It’s great to have that P.E. Toutonghi Obit again, I lost it! There’s something strange going on.
Mary the ‘baby-sitter’ was born on 1935/36. She said she had a daughter aged 50 when she was interviewed by WND.
She has to be the Mary who was part of the original family who arrived in 1946 with six children. The elder daughter, also named Mary, (Mary-Agnes) had arrived two years before and married Van Beveren.
The Mary Hurt, shown on the obit, appears to have a birth year of 1942. We have her maiden name. It wasn’t Toutinghi.
Why would the obit exclude the Mary who was part of the family, the ‘baby-sitter’ and substitute it with Mary Hurt?
Don’t take anything to do with that story at face value.
Was it assumed that Mary the babysitter was the Mary who arrived in 1946 at age 10, so the birth date was calculated as 1935?
Mary the babysitter was married to Joseph Toutonghi. She had a different maiden name. I don’t know what it was. Her son states on his website that his mother is Latvian. She looks Latvian, not Egyptian, if you assume that the photo given to the Seattle blog is actually her. She said that she herself was a very young mother when she babysat for Obama (if she really did). Her daughter was born in 1959, so she probably was born in the mid to late 30s. Her husband Joseph was born about 1933, so it’s likely she was close in age to him. She wasn’t mentioned in Philippe’s obit, I believe, because she and Joseph no longer lived together, were probably divorced. I see no evidence that Joseph ever moved to Alaska, and this Mary supposedly moved there in 1977. Some have said Joseph remarried, to a woman name Ruta. However, notice that none of the children-in-law were specified in the obit.