Avril Margaret Garscadden
- Published: September 13, 2018
Avril Margaret Garscadden, née Thompson, was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on May 24, 1940. After narrow escapes as a child from the bombings during WWII, she attended Strandtown School and then Ashfield School. She won competitions in voice, piano and Irish dancing. Afterwards she worked for the Harland and Wolff Ship Building Company in their tracing offices.
As newlyweds, Avril and her physicist husband, Alan, immigrated to the USA in January of 1962. They settled in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and remained in the area raising four children: Graeme, a pediatrician in Colorado Springs, Colo.; Neil, a businessman and publisher in Tokyo; Gael, a specialist in International Relations at the World Bank in Washington, DC; and Hilary, a physical therapist in Seattle, Wash.
Once her children were in school, Avril went to Wright State and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in elementary education and a Master of Education degree in early childhood education.
Avril enjoyed music of all kinds, especially the classics, and she sang with the YS Choir in the ’70s and ’80s. She was an avid reader and listener of UK histories, a proficient gardener and, most of all, she was a prolific expert at needlework as the walls of her home attest, with displays of Celtic scripts and patterns, dragons and cathedrals.
Avril and Alan more recently enjoyed cruises to Europe and England, and especially to Australia and New Zealand, where some of her mother’s family had settled in the 1920s. Once both retired they travelled more frequently and visited their children and five grandchildren: Kyle, Amanda Erin, Jamie, Vivian and Malakai.
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