Sussex-Dinwiddie County Virginia USGenWeb Archives Obituaries.....Hancock, Henrietta M., 1996 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/va/vafiles.htm ************************************************ HENRIETTA HANCOCK WAKEFIELD - Henrietta Hancock, the 103-year-old known to her Wakefield community as "Miss Etta" died Monday. She lived alone through her mid-90s in the century-old home of her late parents on Wilson Avenue. Miss Etta was born May 27, 1892, in Dinwiddie County, daughter of a sawmill worker and his wife, John Henry and Anna Jennings Hancock. She was one of eight children. With a seventh-grade education, Miss Etta earned a teaching certificate and found work in Chase City, said her nephew, J. Marvin Hargrave of Newport News. "She taught school for 12 dollars a month and paid five dollars a month for room and board," Hargrave said. Lifelong friend Ina "Pun" Edwards remembered her working as a teacher in a four-room "country school" near Wakefield. The building, long gone, was heated by a pot-bellied stove. When her parents became ill, Miss Etta returned home to care for them, she said in a newspaper story. Her mother lived to age 92. Edwards remembers watching Miss Etta from two houses away, a "tiny" woman on her porch, brushing scatter rugs with a broom and leaving the screen door cracked for the neighborhood cats she fed. An old joke recounts how after Miss Etta became legally blind, ‘possums sometimes found their way to the cat food until neighbors chased them away, recalls Edwards and her son, the Rev. Jerry Edwards. She never married or had children. But as she got older, one neighbor helped her read the mail, said the Rev. Edwards. Others helped her shop so she could live on her own as long as possible. When Miss Etta walked to the store "they would help her in the store to pick out her groceries and somebody would bring her home," said Mrs. Edwards. She had worked many years as a bookkeeper at Jeb White’s general store in Wakefield, a car dealership in Waverly and Mid-way Service Station in Wakefield. "She was always interested in the people in her neighborhood and the church," said the Rev. Edwards, who she requested officiate at her funeral. Her long life gave the community an opportunity "to do things that people in a small community do" for each other, something the Rev. Edwards said he will mention in her eulogy. She was a member of Wakefield Congregational Christian Church for more than 50 years. After breaking a hip in her 90s, Miss Etta left her home and her vegetable garden to live with a grandniece in Smithfield and then with Hargrave in Newport News, where she died. She also is survived by nieces Edith Farmer of Denver, Colo., and Joanna Bowers of Columbia, GA. A funeral service will be conducted at 2 p.m. Wednesday at Purviance Funeral Home, Wakefield, with burial in Wakefield Cemetery. The family will receive friends at the funeral home on Tuesday from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Henrietta Mae "Miss Etta" HANCOCK, former teacher & bookkeeper, b. 27 May 1892, Dinwiddie Co., d. 26 Feb 1996, Newport News, interred in Wakefield Cemetery*, 28 Feb 1996, "The Daily Press" (Newport News, VA), Feb. 27, 1996, p. 11 *Wakefield list, an extension of the Southampton County Historical Society {SCHS} Cemetery Project: http://files.usgwarchives.net/va/sussex/cemeteries/wakefd.txt Her nephew is also buried there. His obit ("Daily Press," Dec. 30, 1996) is posted at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/va/sussex/obits/h626m3ob.txt Her parents are buried in Waverly Cemetery. Contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by Mrs. Bruce Saunders (bs4403@verizon.net), and re-formatted by File Manager. file at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/va/sussex/obits/h522h4ob.txt