Nancy (Burgwyn) Lawrence Sargent

From Bloomfield, CT, 96 years old Nancy (Burgwyn) Lawrence Sargent passed away peacefully at the Caleb Hitchcock Care Center on February 20.

Nancy was born February 12, 1924 in Bronxville, N.Y., the daughter of Dudley Bates Lawrence and Katherine Clitherall (Birch) Lawrence and the granddaughter of Sarah Bates Lawrence and William Van Duzer Lawrence, the founder of Sarah Lawrence College, Lawrence Hospital and what is now known as the Lawrence Park Historic District.

She was raised in Bronxville and then Mount Kisco, N.Y., and graduated from the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, CT with the class of 1942.

As a teenager she was quite the adventurer and a precocious soul, traveling solo from New York to Boston, to Alabama to visit relatives on her mother’s side of the family and once to Guatemala on a banana boat to visit a classmate.

Like many in her generation, WWII proved to be a time to leave the beaten track. In Nancy’s case, that involved a trip to Pensacola, FL to help her older brother, Dudley, and his young family. There she met and married Edward Cutler Sargent, a naval aviator. Together they helped the baby boom along with four spirited boys.

Throughout a long life that included many moves from New York to Wyoming, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina and Connecticut and the early death of her husband in 1977, the two constants remained her deep attachment to family and her life-long connection with the home where she spent nearly every summer of her life, a camp that her father built in 1916 at Big Wolf Lake in the Adirondacks.

Nancy was also a wonderful storyteller with a witty sense of humor, an avid reader, a creative spirit and a strong supporter of the arts, animal rights and the protection of wildlife, serving for years as a volunteer at the Carnivore Preservation Trust in Pittsboro, N.C. She is survived by her four sons: Lawrence of North Royalton, OH, David of Ashburnham, MA, Edward Jr. of Portland, ME and Peter of Bangkok, Thailand; four grandchildren, Kathy (Sargent) Havelka, Elizabeth Sargent, Anne Sargent and Jonathan Sargent; and seven great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held later in the spring at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, N.Y.