RITTENHOUSE, Mrs. Laura Jacinta, temperance worker, author and poet, Born in a pleasant home on the forest- crowned hills in Pulaski county, Ill., near the Ohio river, 30th April,
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LAURA JACINTA RITTENHOUSE.
1841. She is a daughter of Dr. Daniel Arter. From her parents she inherited her tastes and talent for literature. Her education was received in the schools of the sparsely settled country, but she supplemented her deficient schooling by earnest self-culture and wide reading. She became the wife, on 31st December, 1863, of Wood Rittenhouse, a prominent business man and honored citizen of Cairo, Ill. Their family numbers one daughter and four sons. The daughter is a promising writer, who recently won £1,000 for an original story, and who is also president of the Young Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Cairo. Of the sons, the oldest is an electrician, the second a physician, the third a business man, the fourth a high-school boy, and all are energetic and industrious, total abstainers and free from the use of tobacco or narcotics of any kind. After her marriage, for many years, Mrs. Rittenhouse was able to spare but little time for literary work, but during the past three or four years she has been a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers. Her best work is done in her short stories. She is a skillful maker of plots, and all her stories are carefully wrought out to their logical ending. Her warmest interest has for years been given to the work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and for that body and its great cause she has toiled and written unceasingly. She was the first president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Cairo, serving in that office for many years. She was elected district president of that organization for four consecutive years, and for the past five years she has served as district treasurer. She was secretary of the Social Science Association in Cairo so long as it was in existence. She served as secretary of the Centennial Association in Cairo, and also as secretary of the Cairo Protestant Orphan Asylum, besides acting as manager of the asylum for many years. She served a year as secretary of the Cairo Women's Library Club. For three years she was president of the Presbyterian Woman's Aid Society in Cairo. She was one of the vice-presidents of the Red Cross Society in Cairo. Her life is a busy one, and her latest work in literary fields gives promise of valuable results.
ROACH, Misa Aurelia, educator, born in Atlanta, Ga., 10th March, 1865. Her father, Dr. E. J. Roach, was a physician, a native of Maryland, who removed to Georgia several years before the Civil War. His ancestors were among the earliest settlers of Somerset county, Md., and the original land-grants are still in the family. During the war Dr. Roach was surgeon of the 18th Georgia Regiment. After the war he returned to Atlanta, where he achieved distinction in his profession and served the public in several offices. Her mother was a daughter of A. Weldon Mitchell, one of the early settlers of Atlanta, and at one time one of its wealthiest citizens. Her great-great-grandfather on the maternal side served as lieutenant in a Georgia regiment in the Revolutionary War. Miss Roach was graduated with distinction from the girls' high school of Atlanta in June, 1882. The two years succeeding her graduation she spent in the study of French and German, with which languages she was already familiar, having studied them since early childhood. In 1884 she was appointed a teacher in one of the public schools. Beginning with the lowest grade, she was promoted until she had reached the fifth grade, when she left the school to
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AURELIA ROACH.
travel in Europe. She made a northern tour, visiting Norway, Sweden, Russia and Denmark. During her sojourn in Europe in 1889 she acted as a special correspondent for the Atlanta "Constitution."
