Rosemary Duncan Zahringer passed away peacefully in her sleep on May 29, 2026, after a full and abundant life of one hundred years. She was preceded in death by her loving husband of seventy-one years, George John Zahringer, Jr., her mother, Margaret Isabelle (Sweeney) Duncan, and her father, Harvey Samuel Duncan.
Born in Creston, Iowa, on April 21, 1926, Rosemary was the only child of parents who adored her and to whom she was wholly devoted. Hers was a quintessentially American small-town childhood, lived amid a wide and loving circle; there were neighbors who felt like family, friendships that would last her whole life long, doting aunts and uncles among them Ruth, Marie, and Bill, grandparents close at hand, and a steady company of schoolmates. It was a world of nightly homemade family dinners and of a town she knew by heart, where she could name every shop and greet every shopkeeper by name. From this world she drew two great constants of her life: a strong moral compass rooted in a steadfast Catholic faith, and a reverence for learning. Her family prized education, classical and humanist but always rooted in the sturdy, unpretentious soil of the Midwest. When the time came to leave home, she carried this love of learning with her, ready for a wider world of books, music, and ideas.
She continued her education at Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois, just west of Chicago, where, under the guidance of the Dominican sisters, she more than fulfilled the promise of her early years, taking her place once again as an exemplary student. She read hungrily and well, sang at every opportunity, and immersed herself in the life of the college, graduating in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. Soon after, while working at Younkers department store in Des Moines, where she ran the home decorating department, she was introduced through a mutual friend to the man who would become her husband.
On May 10, 1951, Rosemary married George John Zahringer, her Jack, at St. Malachy Church in Creston. In the early years of their marriage they lived in several places, among them Williamsburg, Virginia, before settling at last in Rye, New York, which Rosemary called home for the last sixty years. Together she and Jack raised five children, and the family they built became the great and abiding joy of her life. Each of them, in the end, lived to one hundred: a rare span for a single life, and rarer still for a marriage to reach it twice.
Yet anyone who knew Rosemary could see that her gifts ran wide and deep. She was a lifelong reader, with a profound love of Shakespeare and the whole of the Western canon, and a mind equal to it. Her memory was extraordinary, razor-sharp into her late nineties: she could recall the name of every author and their characters in every book she had ever read, the names of her first-grade classmates and even their parents, and the melody and every lyric of any song she had ever known. Music, in particular, never left her. An accomplished pianist blessed with a beautiful voice, she went on singing to the very end of her life.
Her hands were as accomplished as her mind. She painted in oils, sketched in pencil, and built intricate dollhouse miniatures with remarkable patience and care. She was quietly fashionable, with a sure sense of style, and sewed many of her own pieces. She had a discerning eye for architecture and design, which she put to use in designing her own home in Williamsburg. And she was a marvelous cook, devoted to the great cookbook authors of the twentieth century- Rombauer, Montagné, and Child among them- forever collecting recipes and preparing meals beyond number for the people she loved.
These gifts did not stay within the walls of her home. Civic-minded and generous with her time, Rosemary gave herself to the life of her adopted community in Rye, where her loves of history, architecture, and craft found public expression. A proud Daughter of the American Revolution, she volunteered with the Rye Historical Society and chaired the dollhouse exhibition at the Square House Museum. She was an active and contributing member of the Rye Board of Architectural Review and devoted herself to the successful preservation of the historic John Jay Homestead.
Above all of this, Rosemary was the heart of her family. The matriarch of a large and close-knit clan of five children and twenty-one grandchildren, she followed each of their lives with genuine care, mindful of their milestones and looking after them all. It was she who drew everyone together, year after year, for Christmas gift exchanges, for sprawling and joyous Thanksgivings, and for the countless celebrations that, in time, all turned around her.
She was adored by her five children: George J. Zahringer III (Natalia), Martha Z. Jeffrey, James D. Zahringer (Madeleine), Charles J. Zahringer (Edmée), and Anne Z. Ogilvy.
She will be profoundly missed by all her family, including her twenty-one grandchildren: George IV (Laurie), Killian, Lauren, Alexander, and Christina Zahringer; William, John (Zoë), and Christian (Ashley) Jeffrey; James Jr. (Ashlee), Charlotte, Dashiel, Kendall, and W.Kress Zahringer; Lucia (Fritz Coan), Charles Jr., Graham, Kylie (Jacob Young), and Frederick Zahringer; Charlotte (Gregory Hunt) and Margaret Wells (Bradley Stinn Jr.) Poler; and Melinda Fairfield Ogilvy. She is also survived by her nine great-grandchildren: James III, Summer Isabelle, Grayson John, and Ivey Madeleine Zahringer; Schaefer and Heidi Coan; Charles Browning Zahringer; Jay Moran Young; Wilhelmina Rose Jeffrey.
A Mass of Christian Burial at the Church of the Resurrection, Rye, New York, will be announced at a future date.
