Marion Foster

Early life Marion Foster Welch outside the Foster home museum with W.D. Armstrong, a visiting composer on the left and the pianist Mrs. A.D. Mitchell on the right. thumb Marion Foster was born on April 18, 1851, at the home of her uncle, William Barclay Foster Jr. Her parents, Stephen Collins Foster and Jane Foster, then moved with her to the home of her paternal grandfather, and a few months later they moved back to her grandparents' home.

In 1861, Jane and Marion moved to Lewistown, Pennsylvania, where Welch began attending school. When the copyright expired on "Old Folks at Home", they renewed it for a fourteen-year period.

In 1893, she and her mother filed a suit alleging copyright violation of Stephen Foster's song, "Old Folks at Home". In 1895, Welch was living in Chicago.

In 1900, she unveiled the Stephen Foster Memorial in Highland Park.

In 1906, Welch unveiled a model of the statue then being built in Frankfort, in honour of Stephen Foster and his song "My Old Kentucky Home". In a ceremony in Louisville, Kentucky, a chorus of 1,000 children sang some of her father's works.

In 1913, citizens in Pittsburgh initiated fundraising to preserve Stephen Foster's place of birth in the city as a memorial to him.

Philanthropist James H. Park bought the property outright the following year and asked Welch and Jessie Rose to become the live-in caretakers of the house. Park gave the house at 3600 Penn Avenue, known as the Stephen S. Foster Memorial Home, to the city of Pittsburgh in July 1916.

In 1929, she was Canonsburg's guest of honor in a celebration of her father's work, where she played both her own music and her father's. She was described by the local paper as having a youthful outlook on life, despite being more than seventy-seven years old.

After Josiah Lilly built the Stephen Foster Memorial in 1937, staff from the memorial spoke to Welch about her family's genealogy. Fletcher Hodges, Jr., who was the first curator of the Foster Hall Collection at the memorial, noted in 1948 that Marion Welch had "provided a link between her father and the present". In her later years she spent her time with her daughter and granddaughter.

Music Welch taught music and piano. Fletcher Hodges noted that Foster Welch was "long known as a piano teacher" in Pittsburgh, and that "many Pittsburghers have received their first instruction in the art of music" from her.

She occasionally composed music of her own. She continued to write and interpret musical scores for her friends "even in the last months of her life." However, since few were found later, it was suspected that her musical writing may have been destroyed. Some say that she was "not able to attain fame of a like order" when compared to her father. She also filed suit against at least one publisher who was infringing upon her copyrights.

Archived content Primary source material including family letters concerning the life of Welch are housed in the University of Pittsburgh Library System Archives Service Center. These have been digitized and are accessible remotely. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette also maintains archives of numerous newspaper articles about Welch.

Philanthropic activities On September 12, 1900, Welch unveiled one of the first monuments created to commemorate her father. She appeared at one of many commemorative events as far away as Kentucky where she appeared before a crowd of about one thousand to unveil a statue of her father.

Death Welch's cause of death in 1935, aged 84, was a heart attack brought on by asthma.