Fanny Lover (1834–c. 1915–20)

Samuel Lover had two daughters, both born in Dublin; his first wife, Lucy Berrel, and first-born, Margaret, predeceased him. His second daughter, Frances, spoke several languages and was said to be ‘very musical, a fine pianist and very much her father’s daughter’. Her second husband was a medical doctor and they had a son, Wilhelm Marius Schmid, born in Stuttgart in 1870, who became an actor. Although they apparently corresponded, Fanny disappears in Victor Herbert’s published biographies until she visits him in America sometime during the winter of 1896–7, when he was director of the 22nd Regimental Band of the New York National Guard, founded by Galway native Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore. On that trip she presented Victor Herbert with a scrapbook she kept and published a description of its contents as ‘The Author of “Rory O’More”: Recollections of Samuel Lover, by his Daughter’ in Century Magazine in February 1897.