Fanny Hallycarnie Titus was born in
Vershire, Vermont in 1840, the eldest of the eleven children of Simeon Bacon Titus and Eliza Jane Morris Titus. Her grandfathers William Morris and Lenox Titus both served in the
American Revolutionary War.[1] She was raised partly in
Lawrence, Massachusetts, living with her grandmother to attend school there.[2]
Career
Three of Titus's brothers served in the
Union Army; two died from their wounds and illnesses in the service, and one was a prisoner at
Andersonville.[3] Though she was younger than the minimum age preferred for nurses,[4] she joined the Army nursing corps in 1864 under
Dorothea Dix,[5] trained under
Caroline Burghardt, and worked at Columbia Hospital in Washington, D.C. until the end of the war in 1865.[2][6] "So hour after hour I watched the life-light flicker and die of many noble men whose lives were a sacrifice for their country," she recalled later in a memoir for
Mary A. Gardner Holland's Our Army Nurses (1897).[3]
Fanny Titus married Charles Richard Hazen, a Union Army veteran, in Vermont in 1866. They lived in Massachusetts and had four children; two sons died in childhood.[1] Her parents lived with her in their last years;[9] both died in 1903.[10][11] She had a dressmaking business in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.[2] She was widowed when Charles Hazen died in 1916, and she died in Cambridge in 1930, aged 89 years.[12] Her grave is in Cambridge Cemetery.[2]