William Alexander Lamberton

The Lamberton lineage is linked to Ireland, but Bill’s parents arrived long before the potato famine of the 1840s that forced many to leave. Bill was the youngest of three children born to a grocer and his wife, each child thriving in their pursuit of education, then establishing themselves firmly in their chosen careers as educators.

Bill was an academically gifted student, entering the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1863 when he was just 14 years old. With his degree in hand in 1867 he taught math at the school for a year. 

Many of his students were older than him. Perhaps for that reason he took a position as a math instructor at Lehigh University, which had just been founded in 1865 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Soon he found his true calling as a professor of Greek and Latin.

Since Latin is the mother of the romance languages, he may have employed a few phrases to impress a young lady named Mary McCurdy, whom he eventually made his wife for life in 1882. They shared a love for education, since she was trained as a school teacher. 

Although married at Southwestern Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, they raised their family in the Protestant Episcopal Church. A daughter, Mary, and son, Robert, were born and baptized while they lived in Bethlehem.

After 20 years, Bill accepted an invitation to return to Penn as professor of Greek, so the family moved to Philadelphia in 1888. Their home was a few blocks west of campus on Osage Avenue where their last child, Anne, was born in 1892. The school gave Bill the degree of Doctor of Literature two years later, and he became chairman of the Department of Greek. Daughter Mary graduated from Bryn Mawr College, as did Robert from Penn, before their father died in 1910. 

While vacationing at their seaside home in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, Bill went into a diabetic coma and couldn’t be treated in time. His inscription on the stone shown above is from Psalm 37:37. It reads, “Mark the perfect [blameless] man, and behold the upright; for the end of that man is peace.” 

However, the next ten years were difficult for his children; their mother Mary, Uncle John, and Aunt Mary all came to the end of their lives. All of them except John were buried with Bill and his parents in Section 37, northeast of the Circle of St. John.

But the story continues because the lives of Bill’s siblings and children were as notable as his. His brother, John, was also a Penn grad and a librarian and bibliographer there. After 20 years in classical education he became an author of various reference works. He was an editor of the American edition of Encyclopedia Britannica and a contributor to  Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary. Bill sister, Mary, was a teacher in the public schools her entire life but never married.

Bill’s son, a college football star, had an impressive career in law and politics, holding the office of county sheriff, judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and city council member. Robert ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1936, but came back in 1940 to win the honor of being the 88th mayor of Philadelphia. (He replaced the interim mayor who happened to be the owner of Mount Moriah Cemetery, George Connell.) Robert was only able to serve 18 months, from 1940 until his death in 1941. A public school in the Overbrook Park neighborhood was named after him.

The passion to be involved in education created an interesting life for Bill’s two daughters. They remained in the family home after their parents died and, although separated in age by ten years, they stayed close to each other for the rest of their lives. They were public school teachers until 1924 when Mary moved to San Francisco. She used her master’s degree to teach at a college there. Anne became a missionary/teacher at St. John’s University in Shanghai, China under the auspices of the Episcopal Church.

Mary joined her there throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s. During World War II, when Japan occupied Shanghai in 1942, Mary escaped but Anne was taken captive. She was held for more than a year before she and others were released to the United States in a prisoner exchange. Feeling emboldened after the war, Anne returned to teach in Shanghai until being forced out by the Chinese Communists in 1949. 

Both sisters were missionaries to Puerto Rico in the 1950s and died in the 1960s. They were laid to rest beside their parents, grandparents, and aunt. Since they took care of the arrangements for their Aunt Mary’s funeral in 1920, they planned for when they would be placed beside her and included their names on the stone, shown here. But because older sister Mary was the last to die, in 1966, her date of death was never inscribed.