Felicia Blue, 94, genealogist

Felicia Blue, 94, an expert in African American genealogy in Philadelphia, died of congestive heart failure Jan. 22 at Stapeley in Germantown, a continuing-care retirement community.

Born in South Philadelphia, Miss Blue was a 1932 graduate of Overbrook High School and attended a preparatory school for teachers on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.

From the late 1930s until her retirement in the early 1970s, her friend Ruth Scarborough Ramsey said, Miss Blue was a secretary at the headquarters of the Philadelphia School District.

In a 1999 Inquirer interview, Miss Blue recalled playing in the rowhouse at Ninth and South Streets where her maternal grandfather, Joseph T. Seth, operated his funeral home.

Not only was Seth the city's most successful African American undertaker in the early 1900s, Miss Blue told the reporter, but Seth's aunt Henrietta Bowers Duterte had become the city's first female undertaker when her undertaker husband died in 1856.

Ramsey said Miss Blue contributed those and other memories to the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University.

Miss Blue also shared her genealogical research in Roger Lane's 1991 book

William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America.

She was a member of the vestry at the Church of the Annunciation in West Mount Airy, and was "a very active lay leader," said its rector, the Rev. Elliott Waters.

A viewing will be from 10 a.m. Tuesday at the Church of the Annunciation, Carpenter Lane at Lincoln Drive, followed by an 11 a.m. funeral. Burial will be in Eden Cemetery, Collingdale.