|
Revised
on September 3, 2018 The
Family of
Neil A. Boyer of Easton, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D. C. Children of Neil:
Sabrina Nicole Boyer Foster Elijah Nicholas (Eli) Foster Tobias Julian (Toby) Foster Gary Steven Boyer Iris Monroe Boyer Maren Wade Boyer Gerald Family LINKS Neil Boyer's Family Genealogical Chart Neil's Parents, Art and Anna Boyer Neil's Sister, Ann Lee Boyer Parks The Boyers of Easton Photo Gallery of the Boyers of Easton Neil Boyer's Home Page Neil Arthur Boyer, the first child of Art and Anna Boyer, was born on April 22, 1938, in Easton Hospital, Easton, Pennsylvania. He grew up in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. When he began first grade, his parents lived there at 134 Summit Avenue. Neil attended Freeman School, on Fillmore Street in Phillipsburg. After graduation from the eighth grade, in the summer of 1951, he moved with his family across the Delaware River to Easton, Pennsylvania, and lived at 430 South 21st Street. After studying in New York City, he moved to the area of Washington, D.C., in 1964. In mid-2007, he was living in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside of Washington. Neil attended Wilson Borough High School in Easton, the same school attended by his father, Art. Neil played baritone horn in the marching band and sang in the school choir. After high school graduation in 1955, Neil attended Moravian College, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, living at home and either hitchhiking or driving the eight miles to Moravian each day. He was co-editor of The Comenian, the Moravian weekly student newspaper, and played trombone in the marching band. He graduated in 1959 with a B.S. degree in Economics and Business Administration. During his senior year and in subsequent summers, he also worked on the editorial staffs of the Bethlehem Globe-Times and the Easton Express.
See other photos of Neil in the section on his parents, Art and Anna Boyer, here and here, and in the section on his sister, Ann Lee Boyer Parks. Following Moravian, Neil was admitted to New York University School of Law and lived in the law school dormitory in Washington Square in Greenwich Village. He graduated from NYU with an LL.B. degree in 1962. He was later admitted to the bar of New York State. He was also admitted to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court in June 1970 with other alumni of NYU School of Law. President John F. Kennedy had created the Peace Corps soon after he took office in 1961, while Neil was in law school. Neil took the admission test for the Peace Corps during his last year at NYU, and in June 1962 he was accepted and went into Peace Corps training at Georgetown University in Washington. The trip from New York to Washington was his first ride in an airplane. In early September 1962, Neil was among some 300 Peace Corps Volunteers who flew off to Ethiopia, in East Africa. Neil was stationed in the capital, Addis Ababa, and taught English, first at the Commercial School and later at the new business college at Haile Selassie I University. He also worked for the Institute of Public Administration, drafting legislation and analyzing legal problems.
On his return from Ethiopia in 1964, Neil went to work for the Peace Corps in Washington, in a division that helped other countries create their own programs similar to the Peace Corps. In 1967, he moved to the Department of State where he became the first director of “Volunteers to America,” a new "reverse peace corps" program that brought teachers and social workers from other countries to the United States. In 1969, in Washington, he married Alba Giovacchini of Argentina, one of the volunteers in the program. They were married in the garden of the Argentine Embassy with many Boyer family members in attendance, and they had two children, Sabrina Nicole Boyer and Gary Steven Boyer. Alba Giovacchini Boyer. Alba Julia Giovacchini, first wife of Neil Boyer, had been born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on October 18, 1944, and educated in that city. Her father, Julio Giovacchini, had been born February 27, 1909, in Tuscany, Italy, and moved to Argentina as a young man. He was a bus and taxi driver. His brother Dante and his descendants were visited by Alba, Neil and daughter Sabrina in 1980. Alba’s mother, Iris Ferrari Giovacchini, was born in Argentina in 1910. She died September 
15, 1989, at the age of 79 of cardiac arrest after suffering heart
problems for many years. Julio died of a stroke in Buenos
Aires
on February 4, 1997, at the age of 87. Alba had an older sister, Teresa Iris Giovacchini Santamaria, who was a professor of Spanish literature in Argentina. She had been born on March 28, 1940. She traveled to Washington to attend the graduation ceremonies of Alba and Neil’s children, Sabrina and Gary, as well as for their weddings in 2004 and 2010. Teresa died at her home in Buenos Aires on September 29, 2014, at the age of 74. See photo in the section on Gary, below. Alba received a degree in early childhood education in 1965, from the Instituto Haritaoes in Buenos Aires. Having heard about the creation of the "Volunteers to America" program in the United States, she volunteered and was one of 10 Argentine young women to come to the United States in the summer of 1967. She worked as a "Headstart" teacher, first in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and then in central  Washington, D. C.
