Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on May 30, 1882, Jane Deeter was the middle child of five and the youngest of the daughters.1 She lived in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania with her mother while her father worked in Harrisburg, but came home on the weekends.
Sarah Mather Deeter was a prototype for a mid-19th- mid-20th century middle class woman. The daughter of an enterprising couple, she was a good student in school, studied voice, married a singer, kept house and reared a family of five children in Mechanicsburg, a fairly typical, largely middle-class town in central Pennsylvania.