Barbara S. (Shotter) Ninness, longtime of South Street,
Rockport, died Thursday July 19, 2009 in the Caldwell Skilled
Nursing and Rehab Center, Ipswich following a brief illness.
Born in England, daughter of the late George F. and Alice
(Crocker) Shotter, she was educated in the Crouch End High
School and College in London. During WWII she served with the
British Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force as a flight mechanic, after
which she joined the American Red Cross in London working with
U.S. volunteers assigned to duty in Europe.
Following the war she lived in Belgium and worked in
Switzerland, and in 1950 while visiting her sister in the U.S.A.
she met and later married Homer Holland Ninness.
They made their homes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Altadena,
California, and following a year in England they returned to the
States and made their home in Manhattan, subsequently
Connecticut and Massachusetts. She received her paralegal
diploma from the Fairfield University in Connecticut.
Devoted to music and opera, she studied classical piano and was
awarded a diploma from the Royal Academy of Music in London.
For many years she played classical piano duets here and abroad
and had accompanied violinists, flutists and other
instrumentalists.
With a lifelong interest for animal welfare, she expressed her
commitment through the support of animal welfare centers and
artistically through painting animals in miniature, fulfilling
the promise of her diploma from the Royal Drawing Society of
London.
She is survived by two sisters, Mary Wittkower of Rockport and
Marian McFaddan of Beverly, two nieces, Elizabeth Thurber of
North Andover and Ann Brady of Westford, and two nephews, David
Wittkower of California and Lawrence McFaddan of New York.
Private funeral arrangements are under the direction of the
Whittier-Porter Funeral Home of Ipswich.
