Judith Ann Robertson Apicella

Keeper of the Story

Judith Ann Robertson was born January 7, 1949, in Montclair, New Jersey — the only child of Joseph Jay Robertson and Ellen Marie Hansen. She grew up on Valley Road in Montclair, in the house where her mother had been raised from sixth grade onward. She attended Montclair High School, graduating in 1967, and went on to earn her bachelor of arts degree from Montclair State College, majoring in mathematics and joining Delta Alpha Chi sorority.

Judy spent twenty-one years teaching mathematics at Randolph Middle School in Randolph, New Jersey, retiring on July 1, 2011. Her students' lives wove themselves into her family's in ways that delighted her — former students became her grandchildren's pediatrician, their teachers, even the attendant at the family funeral home. ("I'm hoping he moves on to somewhere else," she wrote. "LOL.")

Beyond the classroom, Judy has been the essential keeper of the Robertson family history. She and Don made the trip to the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton, to Immaculate Conception Cemetery in Upper Montclair, and to cemeteries across Brooklyn in pursuit of the Robertson and Kenny lines. The letters and telegrams her father sent home from the Navy were preserved among the belongings of Barbara O'Brien Hamall — and found their way to Judy when Mary Hamall Morales shared them with her. She has corresponded across years, correcting records, sharing documents, and building the bridge between the three orphans of January 1924 and the grandchildren of today.