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| Pioneers' Cemetery Association Archives |
Anne came from a family of teachers. Her grandfather, Nathaniel Perley, had been an educator for over 30 years, and her father Peleg was a teacher prior to becoming a lawyer and practicing law in Henry, Illinois.
Peleg Perley was the postmaster of Henry, Illinois, in the early 1880s. In 1883, he employed Anne as a postal clerk. She was attending Washington University’s College of Fine Arts in St. Louis in 1887. The Perley family moved to Arizona where Peleg continued his legal career in a milder climate. Anne travelled to Tombstone to fill the position of assistant principal at Tombstone High School in January, 1892. It was a temporary appointment, and she returned to Phoenix at the end of the school year in June. Having acquired some administrative experience, she was then hired as the assistant principal for the old Central School at 201 North Central Avenue in Phoenix.
Anne remained in Phoenix, teaching, until after the death of her parents--her father in 1898 and her mother in 1900. Thereafter, she went to teach in Bisbee, returning to Phoenix in 1903. A few years later, Anne departed Arizona for New York and accepted an offer to teach in Puerto Rico. She arrived there in September 1909 aboard the Steamship Coamo. The 1910 federal census recorded her as a schoolteacher living in Pueblo Norte, Aibonito.
It is not known how long Anne remained in Puerto Rico teaching. However, by 1920 she was back in Brooklyn, New York, and working as a translator for an export business. Presumably, she was by then fluent in Spanish.
Anne was still living in Brooklyn in 1930 when she fell ill and was sent to a private sanitarium in Stamford, Connecticut. She died there on May 23, 1932. Her sister Grace arranged for her cremains to be returned to Arizona where she was buried in her parents’ cemetery plot in Porter Cemetery.
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