Elizabeth (Betsy) Glass Hoke died on the afternoon of March 9 in Freeland.

Formerly from West Hartford, Conn., Betsy moved to Whidbey Island in October 2007 to be near her daughter, Jill Johnson.

She was the daughter of Edgar Toll and Carolyn Woolley Glass of West Hartford. In 1940, she married George Peabody Hoke and moved to Minnesota where her three children were born.

In 1963, the same year her daughter Jill graduated from Northwestern University, she received a master’s degree in library science from the University of Minnesota.

The following year, she was hired as the first professional librarian for the Wadsworth Atheneum, the oldest private art museum in the U.S., located in Hartford, Conn. At that time, there was no library and none of the resources were catalogued. Betsy recruited, trained, and supervised a team of volunteers who catalogued 7,000 volumes, an impossible task according to her professional colleagues. As one Atheneum staff person said, “Betsy brought the library into the twentieth century.” That library now has over 25,000 volumes and is recognized statewide as an important research collection.

Betsy spent many summers here on Whidbey and loved it – especially the sailing and shellfishing. She was happiest on a boat under full sail or mucking about on a beach with a shovel and a pail.

She leaves three children, Carolyn (Jill) Hoke Johnson of Clinton, George (Ned) Glass Hoke of Sonoma, Calif., and Jared Peabody Hoke of Marine-on-St-Croix, Minn.; four grandchildren, Philip Alan Johnson II of Salem, Ore., Pia Elizabeth Schipke of Chicago, Ill., Alexander Marshall Hoke of Boulder, Colo., Evan Joseph Hoke of Marine-on-St-Croix, Minn.; and one great-grandchild, Erika Elizabeth Johnson of Salem, Ore.