Love Maria Willis

WILLIS, Love Maria (née Whitcomb). b. Hancock, New Hampshire, 9 June 1824; d. Elmira, New York, 26 November 1908. She was the daughter of a Unitarian minister. She married Frederick Llewellyn Hovey Willis (1830-1914) in 1858: he had been brought up in the family of Louisa May Alcott, and claimed to be the original of Laurie in Little Women (Willis, 1915). He was a student at the Harvard College Divinity School, but had been suspended in 1857 for his interest in the Spiritualist movement, then very popular. He later became a Spiritualist minister and practised as a doctor at Rochester, New York, and Glenora, Seneca Lake, New York (see the Forbes, Edith (Willis) Linn Papers, River Campus...