Boston Globe article documenting the woman’s death due to a murder/suicide. Ruthann kept digging – and found more to the story! The couple (grandmother and her husband) came from Italy to Framingham via Fall River. The woman and her husband had three children, and a boarder (who came with them from Italy).
“In August 1923 the boarder was evicted by the husband for ‘being too friendly’ with his wife. And then one day in September, the wife went grocery shopping and did not return. People from Dennison walking in the woods found the bodies – it was the boarder and the wife with a gun between them,” she described. Was it really a murder/suicide, or was it staged by the husband? That, we may never know.
Sometime later, the family came to visit Framingham and Ruthann, who had delved into the story of their grandmother! She toured them around the city to see the different areas important to the grandmother’s life so many decades before. It was a special day for all!
Ruthann’s historical knowledge, experience and curiosity are great assets to the Framingham History Center, and she is a vital member of our Research Team.
“I didn’t know how much I knew about Framingham until I started doing this,” she explained.
THANK YOU Ruthann for all you do for FHC!