Georgiana M. Connor died peacefully on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 after embracing life with wisdom, compassion and grace. She was 89.

Georgia, as friends knew her, was born in Philadelphia on Jan. 2, 1928. The independent only child of George and Gertrude (Yeakel) Henle, young Georgia Henle explored the city from her home in Olney, graduating from Olney High School in 1946. She attended Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science until deciding that textbook chemistry was no match for her real-life attraction to Donald Russell Connor. Georgia went to work in publishing and married Russ in 1950.

The Connors joined young couples flocking to new homes in Levittown in 1953. Georgia taught Sunday school and led Girl Scouts while raising daughters Gail Connor Roche and Donna Connor. Favorite subjects were nature and wildlife, including the stray cats and backyard birds she fed and loved. An expert seamstress and artist, Georgia made the girls’ clothes, sewed curtains, braided room-size rugs and laid the slate floor in the expanded ranch house. Cooking was not her forte, though she exceled in mac and cheese and Thanksgiving stuffing. Benny Goodman-era jazz filled the Connor home.

Georgia enjoyed summers with her daughters and parents in Somers Point, New Jersey, outside Ocean City, where she’d worked as a teenager in her aunt’s boarding house. As the girls left for college and Russ retired, she joined the reading assessment division at Educational Testing Service in Princeton. She traveled, tutored in elementary schools and devoted time to her four grandchildren. When she moved from Levittown’s North Park neighborhood into assisted living in Newtown this year, she read to the visiting preschoolers.

Georgia saw the best in everyone, thanks to her own kindness, optimism and wit. She took the challenges of chronic arthritis in stride, succumbing to respiratory failure surrounded by her family at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne. Georgia lost Russ in 2014 after 64 years of marriage. She will be forever loved and missed by daughter Gail and her husband Richard Roche; daughter Donna and husband Robert Kerr; and grandchildren Alex Roche and partner Nicole Saunders, Kaitlin Kerr and husband John Corrado, Clare Roche and boyfriend Mattia Melillo, and Bennett Kerr. Great-granddaughter Lucy Roche adored ‘Gigi’ and filled a special place in Georgia’s heart.

Donations of time or money to honor Georgia may be made to the conservation, education or animal welfare society of one’s choice, or to The Bridge Clinic (spay/neuter), The Pet Pantry (food bank), Bucks County Audubon Society and Bucks County SPCA. A celebration of Georgia’s life is planned for a later time.

Send condolences to www.varcoethomasfuneralhome.com

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