Jane Swan, 84, author and history professor

Jane Swan had a remarkable eyewitness source for her 1989 book, The Lost Children: A Russian Odyssey.

Her first husband was Alfred P. Swan, a Red Cross worker who helped guide 800 Russian children far from the revolutionary chaos of St. Petersburg, starting in 1918.

Alfred Swan, her music history professor at Swarthmore College, was the prime source for her master's thesis and doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. Decades later, the book was based on those papers.

On Friday, Oct. 15, Jane Ballard Swan, 84, a West Chester University history teacher from 1965 to 1995, died of complications of Alzheimer's disease at her Atlanta home.

In a 1989 Inquirer interview, Dr. Swan said that the Russian children, ages 3 to 15, were sent by their parents to spend the summer with their teachers in the Ural Mountains.

But because of the upheaval from the 1917 Soviet revolution and the civil war that followed, the children, under Red Cross supervision, trekked and sailed east for 21/2 years - to the Pacific Ocean, to San Francisco and New York City, to Finland, and then back to their families.

The work, she said, was the result of a coin toss. So, it seems, was her marriage.

In her junior year at Swarthmore, she had to choose between taking an art history course or a music history course.

The coin toss put her into the music history course taught by Swan, an Englishman raised in Russia who, though he was born in 1890 and she in 1925, married her once she graduated.

Alfred Swan was a composer who had taught college music courses on a joint appointment at both Haverford and Swarthmore since 1926.

Born in Chester, Jane Ballard earned a bachelor's degree at Swarthmore College and a doctorate in Russian history at the University of Pennsylvania in 1949.

Her son, Alexis, said that she taught history first at the Agnes Irwin School and then at Moore College of Art.

After beginning her West Chester teaching career in 1965, she helped establish in 1974 the Women's Center there.

Its founders described the center, according to its website, as "a safe haven where they could better understand and discuss their lives as women in a male-dominated society."

Dr. Swan was its part-time director from 1977 until she returned to full-time teaching in 1981.

In 1984 she received a Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Distinguished Teaching Award, her son said.

These days, the Jane Swan Scholarship, offered through the Women's Center, provides $500 to a "full-time, third- or fourth-year, nontraditional, female student who is enrolled in a degree program, completing an interrupted education, and is 24 years or older."

Besides her son Alexis, Dr. Swan is survived by two grandchildren.

Her first husband, Alfred Swan, died in 1970. Her second husband, Durstan Saylor, whom she married in 1974, died in 1978. Her third husband, Robert Gruen, whom she married in 1979, died in 1999.

A memorial service was set for 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 6, at Christ Church Ithan, 536 Conestoga Rd., Villanova.