January 26, 1910 – August 4, 2005

By Julia White Nolan & Irma Crowell, All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Hamlet, NC, 2014

Jeanette Godfrey White was a member of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Hamlet, North Carolina, for 65 years, but her early church years were spent at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Florence, South Carolina, where her parents settled in 1918. In the close-knit and devoted Godfrey family, Jeanette was the eldest of eight children. Consequently, she grew up taking care of her many brothers and sisters. She was an excellent homemaker and enjoyed cooking and tending her flowers into her 90s.

Jeanette attended Florence schools and worked as assistant to the County Court stenographer until her marriage to Paul White in 1933. Paul was employed as a locomotive engineer on the Coastline Railroad. In 1940 he and Jeanette and their two children, ages five and one and a half, left Florence and moved to Hamlet, where the Seaboard Railroad was hiring machinists. During the 1950s Jeanette worked at Belk’s Store as a sales clerk.

In Hamlet Jeanette found a new home at All Saints’. The congregation was especially dear to her during family crises – the extended hospitalization of her daughter after a car accident in 1959; the serious head injury of her son in 1959 in the same month as the death of her mother; the death of her son in 1982; and the death of her husband in 1986. She had occasional problems due to high blood pressure to include open-heart surgery at the age of 90. The following year she left her home of 63 years to enter a retirement/nursing center near her daughter.

Jeanette was a faithful member of All Saints’ prayer group which met on Wednesday afternoon to pray for the sick and people in need. She was an active member of the Episcopal Church Women (ECW) and helped and took part in the many activities.

The ECW sent birthday cards and money to the children at Thompson Children’s Home in Matthews. They would adopt a cabin and help a child in that particular cabin. When they made their annual trip to the beach they stopped at All Saints’ and the ECW gave them lunch and sent them on the way with snacks for the beach stay. Jeanette always enjoyed the visits from the Thompson children.

Jeanette was one of the founding members of the Hamlet Garden Club which met at All Saints’. She was also one of the organizers and instructors of ceramic classes held at All Saints’. She was well known for a gift of ceramic angels. Later in life she gifted needlepoint crosses to her church family and friends.

Through her long life Jeanette was a gentle, quiet, encouraging force in the lives of all she met. One of the many faithful saints of All Saints’, Hamlet.