Montgomery, Marg-Riette

Author; composer; former director/librarian of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library; of San Antonio, Tex.; b. 1896; d. 1993; also known as Marg-Riette Montgomery Hamlett and Margriette Hamlett.

Teacher, author, composer and librarian, Marg-Riette Montgomery Hamlett was a long-time resident of San Antonio, Texas.

Born in Illinois on 1896 June 17, Marguerite Elenor Montgomery (her first name was changed in college to avoid confusion with another student of the same name) was the first child of Joshua Lyman Montgomery and his second wife, Daisy Spilman Montgomery. Financial difficulties led the family to move to Oklahoma, where Daisy Montgomery died. A year later, Marguerite and her siblings were sent to Stephenville, Texas, to live with her maternal grandparents.

At age fourteen, through money earned by selling books, Marguerite entered Baylor Female College in Belton, Texas, completing the high school course of study and two years of college there. She then taught at schools in Rockdale, Temple, and Austin, Texas, before completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Texas in 1921. She then worked in public relations in Washington, D.C., before returning to Texas, teaching at schools in San Antonio. In 1923, she married William A. Hamlett, a Baptist minister she had met in Austin.

The Hamlett family, which grew to include two children, Stephen B. and Marguerite Anniel, lived in Georgia and Florida during the Depression, where William Hamlett held a number of positions. Marg-Riette Hamlett and her husband legally separated in the 1940s and she returned to San Antonio, where she acted as a Spanish translator for the U.S. government, taught, and wrote for a number of publications. She was appointed librarian at the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library in 1956, remaining there until her retirement in 1961. She then devoted her time to various writing projects, including three novels. Despite several bouts of ill health, she remained active into her 80s. Marg-Riette Montgomery Hamlett died in San Antonio in 1993.

Despite personal tragedies and frequent financial hardships, Marg-Riette Montgomery Hamlett maintained a lively intellectual curiosity and turned many of her personal interests - including music, history, feminism, philosophy, and religion - into creative works. She composed and published songs and hymns throughout her life, including a work she proposed as the official hymn of the United Nations. In addition to journalistic work and regular contributions to a number of periodicals, she published Ten Thousand Texas Daughters, a fictionalized biography of her “spiritual mother,” Elli Moore Townsend of Baylor Female College (now the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor); wrote and published poetry; and was the rewrite editor of a history of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church of San Antonio.

Marg-Riette Montgomery Hamlett described her lengthy fictional works, which remained unpublished, as “written for grandmother readers with an appeal to nostalgia or for their immature granddaughters whose emotions thrive on trivial (more or less) details,” though she also felt the "social history" in the novels was “authentic all the way.” The books combine real people and events with San Antonio settings and reflect many of Mrs. Hamlett’s ideas and interests.