She
and Neil, who was director of the program, were married in 1969, and
she was naturalized as a U.S. citizen, in Washington on September 11,
1973. Alba worked in the early 1970s with an American Express language school and then moved to the International Center for Language Services (ICLS) in Washington. She became the business manager for ICLS, keeping track of students, teachers, contracts, payroll and other related activities. She was still working for ICLS in 2009. In 1972, Neil and Alba bought a house on Tilden Street, N.W., in Washington, and were living there when their two children were born, Sabrina in 1979 and Gary in 1983. Neil and Alba separated in 1985 and divorced in August 1991. Alba was living at that address in 2014. Work for the Department of State. In 1970, the Congress cut off funding for the Volunteers to America program, and Neil continued to work in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the Department of State, working on policy analyses relating to the operation of the Fulbright scholarship program and other international exchange programs. In 1976, he took a one-year position as head of the State Department's Open Forum, an organization designed to foster openness and creativity within the State Department. In the fall of 1977, Neil moved to the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, which handles U.S. policy toward the United Nations and its system of agencies. Within that bureau, in 1979, he took on responsibility for U.S. relations with the World Health Organization (WHO), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), in Washington. Neil traveled to Geneva two or three times a year to represent the Department of State at meetings of WHO, mostly in relation to political, administrative and financial issues.
In 1999, Neil took on responsibility for Department of State relations with the Universal Postal Union (UPU), which coordinates relations between the postal services of the world and ensures delivery of mail across national borders and arranges postal payments among postal services. In this capacity, Neil traveled to meetings at UPU headquarters in Bern, Switzerland, as well as to UPU and other postal meetings in China, Uruguay, Guyana, Panama and other sites. Upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 65, in April 2003, Neil retired from the Department of State. In 2007, he was spending time on digital photography, genealogy (including this family compilation), and learning how to use HTML to create a family internet site, as well as taking classes at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Johanna Misey Boyer. Johanna Louise Misey and Neil were married on April 4, 1992, in a small ceremony at the Henley Park Hotel in Washington. She was the daughter of Rachel Louise Long, born February 4, 1924, and Edward Gabriel Misey, born October 1, 1918. They had met while both were employed at the Department of State. The wedding ceremony was followed by a reception at the home of Johanna's parents in Bethesda, Maryland.
In April 1992, Neil and Johanna bought a townhouse on Twin Holly Lane, in Silver Spring, Maryland, from which both commuted to work on the Washington Metro. Johanna joined Neil on his trips to WHO and UPU meetings, and they traveled extensively in Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, Morocco, China, Japan and other countries. In turn, when Johanna traveled for her employer, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), Neil often joined her at NASAA meetings in New York, Memphis, Charleston, Portland, Phoenix, Portsmouth, Boise and other cities. And separate from work, in 2004, Neil and Johanna spent two weeks on a driving tour of Ireland. In later travels, they visited Turkey, Nova Scotia, Italy, France and Switzerland. This link includes photos from 2011 trips to Paris and the Swiss Alps.
