Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/450

Rh to the General Court of Massachusetts in 1641, 1655, 1656, and 1661.

Her great-grandfather, Seth Ingersoll Browne (William,3 Cornelius,2 Nicholas1), was one of the "Mohawks" who helped throw the tea into Boston Harbor, December 16, 1773, and was a non-commissioned officer m the battle of Bunker Hill.

Captain and Mrs. Nicholson removing to Newton when their daughter Adelaide was a mere child, she received her early education in the schools of that town, attending later Maplewood Institute in Pittsfield, Mass. She married Mr. W. H. Blodgett, a member of the well-known Boston firm of Joel Goldthwaite & Co., June 14, 1865, and settled in Newton, where she has since resided. Mr. and Mrs. Blodgett have two children, Grace Allen and William Ernest. The daughter, Grace Allen, a graduate of Smith College, is married to Dr. R. H. Seelye, one of the most skilled surgeons of Western Massachusetts, and resides in Springfield, where she is a power in the educational and moral forces of the community. William Ernest Blodgett is a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. He is making a specialty of orthopedic surgery.

Mrs. Blotlgett has always been a student, and, while travelling extensively in Europe with her children, was as busy with books and music as they. She has been a member of the Eliot (Congregational) Church for thirty-six years, and has given herself with much enthusiasm to its needs a«d concerns. She is now president of the Woman's Home Missionary Association of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. She was for three years president of the Social Science Club of Newton, which has for one of its good works the support of a vacation school in Nonantum (a manufacturing village in Newton) at an outlay of six hundred dollars a year. She was president of the Newton Federation of Women's Clubs, and was elected treasurer of the Massachusetts State Federation of Clubs at the time of its founding, a position which she filled for eight consecutive years.

Though Mrs. Blodgett has filled many public positions admirably, it is in her own home that she is at her best. It is here that one finds many evidences of her cultured tastes, and, seeing the personality of the mistress, does not wonder at her power of hiaking and keeping friends.

AROLINE YOUNG WENTWORTH, M.D., Ch.B., of Newton Highlands, Mass., was born in South Berwick, Me., being the daughter of Benjamin F. and Mary Elizabeth (Young) Wentworth. Her maternal grandmother was a Quaker. On the paternal side her first ancestor in this country was Elder William AVentworth, who came to New England less than twenty years after the arrival of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, and less than ten years after the arrival of John Winthrop and the settlement of Boston. In 1639 he was one of the signers of the "combination" for a government at Exeter, N.H. Some years later he settled in Dover, N.H., where he served as Ruling Elder of the church and for several years as Selectman. The long roll of his descendants includes many distinguished names, both in colonial and in later times.

The Wentworth family in England is traced back to a Saxon land-owner living in Strafford in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the eleventh century, and designated in the Domesday Book as Rynald or Reginald de Wynterwade.

Dr. Wentworth in her girlhood years attended the public schools of Wakefield, Mass., and subsequently took the course at the State Normal School in Framingham. After her graduation she taught m the public schools of Newton and in Arthur Oilman's Preparatory School in Cambridge. In 1895, after a four years' course of study at the Boston University School of Medicine, she received therefrom the degree of M.D., having previously taken (1894) the degree of Ch.B. (Bachelor of Surgery). She then spent a year as surgical interne in the Massachusetts Homœopathic Dispensary, and has held an. appointment on the surgical staff of that institution ever since. She is widely interested in philanthropic movements, and holds the office of visiting physician in a number of practical charitable institutions in Boston and Newton.

Shortly after her graduation Dr. Wentworth