Ellen Parsons Strong Celebrates 90 Years

A 90th birthday party was held recently for Ellen Parsons Strong, a Southbury resident who was born in Sandy Hook in 1914 and was among the first students to attend Hawley School.

Mrs Strong was the daughter of L. Birdsey Parsons and his wife, the former Vivian Whetmore. The family, which included five children, lived on Riverside Road. They moved to Stepney in 1927.

Friends and family from California, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Connecticut, and Canada attended the birthday in the South Britain Congregational Parish Hall. The event was planned by Mrs Strong’s daughter, Marjorie MacPherson who lives in Canada; her granddaughter Anne Ayotte of Ellington, Conn., and her sister, Sylvia Davidson of Trumbull.

About 100 people came to celebrate the birthday. Great-granddaughters Rachel and Rebecca Ayotte of Ellington helped their great-grandmother with the opening of cards. Sylvia Davidson, who is 91, read a rendition of “We Were Survivors,” and her husband, Howard Davidson, 90, read “A 17th Century Nun’s Prayer.”

The event was catered by the church hospitality committee. Music was provided by son-in-law Robin MacPherson of Canada.

Mrs Strong has two other children, Vivian Larson, who lives in Maine with her husband Greg, and Bernice Corlis, and her husband Clarence, of California.

On Mrs Strong’s 85th birthday, her family surprised her with a hot air balloon ride. The balloon took off from the Ram Pasture in Newtown, went over Lake Zoar, past Mitchell Farm, and into Roxbury, where it landed.