Johanna had been born in Washington, D. C., and lived there during her early years. Her father was an attorney with the U.S. Department of State and served with the Foreign Service on assignments abroad. Johanna attended first and second grade in Manila, the Philippines, where her father was legal adviser to the U.S. embassy, and her fifth grade was at the College du Leman, Versoix, Switzerland, near Geneva, where her father was legal counsel of the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Geneva. When the family returned to Washington, they lived at 3263 Beech Street, N.W., and Johanna attended Lafayette Elementary School. In 1973, the Miseys moved to 6306 Herkos Court in the Drumaldry section of Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington. Johanna attended North Bethesda Junior High School and Walter Johnson High School, from which she graduated in 1979. After high school, Johanna went to Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota. She graduated with a B. A. degree in English in 1983.
Johanna returned to Bethesda after college and worked for short periods for the Department of State, for a temporary employment agency and for a practicing psychologist. In November 1984, she began work with the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), in Washington. NASAA represented state arts councils in their relationships with the National Endowment for the Arts and with the Congress. Johanna became Member Services Director and supervised the conduct of the annual NASAA membership meeting, usually an assembly of about 400 arts administrators and directors in such cities as Omaha, New York, Providence and Memphis. At the end of December 2004, Johanna decided to leave her job (after 20 years!) to do part-time consulting, and she created a consultation service called “JMB Arts Management.” In 2006, among other things, she was working on a monograph on experiential education for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; managing the finals for a nationwide high school poetry competition, “Poetry Out Loud,” in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts; and helping to organize conferences relating to the involvement of elderly people in the arts. Her website address was http://www.jmb-arts.com. The change from full-time employment also allowed her to spend more time with her dad. Her mother died on January 3, 2004, at the age of 79. Her father continued to live by himself for a while, in his apartment in Rockville, Maryland, and then in October 2006, he moved to the Riderwood Retirement Community north of Silver Spring, Maryland. With her father in a retirement center, Johanna became more deeply involved in programs for senior citizens. In 2006, she became a volunteer ombusdsman for an assisted-living facility near her home in Montgomery County, Maryland, in a program operated by the county government, and spent time helping to solve problems for residents of the facility. Then, drawing on her previous experience with arts programs, she strengthened her expertise on arts and aging programs, specifically on the mutual benefits of involving the elderly in the arts. In 2007, under contract with three agencies, she authored a 235-page book aimed at bringing about greater collaboration in this area. It was entitled Creativity Matters: The Arts and Aging Toolkit. It was published in November 2007 and posted on the internet in March 2008.
In her spare time, Johanna for many years provided voluntary service to a Washington organization called PETS-DC, an agency assisting the pets of people with AIDS and HIV infection. PETS-DC would organize in "buddy teams" to ensure, for example, that dogs were walked twice a day, or that adequate pet food was made available to those who could not afford it, or that pets were ferried to and from the "dog wash." Johanna became the "buddy team leader" for the North DC district and the buddy team director for all the buddy teams. For many years, her chief responsibility was the coordination of walk services for “Ruff,” a dog of mixed heritage (possibly part Pekinese, spaniel and terrier). When Ruff’s master died of AIDS in 2004, Johanna and Neil adopted Ruff. He had been born in March 1992 and was first walked by Pets-DC during the terrible blizzard of 1993. In early 2007, Ruff was 15 years old but full of energy and fun, despite a bad back, racing through the house with his stuffed moose, bear or dragon. And at night he snored. In 2005, the Washington Post chronicled the story of Johanna and the "Ruff Walkers." In 2004, Johanna was made a member of the Pets-DC Board of Directors. Ruff died at the end of November 2007, at the age of 15. See a tribute to Ruff. On October 27, 2012, Ruff's successor, Jake Boyer, about three years old, was adopted. Heritage unknown, he appeared to most experts as a mix of shiba inu. He was younger and more lively than Ruff and liked to direct his walks and coordinate his daily activities. In 2008, Johanna decided to return to school and began study for a master's degree in social work, at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. She was drawn to work with older people, especially after internships in an aging-services organization and a hospice, where she provided individual bereavement counseling and facilitated support groups for family members of people recently deceased. For her work in these organizations and in university classes, Johanna received the university's "award for excellence in gerontological social work" when her master's degree was conferred in May 2011. After passing her licensing exam in May, she was able to sign her name "Johanna Misey Boyer, MSW, LGSW" (Licensed Graduate Social Worker). In June 2011, she began work as the new "healing arts coordinator" at the Hospice of the Chesapeake, near Annapolis, Maryland, a position created to utilize Johanna's skills in developing arts-related interventions in work with older people, with the purpose of improving the quality of life for hospice patients. The goal of these interventions is to improve quality of life at the end of life. In 2009, Johanna was elected president of the Woodhollow Homeowner's Association in the Silver Spring community (17 townhouses) where she and Neil live.
