Lucretia Facchini was born on December 21, 1929 to Emilia DeGennaro and Joseph Facchini, where they resided on Park Avenue in Hoboken, NJ. She leaves behind two amazing sisters, Josephine (DeCandia) and Lucy (Cimillo); her four children: Rosemary, Marian, Cathy, and Nicky; her 7 grandchildren: Christopher, Timothy, Scott, Sean, Ryann, Jackie, and Julie; her 9 great grandchildren: Garrett, Carter, Aubrey, Alex, Crew, Sophia, Myles, Isabelle, and Leven.
Mom met and fell in love with Thomas Nicholas DeCandia when she was only 17 and he was only 18. They met each other at a dance in Hoboken, but it was amazing that they never met prior to that night because they lived around the corner from each other. On a beautiful winter’s day, on November 26, 1950 -- the day after The Great Appalachian Storm of 1950 -- they were married at St. Francis Catholic Church in Hoboken. They had a snowball wedding where she wore a beautiful, white, sprawling, satin and lace gown and carried a bouquet of white roses. Her bridesmaids wore white too and held luscious, red roses. After getting married they lived in an apartment in Hoboken, close to their family.
In 1953 mom gave birth to her first daughter, Rosemary, and in 1956 they moved to a cute, two-bedroom, one-bathroom Cape Cod in Washington Township, NJ. Shortly thereafter, they had three more children, Marian, in 1957,Catherine, in 1959, and finally a boy, Nicholas, in 1961.
As you can imagine, things were getting a bit cramped for a family of six living in a two-bedroom home, so Tommy (dad) renovated the attic into two additional bedrooms and a bathroom where all the girls would sleep.
Life on Jackson Ave was pretty ordinary and simple in the 60's and 70's, where mom stayed home with her four children and dad worked hard to bring home the bacon. We always had to do our homework before TV, no snacking was allowed before dinner, chores had to get done every Saturday morning (sleeping late was NOT an option with mom :) and then up early on Sundays for church & Sunday school and then off to visit the family in Hoboken and/or Union City. Of course those visits always included a huge Italian dinner with pasta and gravy that was cooked from scratch to perfection. After those meals, the men were stuffed and would take a nap, the kids would run off and play, and the women would get stuck cleaning up the mess (haha).
Unfortunately, as time passed, mom and dad went their separate ways, but Mom eventually remarried in 1980 to Harrison Laird, a Guild Optician, where they resided in Westwood, NJ until they moved to New Smyrna Beach, Florida in 1994. They were very happy together and they would travel at least once a year, until he passed in 2005. She continued to live alone in their Villa in New Smyrna Beach until December 2015, where she moved to Brookdale Port Orange, an exclusive assisted living community for seniors, until she passed on January 22, 2019.
One of the most memorable and endearing things about Lucretia (mom) was that she loved to sing, and she sang a lot...and she was actually really good at it! She absolutely loved Frank Sinatra and would belt out his songs no matter where she was...it truly brought her joy and it brought us joy to listen to her.
We will surely miss that petite,strong-willed, beautiful songbird...