Charlotte Georgie Boyd was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on November 30, 1919, to Marjorie McAllister Boyd and Robert Minton Boyd.
With the same grace as she ice skated until the age of 67, Charlotte moved from coast to coast in Canada with her mother, father, and brother, Jack. After living in several cities, her family moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where she played field hockey and graduated from Halifax Ladies College.
During World War II, she volunteered to go to England as a nurse’s aide with the Royal Canadian Red Cross. Though deaf in one ear, she passed the physical by “faking it” and found herself on a ship that took 13 days to arrive due to the threat of the German submarines. During the bombings in England, she was knocked out of her bed twice. When asked what she did, she replied, “I got back in bed.”
After the war, she worked for the Montreal Daily Star, where she became a stickler for good grammar. Her family had roots in Jacquet River, New Brunswick, Canada, which were shared with the McMillan family. In 1948, she married Thomas Harvey McMillan, administrator of the McMillan Hospital in Charleston, WV, where they raised their two children, Mardi McMillan, a real estate broker in Lewisburg, WV, and Andrew McMillan, a missionary in Medellin, Columbia.
Charlotte is also survived by her stepdaughter, Jean McMillan Hartley, retired LPN, in Crystal River, FL; daughter-in-law, Kathleen Brown McMillan; and sons-in-law, William T. Shiffer Jr. and Wilford Hartley.
She helped found the Charleston Figure Skating Club and became a figure skating judge. She would have continued skating beyond 67 years old, but the club closed, and so Charlotte took up tennis and played until the age of 84. She loved the movement and color of grace: ice skating, birds at her many feeders, good tennis, “all colors so long as they’re blue,” and the liturgy of the Episcopal Church, “just as long as they didn’t chant.”
After her husband died in 1991, she moved to The Colonnades in Charlottesville, VA, and then moved back “home” to Charleston and lived nine years at Edgewood Summit.
She was an excellent mother, but seemed to be born to be a wonderful grandmother to Kelleigh McMillan of Twisp, WA, and Andrew Michael and Christian McMillan of Medelin, Columbia, and great-grandmother to Lazo and Stella, also of Twisp.
She died in Lewisburg at the Peyton Hospice House on Monday, August 25, 2014, surrounded by family, gliding into Christ.
A celebration of Charlotte’s life, which will include Holy Communion, will be held Wednesday, August 27, at 7 PM at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in White Sulphur Springs, WV.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Peyton Hospice House.
Obituary originally published in the August 27, 2014 edition of the West Virginia Daily News.
