MEREDITH ---- In the early hours of Sunday, July 9, 2023, Thena Duncan Bean, passed suddenly, quite unexpectedly, but very peacefully at age 101, with her Bible at her bedside at Forestview Manor in Meredith, NH, where she had been an assisted living resident for four years.
Born in Nelson County, Virginia near Charlottesville, after graduating from Nelson County High School, she graduated from Phillips Secretarial College in Lynchburg, Virginia before beginning a career as legal secretary.
While working in Richmond, Virginia, Thena met the US Navy Sailor, Lakes Region native F. Rockwell Bean, whom she would marry and who would be her lifetime love. Rockwell was attending Engineering School there.
Thena and Rockwell married in Virginia at the end of the war and settled back in Rockwell’s native Laconia where Thena resumed her secretarial career until 1952 and the birth of their first child, Bransom. When daughter, Virginia, arrived in 1953, the family then moved to Paugus Park in Lakeport on the Lake, which would be the family home until 1988 when eventually Thena and Rockwell moved back to Virginia where they lived together happily until his death in 2000. Illness would necessitate Thena’s moving back to New Hampshire in 2018 to be close to daughter, Virginia.
Throughout her life Thena was known for her kindness, hospitality and lover of roses and animals.
A committed follower of Jesus as her personal savior, Thena was a member of the Laconia Evangelical Baptist Church, then in Veterans Square, where she also served as Sunday School teacher and practiced her shorthand skills as Church Secretary.
The beloved wife for 55 years of the late F. Rockwell Bean, of Pleasant View Farm in Gilford, she was dearest mother to Virginia and Bransom. Virginia now lives in Belmont, still teaching in the Laconia School system after 45 years. Bransom lives in the Isle of Man in the British Isles.
A Memorial Gathering is planned for a later date in the Lakes Region, and another in Virginia.
Wilkinson-Beane-Simoneau-Paquette Funeral Home & Cremation Services/603Cremations.com, 164 Pleasant St., Laconia, NH, 03246, is assisting the family with arrangements. For more information and to view an online memorial, please visit wilkinsonbeane.com.