
Grandézza has myriad residents with fascinating backgrounds and lives prior to their locating to our community. Sharmin Fairbanks McKenny was born and raised on a traditional family farm in a small town in Northwest Missouri. Like her predecessors who were early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 1630s, she lived history on a traditional farm. She did all of the women’s chores including cooking, cleaning, sewing, gardening, canning, milking, and making cider. Additionally, she helped raise and shear sheep. (Sheep and wool manufacturing was a mainstay in all of Colonial England and into the Industrial Revolution.) Other farming experiences included helping with all of the farm animals, field work, butchering, and being anywhere she was needed on a working farm. Those early experiences helped give Sharmin an understanding of the lives of the Fairbanks family in 17th Century New England.
Having spent her entire life studying her family’s genealogies and stories, Sharmin has visited all the lands where the family lived, picking up a stone from each place. She even acquired a stone from a 1500s house in England that the Fairbanks likely owned in the very early 1600s. And, thanks to the generosity of the current owners, she had the opportunity to stay there overnight.
Essentially, Sharmin’s ancestors were pioneers and were the first settlers everywhere they moved. Many were on the cutting edge of industry and invention. On Sharmin’s paternal grandparents’ side, the Fairbanks helped found Dedham, Massachusetts and the Prescotts founded Lancaster, Massachusetts. Her mother’s family, the Schweizers, came over from Switzerland much later.
Sharmin’s own pioneer life started with soloing in an airplane even before she received a driver’s license. Her nursing career began in a large general hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, where she worked with early kidney transplant and radiation therapy patients. As part of St. Joseph Hospital Life Flight of Kansas City, she helped initiate one of the first six programs of civilian air transport systems in the United States to put civilian nurses on helicopters. She provided rescue, transport and care of critically ill or injured patients by helicopter from scenes of accidents and small rural hospitals to level one facilities. Not one to slack, on the day she delivered her first child, Aaron, Sharmin submitted her Master’s Thesis in nursing.
Over the last seven years, Sharmin has authored a website and blog dedicated to “traveling” back in history. Included is information about the family and their contributions to this country’s history. As early settlers beyond Massachusetts in Vermont, Ohio, and Kansas, the Fairbanks were a crucial part of the United States’ rich past. They fought the country’s wars: the French and Indian Wars, Revolutionary War, Civil War, WW I, and WW II.
Currently, Sharmin is a Board of Director of the Fairbanks Family of America which operates the Fairbanks House Museum in Dedham, MA. The Dedham House, built in 1637, is the oldest timber frame house still standing in North America. She is a member of Gulf Coast Writers Association and Historical Fiction Writer’s Society, the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Dedham and Lancaster Massachusetts Historical Societies.
Furthermore, Sharmin hopes to continue to inspire readers about the stories of her diverse ancestors across North America in her soon-to-be book publication of Made to Last Forever, the first in a series.
Sharmin’s family, both past and present, are the center of this Savona resident’s life. Her current day family consists of husband John, their children Aaron and Macy, daughter-in-law Angel, and granddaughter Em. One of the family’s most unusual pets, by the way, has been a capuchin monkey named Tiki. This busy woman enjoys playing golf, reading, painting, biking, walking, and is Savona’s Neighborhood Watch coordinator. Sharmin may best be known around Grandézza, though, for her Orphan Orchid Program. In her management of “orphan”
orchids and attaching them on trees, the golfers and other residents here are able to enjoy the beautiful blooms year after year. Thank you, Sharmin!
For further information about Sharmin FairbanksMcKenny, feel free to read up about her online at: https://www.fairbankshistory.com or Facebook.com/FairbanksHistory