My paternal great grandmother was Josephine Tingley Linscott. Known as “Josie,” she was born in Greencastle, Indiana to Rebecca and Joseph Tingley, who was a college professor and administrator at Indiana Asbury (now DePauw) University.
Coming from an academic home, Josie was drawn to music and literature. She played piano and sang at DePauw, but her greatest accomplishment may have been her poetry. In Chicago after college, she trained as a Deaconess and then helped care for young women in a Methodist Deacon home in Canada.
She married my great grandfather Walter Keene Linscott in 1899 and moved to Mexico to be with him as he ran his lumber export business in Coatzacoalcos.
They lost their first child to yellow fever and eventually moved to Mobile, Alabama and had three more children. She wrote poems that both mourned and celebrated family events. These have been passed down through the family. I will publish some of them in my next novel, which will trace her and Walter’s lives.
From her published obituary:
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