| Graduation Year | Class of 1948 |
| Date of Passing | Aug 12, 2023 |
| About | [Here is the text of our mother's obituary, published by the family in the Washington Post because that was the paper she read for more than 50 years and because it might be easily found by genealogists like herself:] Delilah Foster, 93, formerly of Bethesda, MD, died on Saturday, August 12, 2023, in Columbia, MO. Delilah was born on May 23, 1930, in Louisville, KY, to Fulton Dillard Stokes and Lorraine Richards Stokes. She loved to tell the story of how, it having been agreed that her father would name her, he declared that if she was born on Derby Day, she would be named after the winner. Fortunately, or through the sheer determination of her mother, she was born a few days later and thus avoided being named Gallant Fox. Delilah’s father, Dillard, who became a well known reporter, was also a gambler and something of a character. “He was just eccentric enough to have done it,” Delilah wrote later, while admitting to some distinction in the name: Gallant Fox went on to win the Triple Crown. In 1937, when the Ohio River flooded 70% of Louisville, the family fled to New Orleans and then to Chicago, finally settling in Washington, DC, when Dillard got a job with the Washington Post. After the war, her parents divorced, and in 1947, Lorraine, Delilah, and Delilah’s younger brother Richard moved back to New Orleans, where Delilah finished high school. She remembered later that she first heard of her later profession, medical technology, after her chemistry teacher noticed how much she enjoyed the lab work. In her senior year, Delilah had to ride a bus across town to attend math classes at her level. In 1948, when Delilah registered at Louisiana State University, there was no specific college course in laboratory technology, so she was placed into the College of Chemistry and Physics, where she majored in Chemistry and minored in Math. This was followed three years later, after her graduation, by a one-year internship in Medical Technology at Charity Hospital of Louisiana in New Orleans. Now a certified Medical Technologist, Delilah took a series of jobs in blood banks and laboratories in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. In 1955, when she was working at the Biochemistry Lab at the LSU Medical School, she met her future husband, Bill Foster, then a physican-in-training. They married in July 1957 and moved to Bethesda, MD. Her sons Gregory, Stuart, and Douglas were born in 1960, 1961, and 1964, respectively. Delilah suspended her career to devote herself full time to her family until her eldest went off to college. Then she returned again to lab work, ultimately spending more than half of her 23 working years at the Clinical Chemistry Lab at the National Institutes of Health before retiring. Bill also worked at NIH, as a staff physician in the Director’s Office at NIDDK. For most of the half century she lived in Bethesda, Delilah was a dedicated church member and volunteer at Cedar Lane Unitarian Church. The precision of thought and habit which served Delilah so well in her work as a chemist and medical technologist was mirrored in her pursuits outside of work. She was the genealogist of the family in her generation, a tireless scholar and researcher who scoured the holdings of countless courthouses and records offices in several countries in the course of her research. She built up an extensive and genial correspondence, forged a number of life-long friendships, and wrote a book, Gustav Waldemar Nelson: His Family in America and Denmark (1998), which traced a major branch of the family on her mother’s side from an early 19th century Danish sea captain to the present day. In her 60s and 70s, she also wrote a number of charming, detail-filled memoirs in which she applied her talents for storytelling and family history to her own life. Delilah never thought of herself as creative, but anyone who knew her knew that she had an artist’s hands. She made her own clothing (and her own patterns!) from her teenage years on. She was an accomplished cook and especially a baker, who was as adept at producing formal wedding cakes as she was at cookies and cobblers. She was an innovative craftsperson and a skilled gardener. She loved cats. She also loved to travel. In addition to domestic and international trips she took by herself (usually combining family visits and sightseeing with genealogical research), she and Bill attended a number of educational elderhostels in a wide range of locations. To her children, she was the center of their family. Her half brother Lucky remembers her kindness and generosity, her practicality (born of her childhood in the Depression), and her continuing desire to bring the branches and generations of the family together despite their schisms. In time, she even converted him to genealogy! Her niece Stephanie says that Aunt Delilah changed the trajectory of her life, planting the seed of a love of education that Stephanie has passed on in turn to her own children—and she, too, remembers her stories. We all miss her. Delilah is survived by her three sons, Gregory Mark Foster (Sally Seagull) of Columbia, MO, Stuart David Foster (Madeline Grace Palisca) of Scottsdale, AZ, and Douglas Andrew Foster (Deborah Megivern) of Cottage Grove, MN; Stuart’s sons Christopher Dylan Bruch Foster of Ann Arbor, MI, and Hans Richard Bruch Foster, of San Antonio, TX; Douglas’ son Elliot Nielsen Foster of Minneapolis, MN; Delilah’s brother Lucky Stokes of Alexandria, VA; and her niece Stephanie Ann Stokes Charaf (Husam Eddin Charaf) of Beaux Arts, WA. Delilah was preceded in death by her parents; her husband Willis Roy “Bill” Foster; her brother Richard Stokes; and her grandson Eric Alden Foster, Douglas’ elder son. The funeral service will be private. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church, 9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda, MD, 20814. |
