Nancy Leighton (nee Nancy Brown) of Edgartown, died on April 15 at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, after a brief illness.

Nancy was born on July 17, 1930, to Dugald and Edith Brown. The daughter of a research scientist, she took after her father’s natural curiosity about animals and environments. Using this inherited gift, she would spend a lifetime absorbing all manner of information, making herself into a virtual encyclopedia of life sciences. In later years, her grandchildren would infuriate her daughters by never accepting any scientific statement as a fact unless Nancy had first confirmed it. To them, it seemed, “Grammy” was the final arbiter of scientific data.

Nancy spent her childhood in numerous locations, due to her father’s profession. After high school, she attended Boston University’s Sergeant College where she met her husband, Sam Leighton. She graduated from Boston University in 1952, and later attended her 50-year alumni reunion in 2002. Immediately following graduation, she married Sam and began a life on the Vineyard.

After moving to the Vineyard, Nancy took a job as a physical education teacher at the Edgartown School. After a few years in Edgartown, she became a second grade teacher at the Oak Bluffs School. She held that position for many years until she retired in the late 1980s. As a teacher, she was well known for having animals in her classroom and for her focus on science experiments. Even in her home, visiting children could always find a stalk of celery soaking up food coloring to show its veins or a terrarium off in the corner with a complete food chain inside.

Teaching and working with children was a great love of Nancy’s life. Whether she was teaching formally in her classroom, providing an explanation to an inquisitive child on the beach, or exploring a problem in a quiet moment with one of her six grandchildren, Nancy was always helping someone to explore the world around them. That is perhaps because she never ceased to explore the world herself.

One way that Nancy sought to fulfill her appetite for knowledge was through reading. If one were to look at a book in the Edgartown Public Library, there is a good chance that she might find the name Nancy Leighton scrawled across an old card. She frequented the library, taking out many books at a time, and always having to return for new ones sooner than she expected. Her love of reading stretched across genres and across time, from science fiction to historical novels and from the classics to books chronicling new findings in biology. She shared the knowledge gained in these books with people on a daily basis, constantly recalling a pertinent fact from some book or magazine article and scurrying off to locate the work for someone she thought would be interested.

She would also share her love of reading with friends, with whom she often traded books and suggestions for future library trips. Nancy painstakingly and lovingly passed the love of reading on to her grandchildren, many of whom learned to read one patient moment at a time sitting at Nancy’s kitchen table.

For all who knew Nancy, it will come as no surprise to hear that her animals and her time at Bittersweet Farm provided her with some of her greatest joys in life. She kept horses at the barn for decades. It was there that she taught her daughters to ride and her granddaughters after that. For Nancy, horses proved to be a love affair that would last a lifetime. Those who still keep horses at the barn at Bittersweet will no doubt last remember seeing Nancy there, standing in front of a paddock and commenting on what should be done with the horses in light of the weather forecast. Few people are fortunate enough to enjoy their life’s passion until the very end of life, but Nancy is among them.

She always brought patience, dedication and great love to her work with both curious children and mischievous animals. It can never be said that she turned her back on either. She took in any stray animal, and any wild animal for that matter, whenever she was able and saw the need. And when it came to assisting a child in pursuit of some piece of knowledge or some amount of happiness she was no less willing to provide, no matter what the personal cost for her. It is for this most of all, her great generosity of both mind and spirit, that she will be missed by the many whose lives she touched.

She is survived by her husband of 57 years, Sam Leighton, their three daughters, Nancy Henry, Gail Palacios and Patty Mundt, six grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, one brother, Dugald Brown of West Virginia, and two dogs. She was also fortunate enough to be survived by a large and loving community of friends.

Friends and family will host a gathering in celebration of her life at a later date, which is still to be determined and will be announced in a future edition of the Gazette.