Alexandria's premiere house historian, a woman who pioneered the industry and fiercely protected her research, died April 30. She was 95.
"She had a curious and inquisitive mind," recalled her son, Arthur Lincoln Kaye.
Kaye was known throughout the city as a sort of walking history book, a woman who possessed an extensive institutional memory and a razor-sharp wit.
Kaye is perhaps best known for being the author of almost 400 histories, a cottage industry that she helped created more than 30 years ago. Owners of historic properties wanted to know the history of their houses, and Kaye had the skills to dig through property records and old newspaper clippings. Last year, she donated the collection of house histories to the Local History Special Collections Department of the Barrett Branch Library, where generations of future historians will have the benefit of her decades of painstaking research.
"Ruth has done all the work in terms of documenting all of this history," said George Combs, director of Local History Special Collections. "I guess that's just Ruth being Ruth, thinking about people who will come after her."
A NATIVE of Buffalo, N.Y., Kaye was raised in Daytona Beach, Fla. She studied history and English at Randolph Macon College in Ashland before heading off to New York City, where she took a job doing office work for $62 a month at the Rockefeller Foundation. She married her college sweetheart, Frank Boan, and moved to Alexandria, where he worked at the Alexandria National Bank. That marriage did not work out, and she eventually divorced and married Merwin Kaye. And, yes, she was, in fact, related to Abraham Lincoln.
"We had a common ancestry in the 1500s," Kaye explained in an interview last year. "That's so long ago, you can barely count it."
In 1980, Kaye started writing the house histories that eventually made her an Alexandria superstar. Others have tried to enter the market, but a house with a Ruth Lincoln Kaye history has a cachet all its own. Kaye is also well known for documenting ghost stories of Alexandria, researching genealogy and collecting off-beat stories about the city she called home since the 1940s. For many years, she held the position of historian at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, where she was known for sitting in the balcony so she could keep a watchful eye on parishioners.
"I keep three books on my desk," said Oran Warder, rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church. "A prayer book, a Bible and Ruth Lincoln Kaye's history of St. Paul's."
HER FUNERAL last week featured a song Kaye had composed when her second husband died in 1987, a song titled "Wherever You Are." Family members recalled a woman who loved pets so much that a bush in the backyard became a burial yard for dozens of pets over the decades. They recalled how she played piano during holiday parties and made Christmas decorations as presents. Ultimately, they said, she was a fiercely independent woman who was determined to forge her own way in the world.
"She was the ultimate do-it-yourselfer," said Arthur Lincoln Kaye. "When she was 93, she decided that she was going to paint the floor of her porch. I kept telling her not to do it, but she did it anyway."
Associate Rector Sam Mason recalled meeting with Kaye to go over details of the funeral, a service including a reading from the Book of Romans and concluding with the hymn "O Master, Let Me Walk With Thee." One part of the service he said she didn't seem to want was a homily, a quirk of her personality he said she probably acquired from being a preacher's kid back in the 1920s and 1930s. Mason said he could not recall the final decision on the homily, so he gave one anyway.
"She was just a little bit rebellious," said Mason. "She was determined to find her own way."