Neil and Genealogy. In 1987, Neil undertook extensive research about his family and published a book called The Boyers of Easton. The book contained 300 pages of documentation, clippings and charts, and more than 300 photographs. In 2003, Neil also produced for family members a compact disk  containing more than 2,500 photographs of Boyer family
descendants of Neil’s grandfather, Lewis Elmer
Boyer. Neil
also did genealogical work for the "Association
of American Boyers,"
founded in 1905. He served as assistant historian, and for
some
years led a genealogical forum at the association's annual reunion in
Boyertown, Pennsylvania. In 2005, Neil began to extend his research and learned website coding so that he could publish his historical research on the internet. Major sections of his research on the Boyers and the Waltmans, including this one, were posted on the internet in 2006 and kept up to date. Photographs of family members were added in 2007. The website was http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~boyerlinks/. Neil also was an amateur photographer, like his father and grandfather, and he amassed many color slides, prints and digital images. He also served for a time on the Board of Directors of the Woodhollow Homeowners Association, in the community where they lived, on Twin Holly Lane, Silver Spring, Maryland. Children of Neil Boyer 1. Sabrina Nicole Boyer, first child of Neil and Alba Boyer, was born in George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D. C., on August 23, 1979. At the time, her parents lived at 4711 Tilden Street, N.W., Washington, D. C., 20016, and that was her home until she completed college. She was baptized in the presence of her grandparents, Art and Anna Boyer, at Calvary Church, in Easton, wearing the same dress worn by her father at his baptism years earlier. Later, Sabrina was also baptized in the presence of her other grandparents, Julio and Iris Giovacchini, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Sabrina attended Horace Mann Elementary School, from kindergarten until sixth grade, and then went to Hardy Middle School for grades 7 and 8. Both schools were in the D. C. public school system. In the summer between seventh and eighth grade, Sabrina went on a tour of Italy with her Hardy classmates. From ninth to twelfth grades, Sabrina attended Oakcrest School, a small Catholic school near Tenley Circle, at 4201 Yuma Street, N.W. in Washington (it later moved to a new site in Virginia). She was active in many school events, elected president of the junior class and a member of the student council. She sang and danced in the highly praised musical variety shows produced by the school each year. She was also copy editor of the yearbook during her senior year. When she graduated in May 1997, Sabrina was first in her class and gave the valedictory speech at commencement. She also received a number of the school's academic awards.
During her high school years, Sabrina worked in the office of the Ross Veterinary Hospital, on McArthur Boulevard in Washington. She first served as a volunteer, while she was in middle school, and then as a paid employee until she went to Swarthmore. She assisted in the treatment of the animals and worked with pet-owners and other customers in scheduling appointments and collecting fees. In her vacation periods during school, Sabrina and her brother Gary regularly spent two weeks with their father and his wife Johanna -- first at Leisure Lake, in Scotrun PA, just northwest of Stroudsburg, and then in various vacation houses at Emerald Isle, North Carolina, located on Bogue Inlet, near Swansboro. Sabrina also traveled internationally, visiting Argentina on several occasions with her mother and Geneva and Paris with her father.
