Ann Eaton

Ann Telfer Eaton passed away peacefully at home on Saturday, April 4, 2026, after several months of illness. She was 93.

Born on March 15, 1933, in Buffalo, NY, she was the middle child of Maxwell Telfer Eaton and Ninah May Holden. She grew up in a house alongside the 2nd tee of the golf course of the Wanakah Country Club in Wanakah, NY, where her parents were founding members. As a girl, Ann recalled her father playing a few holes after work before dinner, and many evenings were spent enjoying dinner at the club, where her Dad was President for many years. She spent one memorable winter with her Aunt Ninah May Holden Cummer in Ninah’s home in Jacksonville, Florida, now the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, keeping Ninah’s husband, Arthur Gerrish Cummer, company. 

Many of Ann’s fondest memories were from her days at Cornell University, from which she graduated with a degree in Home Economics in 1955. At Cornell, she received the nickname Toni (a reversal of Eaton) from her sorority sisters, and it became the name she used throughout her life. A proud member of Phi Beta Phi, she attended many sorority and fraternity parties on campus, where she met her husband, Lafayette (“Skip”) Duncan Rothston. They married during her senior year, and gave birth to their first child, Lynn Ann, while Skip was stationed in Ft. Lee, Virginia, as  First Lieutenant in the US Army. 

After college, and Skip’s discharge, she and her husband had a brief stay in a suburb of Syracuse, NY, before moving with their young daughter to Littleton, MA. While Skip worked as a comptroller for Shopper’s World in Framingham, one of the first malls in the country, Toni was a homemaker and later taught sewing at Littleton High School. In 1958, Toni and Skip welcomed their son Charles Howard Rothston. The family moved to Huntington, NY, in 1967 when Skip took a position as manager of the Mall at Roosevelt Field. 

During those early years in Huntington, her marriage grew increasingly difficult, and she and Skip divorced in 1972. Toni supported herself by teaching sewing at a Singer Sewing Center in Commack, before commuting to NYC  to work as a secretary at the headquarters of Citibank. In the early 1980s, she enrolled in graduate school at New York University, where she earned a Master’s in Computer Science in 1983.  She worked for many years at Marsh McLennan, during which she worked on a pioneering 1980s office automation and email system designed for IBM called PROFS.

In 1990, she and her second husband Robert Albrecht had a house built for them in Gill, MA, where she lived until the day she died. 

Toni retired from Marsh McLennan in the late 1990s. On September 11, 2001, Marsh McLennan suffered a direct hit by AA Flight 11 into their headquarters in the North Tower and had the highest loss of life of any tenant in the World Trade Center. While her direct boss was spared (he was late to work that morning), Toni lost the majority of her former colleagues that day. Their names are engraved on the WTC Memorial. 

In her later working years, Toni was employed by the Massachusetts Dept of Education on a team that was tasked with capturing demographic information on students enrolled in elementary and high schools throughout the state. 

In 2015, when she was 82, Toni was thrilled to reconnect with the man she fell in love with when she was 17, Lawrence Handley. Larry moved from the Cape into Toni’s house and they spent 4 years together, the last few months as husband and wife, before he passed in 2020. The years with Larry were the happiest in her life.

Toni leaves behind her daughter Lynn and son in law Don Krüger and son Charles Rothston, his wife Susan, and their three children, Caroline, Max, and Ben. She was also pre-deceased by her parents, her sister Ninette Eaton Allen and her brother Wyndham Eaton. 

In lieu of flowers, friends and family can make a donation to Cornell University or the Phi Beta Phi sorority. 

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