Anna Litwiller Nafziger Family Scholarship

Anna’s fifteen grandchildren are joining together to fund a scholarship honoring Anna and her children’s legacy. Not only did she graduate from Goshen College, but her four children did as well. Marvin and Mary were education majors as was Anna. Myrl became a pediatrician, and Anna Ruth an RN. Fourteen of her grandchildren are GC alumni. Numerous great-grandchildren are GC graduates. Anna is remembered as commenting that her father told his children, “I can’t give you each a farm, but I can give you an education.”

In naming this scholarship after Anna Nafziger, we want to highlight the education that she and her children earned at GC and the contributions that they made working and teaching at GC. We see this as acknowledging the positive influence this education had on our lives, and expressing our gratitude to our grandmother and parents. We want to pay this gratitude forward by enabling students to improve their education and lives by the gift of this scholarship. The scholarship plans to alternate between nursing and education majors.

Anna was born in 1900 in Illinois and taught in a one-room schoolhouse before marrying and having four children. When her husband died suddenly, she found herself a single parent, supporting four teenagers and running the farm. Family members began attending Goshen College in 19     43. She sent Mary (1947), and Myrl (1950) first, and by 1954, she (1951) and Marvin (1951) and Anna Ruth (1954) had also graduated.

Our family and community have benefited immeasurably from Anna’s dedication to education. She not only taught first grade in the Goshen school system at Pike Street and Riverdale schools until 1966, but taught the 3-year-old class at College Mennonite Church for over 40 years.