In the college entrance competition, from the six schools that offered her admission, Sabrina chose Swarthmore College, in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, and enrolled there in August 1997. Among other activities, she immediately joined the women's rugby team. During her junior year, Sabrina undertook a study-abroad program at the University of San Francisco in Quito, Ecuador (in Spanish “Universidad San Francisco de Quito” – USFQ). Initially planning to stay only one semester, she liked the program so much that she stayed the entire year. Her time in Ecuador got her interested in volcanoes, and during the following summer she obtained an internship with the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History in the section dealing with earthquakes and volcanoes. Sabrina graduated from Swarthmore in 2001 with a B.A. degree in biology with a concentration in environmental studies.
Following graduation from Swarthmore, Sabrina worked briefly for her mother’s employer, the International Center for Language Services, and then in early 2002 she joined Conservation International (CI) as a professional staff member in the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF). This position gave her the opportunity to travel to Costa Rica, Brazil, Ecuador, South Africa and Madagascar in her first several years with CI. In 2005, she was CEPF grants coordinator for Latin America. When Sabrina and Matt moved to Charlottesville in 2005, she stopped working for CI and began study for a master's degree at the University of Virginia. In the fall of 2007, Sabrina took a position as a teaching assistant for a UVA class in geology. Meeting Matt Foster. Shortly after joining Conservation International, Sabrina met Matthew Nathaniel Foster, another CI staff member. They became engaged on Easter Sunday 2003 (the ring was found as part of an “egg hunt”), and they were married on July 10, 2004. Here is Sabrina’s description of their meeting:
About 100 people – family, CI staff members and friends – attended their wedding at the Church of the Annunciation, on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. Sabrina’s father gave her away and her brother was one of the ushers. A reception was held at Rockwood Manor, a facility operated by the Montgomery County Department of Parks, in Potomac, Maryland. Sabrina and Matt spent their wedding night at the Tabard Inn on N Street in Washington and then took a brief mini-honeymoon at a resort in the mountains of nearby West Virginia. The real honeymoon came in a two-week trip to Hawaii in October 2004.
Following the wedding, Sabrina and Matt lived for a year in an 11-story apartment building in Arlington, Virginia, and used the Washington Metro to commute to work. In 2005, they moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where Matt continued to work for Conservation International. In August 2009, Sabrina received from the University of Virginia her Master of Arts degree in Environmental Sciences, with a focus on ecology, and she began working full-time for the environmental consulting firm "e2" (pronounced "E-Squared") in Charlottesville. Among other tasks, the company carried out projects in cooperation with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other agencies. Sabrina was often involved in review of and reporting on Superfund clean-up sites. In February 2011, the company changed its name to Skeo Solutions. After almost ten years with Conservation International, Matt left in April 2011 to take a senior position at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation in Washington. Matt and Sabrina maintained their home in Charlottesville but rented a house in Alexandria to ease the problem of commuting to jobs in different cities. Matt and Sabrina were the parents of Lucia, a rambunctious black labrador mix. Sabrina and Matt had a son, Elijah Nicholas Foster. Matt Foster had been born on January 17, 1973, in Rockford, Illinois, the son of John Foster, a physician, and Mary Ann Foster, a teacher and later a real estate agent in Rockford. Matt attended public schools in Rockford and graduated from the University of Illinois in 1995. He had two older sisters, Elizabeth and Rebecca, and one younger brother, David. Before Matt’s graduation from Illinois, he spent six months studying in Quito, Ecuador, in 1993. He worked as a volunteer for six months in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and then taught in the Rockford Public Schools for two years before going to graduate school. At Tufts University, he earned his master's degree in environmental analysis in 1999 and then spent two years working on Cape Cod with the International Fund for Animal Welfare. In 2001, Matt moved to Washington DC to work with Conservation International. Fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, Matt did extensive traveling to Brazil, Mexico and other Latin American countries in support of CI-funded environmental activities. In 2007, he became Conservation International's Director of Conservation Outcomes, heading a group of three people identifying conservation priorities in Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, and Africa and Eurasia. It was at CI that Matt met Sabrina. His brother David Foster served as his best man at the wedding in July 2004, and his sisters Rebecca Messerschmidt and Elizabeth Steward provided music. Several nephews and nieces also participated in the service.
