Theodore Thomas (conductor) - Marriage and Family

Marriage and Family

He married as his first wife in 1864 in New York City, Minna L. Rhodes. She was a graduate and later a teacher at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut. They met at a series of chamber concerts in Farmington, Connecticut. Thomas and Minna had five children: Franz Thomas, Marion Thomas, Herman Thomas, Hector W. Thomas and Mrs. D.N.B. Sturgis.

He married, as his second wife, in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, at the Church of the Ascension on May 7, 1890, Rose Emily Fay, the daughter of Rev. Charles Fay, Harvard College 1829, an Episcopal priest and Emily Hopkins. She was born in 1853 in Burlington, Vermont and died on April 19, 1929 at Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is buried next to her husband at Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Rose was a gifted women who contributed many of the critical notices published in the New York and Chicago Journals; Rose was well known in Chicago as a decorative artist. Her marriage was a society event. She was a sister of Amy Fay, a prominent violinist, and Harriet Melusina "Zina" Fay who married in 1862, Charles Sanders Peirce, an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist. The philosopher Paul Weiss called Peirce "the most original and versatile of American philosophers and America's greatest logician". She was also the sister of businessman Charles Norman Fay, who was Thomas's chief booster and supporter in organizing a major Chicago orchestra.

She was the granddaughter of John Henry Hopkins, who was the first bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont and was the eighth Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. She was also the granddaughter of Samuel Prescott Phillips Fay (1778–1856). He was a Probate Judge for Middlesex County, Massachusetts for 35 years and served on the Board of Overseers of Harvard College for 28 years. She was the great-great granddaughter of Dr. Abel Prescott, a physician in Concord, Massachusetts and the father of two American patriots who sounded the alarm on April 19, 1775.

Her first cousin was Harriet Eleanor Fay, the wife of Rev. James Smith Bush, an attorney and Episcopal priest and religious writer, and an ancestor of the Bush political family.