Politics / Literature
Ann Romney
born 1949 · author, philanthropist, former First Lady of Massachusetts
Detroit-born, Bloomfield Hills-raised Kingswood graduate who married Mitt Romney and became First Lady of Massachusetts and an advocate for multiple sclerosis research.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan
age 77- Birth name
- Ann Lois Davies
- Detroit years
- 1949–1967
- Field
- Politics, Literature
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Ann Davies was born in Detroit in 1949 and raised in Bloomfield Hills, where her Welsh-born father ran Jered Industries, a Troy maker of heavy marine machinery, and also served as the town's part-time mayor. She attended Kingswood School, the girls' counterpart of Cranbrook School, and met Mitt Romney, then a Cranbrook student, while both were teenagers. With guidance from his father, Michigan governor George Romney, she joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the couple married in 1969 in a civil ceremony at her family's Bloomfield Hills home, followed by a reception at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club. She later studied at Brigham Young University and Harvard Extension School. As First Lady of Massachusetts and during her husband's presidential campaigns she spoke openly about living with multiple sclerosis and breast cancer, and she co-founded a neurological disease center in Boston that bears her name.
Highlights
- Graduate of Kingswood School, Bloomfield Hills (1967)
- First Lady of Massachusetts, 2003–2007
- Author of The Romney Family Table (2013) and In This Together (2015)
- Namesake of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases in Boston
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Studied here · 1960s–1967
Cranbrook School
Kingswood School, the Cranbrook girls' school designed by Eliel Saarinen, where she graduated in 1967; it merged with Cranbrook School in 1985.