My great, great grandmother, Lucy Louise Mercier Wyrwas was born April 10, 1854 at New London, Connecticut, the daughter of French Canadian Immigrants, Edouard Mercier (a blacksmith) and Lucie Archambeau. Her father had immigrated to the U.S. from Quebec in 1848.

Lucy spent most of her youth in Northampton, and Springfield, Massachusetts. She was dramatically talented, and appeared on stage many times in The Court Square Theatre, Springfield, Massachusetts in the late 1870s. Sometime in 1879, her father introduced her to a young man he worked with as a blacksmith. His name was Theodore Wyrwas, a recent polish immigrant of German/Polish blood. She married him March 3, 1880. They had 9 children, all of whom lived to adulthood.

Sometime before 1900, Theodore abandoned Lucy and their family, supposedly removing to southern Connecticut (Bridgeport), and gaining employment at the Singer Sewing Machine Factory, where he remarried and had two sons and a daughter. Lucy was destroyed. She began having "fits" (related to epilepsy) and died in an institution June 1st 1907. Both her parents survived her, and her sisters Emma Mercier White and Josephine Mercier Wands did everything they could to take care of Lucy's children who were still minors.