Lydie Marland

Lydie Marland (April 20, 1900 – July 25, 1987), an American socialite, was born Lyde Miller Roberts in Flourtown, Pennsylvania, the second child of Margaret Reynolds (Collins) and George Frederick Roberts. Her parents decided to give up her and her brother for adoption as teenagers by their maternal aunt and uncle, Virginia and Ernest Whitworth Marland, who were both childless and fabulously wealthy from his success in the oil business in Ponca City, Oklahoma.

Two years after Virginia Marland died in 1926, E. W. annulled the adoption of Lydie Roberts Marland. They married that year, when she was 28 and he was 54. Lydie Roberts Marland enjoyed volatile times and drastic changes in fortune with her husband: he lost much of his money in 1928; she accompanied him to Washington, DC after he was elected to the US Congress in 1932, and to the Oklahoma governor's mansion as his First Lady in 1934.

After his gubernatorial term, they lived in the chauffeur's cottage of their former mansion and sold the big house and grounds. Following his death in 1941, Lydie Marland became more reclusive. In the 1950s, she disappeared from Oklahoma for more than a decade. She returned to Ponca City for her later years, and succeeded in having the Marlands' Palace on the Prairies purchased and preserved by the city.

Lydie (her preferred spelling) and her older brother George (born November 19, 1897) were the children of Margaret Reynolds (Collins) and George Frederick Roberts of Flourtown, Pennsylvania. Their grandparents were George W. Roberts and Mary B. (Fine) Roberts, and Samuel Cavin Collins, Sr. and Lydie "Eliza" (Miller) Collins. Their parents struggled financially.

In 1912 the family visited their mother's sister, Mary Virginia (Collins) (called Virginia) and her husband, E. W. Marland, an oil millionaire in Ponca City, Oklahoma. The Roberts hoped to interest the childless Marlands in their children, to provide them with a better economic future. The pair of children stayed with their aunt and uncle and started school in Oklahoma. In 1916, the Marlands adopted Lydie and George, then 16 and 19.

Lydie attended the local Catholic school, but her adoptive parents soon sent her back East to private boarding schools. She finished her education at the Oaksmere School in New Rochelle, located in Westchester County, New York on a property overlooking Long Island Sound. The school was founded by Winifred Edgerton Merrill, the first American woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics.

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