Obituary of Meriel A. Freeswick

Meriel Anderson Wilson Freeswick was born on April 8, 1919 in Passaic, New Jersey, the ninth of ten children of William and Margaret Wilson, Scottish immigrants. At the age of 11 she moved with her family to Clifton, New Jersey, where she resided for some 30 years. She graduated from Clifton High School in 1937 and from Paterson State Teachers College in Paterson, New Jersey in June, 1941 with a Bachelor of Science in Education degree. On October 25, 1941 she married James Edgar Freeswick, also of Clifton, in a civil ceremony in Warrenton, Virginia, where her husband, who had been drafted into the United States Army on July 21, 1941, was stationed. He served during World War II as a topographer with the 67th Engineer Battalion in the Hawaiian Islands, and was honorably discharged with the rank of staff sergeant on November 24, 1945. They were married again, on December 30, 1944 in a religious ceremony at St. Georges Protestant Episcopal Church in Passaic, New Jersey. During their wartime separation they wrote each other a letter every day. Their only child, James Robert, was born in 1950. She was a first grade teacher in public schools. She taught form 1941 to 1949 and from 1957 to 1959 in River Edge, New Jersey; from 1961 to 1963 in Oakland, New Jersey, and then, for about an eight-week assignment as a substitute teacher, at James Fallon School in Wayne, New Jersey. Her husband was in the employ of the Continental Can Company for about 48 years, first as an artist, and then as a Supervisor, in the lithography section of Plant #67 located in Paterson, New Jersey, and then, at the end of his career, in Pine Brook, New Jersey. In 1960 she moved with her family to Wayne, New Jersey, where she resided for the remainder of her life. Her husband died on February 5, 1988 at the age of 68 at Passaic General Hospital. She died at the age of 85 at the same hospital, now named Passaic Beth Israel Hospital, in the city of her and her husbands birth, on Wednesday, November 3, 2004. She is survived by her son, James Robert Freeswick, of Wayne, New Jersey, and by her sister, Laura Anthony of Pasadena, California. Moores Home for Funerals in Wayne, New Jersey will have visiting hours on Sunday, November 7, 2004 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. There will be a service at St. Michaels Episcopal Church in Wayne, New Jersey on Monday, November 8, 2004 at 11:00 a.m. She will be cremated and her ashes buried next to the ashes of her husband in the family plot in Lodi Cemetery in Lodi, New Jersey, at which time there will be a private burial service for members of the family.