Elijah Nicholas (Eli) Foster,
son of Sabrina and Matt was born on January 13, 2015, at Martha
Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was Neil Boyer's
first grandchild. Eli was baptized in Charlottesville on April 19, 2015, with family and friends present. See the photos on Neil's Facebook page.
Tobias Julian (Toby) Foster, second child of Sabrina and Matt, was born on July 7, 2017, at the Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia.
2. Gary Steven Boyer, the second child of Neil and Alba Boyer, was born on November 6, 1983, at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D. C.
He attended Horace Mann Elementary School, a Washington, D.C., public school honored for its excellence by the U.S. Department of Education. Gary was a student there from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade. For seventh and eighth grade, Gary attended St. Ann's Academy, a small school on Wisconsin Avenue at Tenley Circle in Washington. The entrance to the school was just across the street from Oakcrest School, which was attended by his sister, Sabrina. In September 1997, Gary began attending St. John's College High School, on Military Road in Washington. Gary chose the Junior ROTC course of study and dressed in his military uniform for school, but he dropped the military program after one year. He graduated from St. John’s in 2001.
At St. John's, Gary joined the school soccer team and started for the junior varsity. He also continued more than five years of soccer play for the Comets, a team in the Stoddert Soccer League. Gary regularly started for the Comets and was one of their best players.
In the fall of 2001, Gary entered St. Mary’s College of Maryland, in St. Mary’s City, about two hours southeast of Washington, and majored in economics. While in college, he became an expert trader on E-Bay, and put major efforts into improving various cars. In his last year at St. John’s, Gary secured a maroon 1989 Honda Accord sedan, which he quickly dubbed “Juanita.” In very little time, Juanita turned out to be a “lemon,” as almost every part needed repair or replacement. In 2003, he traded the Honda for a 1993 Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited, which seemed to be in good condition at the time but then followed the path of the Honda. When Johanna inherited her mother’s car in 2004, she gave Gary her black 1994 Toyota Corolla and Gary embarked on an extended (very long), eventually successful, effort to sell the Jeep. By early 2007, the Corolla had made many trips between Washington and Charleston, South Carolina. In August, 2007 Gary bought a 2004 GMC Canyon, a small four-door truck he had long admired.
Gary’s girlfriend in college, Emma Gerald of Pelham, New York, a fellow student at St. Mary’s, was presented for her social debut in her grandmother’s home town, Florence, South Carolina, in December 2002. As the escort, Gary was persuaded (required) to wear white tie and tails, and the photographs showed a dashing couple. In 2004, Gary was an usher in the wedding of his sister Sabrina and in December accompanied Emma once again to a fancy-dress debut in South Carolina, this time the debut of one of Emma’s sisters. In 2006, Gary acquired Buster, a large dog of mixed heritage, probably major part plott hound, who had a somewhat fierce appearance but a very gentle and laid-back personality. When caught doing something he shouldn't do, Buster would voluntarily give himself a "time out." Buster died in 2014 at the age of 9.
Gary’s vacations included going to Geneva and Paris with his dad and Johanna when he was 9 and to Argentina with his mother and sister on several occasions. Gary and Emma joined Sabrina and Matt at Emerald Isle, North Carolina, when Neil and Johanna rented a vacation cottage, and he drove to spend time with friends in Maine as well as to visit Emma at her home in New York. In early 2009, on the day before Valentine's Day, Gary and Emma became engaged while they were vacationing in Argentina. Gary proposed and gave Emma a ring while they were visiting the massive waterfalls in Iguazu National Park.
