Frances A. Rogers

Frances Agnes Rogers, known in the family as Fanny, was born in Billerica on May 3, 1883, the youngest of the ten children of Timothy Rogers (1835 to 1906), a laborer, and Mary E. (Rowe) Rogers. The family lived at 382 Boston Road in Billerica Center, in a house built about 1872 for Eleanor Richardson Bennett, who leased it to Timothy Rogers and left it to him at her death in 1891. Her sisters included Nellie L. Rogers, for more than thirty years one of the town's public weighers, and Alice Teresa, who became a nun as Mother Aloysius; her brother Francis E. Rogers became a priest.

She was one of the eight members of the class of 1899 at the Howe School, the town's high school, listed in the school report with John Barrington, Albert Richardson and Joseph H. Sherman. According to her family, she went to work in 1900 as clerk and assistant at the Billerica post office at the Center, where the postmaster was Thomas F. Lyons, who had held the office since 1889 and was married to her sister Bridget Isabel ("Belle").

T. Frank Lyons died in December 1931, at 66, and Miss Rogers carried on the office after his death. The Post Office Department's records list her as acting postmaster of Billerica from April 20, 1933, and she was appointed postmaster on April 25, 1934. Her sister Belle Lyons died in September 1933. Frances Rogers kept the Center post office for almost twenty years more and retired on May 31, 1952, after some fifty-two years of work there; John B. Keaney succeeded her as acting postmaster.

In 1932 she bought the house next door to the homestead, 380 Boston Road, a Dutch Colonial built about 1919 for her sister Mary A. Rogers and Mary's husband Michael Hayes, and she owned it until 1963. The homestead at 382 Boston Road stayed in the Rogers family until 1970, when Frances A. Rogers, the last of the sisters, sold it to the Mother Aloysius Foundation, Inc. She died in Boston on January 30, 1973, at the age of 89, and was buried in the family lot in Saint Patrick Cemetery in Lowell, where her name is on the stone with her sisters Elizabeth and Anne.

References

1. Frances Agnes "Fanny" Rogers (1883-1973), Find a Grave (birth, death, burial, family; post office service 1900-1952)
2. USPS Postmaster Finder, Postmasters by City (Billerica, Mass.): acting April 20, 1933, appointed April 25, 1934
3. Town report for the year ending Feb. 28, 1900: Howe School, members of the class of 1899 (Frances A. Rogers)
4. Deaths registered in Billerica, 1931 (Thomas F. Lyons, postmaster, Dec. 6, age 66)
5. MACRIS BIL.396, Michael Hayes House, 380 Boston Road (owned by Frances A. Rogers 1932-1963)
6. MACRIS BIL.397, Eleanor Bennett / Timothy Rogers House, 382 Boston Road (Rogers family; sold by Frances A. Rogers 1970)