Gary graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland on May 14, 2005, with a degree of Bachelor of Arts in economics, with an emphasis in business. After working for several months for Bank of America, in Washington, he moved in the fall of 2006 to the area around Charleston, South Carolina, first in Mount Pleasant and later in Isle of Palms. He worked for a year as a project manager for Boss Carpet Cleaning, specializing in water extraction and flood damage. In early 2007, he began work as an automobile claims agent for Allstate Insurance in Charleston. In November 2008, he moved back to Washington and began work on Allstate homeowner insurance claims in Columbia, Maryland. Then in July 2009, Gary and Emma moved to West Asheville, North Carolina, where Gary joined Americorps and began work on a project helping low-income families insulate their homes. On September 18, 2010, Gary and Emma were married. The wedding was at Camp Ton-A-Wandah, a summer camp for young girls in the mountains of western North Carolina, close to Hendersonville and Flat Rock. Wedding guests were invited to stay for two nights in the rustic cabins and to participate in swimming, rock climbing and zip-line adventures. Gary and Emma were married at the bottom of a waterfall late on Saturday afternoon. The wedding party included Emma's three sisters (Grace, Ann and Sarah Gerald), and one brother (Will Gerald), Gary's father, Neil, as best man, and his sister, Sabrina, as well as several friends of both Gary and Emma. On the Monday after the wedding, Emma and Gary Boyer left a for ten-day honeymoon at two "green" ecological resorts in Nicaragua. The wedding was announced in The State, a South Carolina newspaper, as well as a New York Hudson Valley publication. In February 2011, Gary began work for Edge Energy, a firm performing weatherization work on homes in the Washington and Baltimore areas. Gary's job was to perform energy audits on houses, followed by estimates on work needed to improve the energy efficiency of the buildings. Gary and Emma (and Buster) moved to the Del Ray section of Alexandria, Virginia, in April 2011. In early 2015, they bought a house in Georgetown, South Carolina, and embarked on a significant up-grade project. About the same time, Emma secured a position as the Riverkeeper for the Waccamaw River and adjacent land in the Winyah Bay watershed, which covers northeast South Carolina and southeast North Carolina. In May 2015, Emma and her new job were featured in an article in the Myrtle Beach On-Line website. This letter from July 2015 contains Emma's description of her new job, a brief biography and a picture of Emma at work in the Riverkeeper role. On August 3, 2015, Iris Monroe Boyer was born to Gary and Emma. Iris arrived six weeks before she was expected, weighing four pounds one ounce. Emma gave birth at Trident Medical Center in Charleston, South Carolina.
On August 11, 2017, Maren Wade Boyer, second child of Emma and Gary Boyer, was born at Charleston Birth Place, in Charleston, South Carolina. She weighed six pounds, 11.5 ounces.
The Gerald Family. Emma Gerald Boyer, wife of Gary, was one of five children of Lucta Allen-Gerald and William Levi Gerald (1954-2008). Emma was born on June 17, 1983. She and her siblings were born in South Carolina but went to public schools in Pelham, New York. Their father was a prominent surgical pathologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, with a special interest in cancers of young people and the molecular biology of cancer. He was born on March 2, 1954, the son of Thelma Todd Gerald (1919-2009) and Cleeland Talbert Gerald. His parents lived in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Dr. Gerald died of cancer at his home in Pelham on September 14, 2008, at the age of 54. William Gerald married Lucta Allen on May 5, 1979. Lucta was a nurse and for many years was the camp nurse at Camp Ton-A-Wandah, which her four daughters attended and where Emma and Gary were married. In 2010, she lived in Marion, South Carolina. Her mother, Lucta Johnson Allen (known as "Lucky Mama"), lived in Florence. William and Lucta Gerald had five children: William
Cleeland Gerald
Emma Gerald Grace Lucta Gerald Anne Marshall Gerald Sarah Todd Gerald
LINKS Neil Boyer's Family Genealogical Chart Art and Anna Boyer of Easton Ann Lee Boyer Parks The Boyers of Easton Photo Gallery of the Boyers of Easton The Boyers of Orwigsburg The Jacksons of Cumbria, England Neil Boyer's Home Page |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
