Judy Elizabeth Watts September 25, 1946 - October 16, 2024 Judy Elizabeth Watts, a loving mother, grandmother, widow, sister and friend, retired federal civil servant, and a person who above all sought to help others, died Wednesday, October 16, 2024, in Boston. She was 78. Born September 25, 1946, in Chattanooga, she grew up with her parents, Anne Dempsey Watts and Ray Dean Watts, and three siblings, attending Missionary Ridge Elementary School and Chattanooga High School. She attended the University of Georgia, studied one summer at the University of Dijon in France, and in 1966 transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political science and a minor in mathematics in 1968. She achieved a midcareer MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 1981-1983. She was a career employee of the U.S. Veterans Administration, later the Department of Veterans Affairs, in Boston. She never lost her Southern accent, despite living most of her adult life in the Boston area, primarily Cambridge from 1969-2007. That is where she and her husband, Whitney “Terry” Coffin Colby II, raised their two children: Edward “Ned” Colby, born in 1980, and Susannah Colby, born in 1984. For all that she did in her life, she was most proud of them. After retiring in 2005, Judy moved back to the South with Terry in 2007, living in Woodstation, Georgia, on the former Watts family farm. She returned to Massachusetts in 2019, where she lived in Westborough, initially with Susannah and her husband, Craig, as well as their daughter Esme, born in 2020. Survivors include her children, Ned and Susannah, and their spouses, Tanna Tanlamai and Craig Barnes; three grandchildren, Barnaby and Autumn Colby, and Esme Colby-Barnes; siblings, Emily Watts Card, Janie Watts Spataro and husband Stephen Spataro, and brother Ray Dean Watts Jr. and wife Gail Lingerfelt Watts; numerous nieces, nephews, cousins, extended family and friends; and dear lifelong friends, Margo Turrentine and Toàn Trinh, wife Nancy, and their three sons. The Burial will be at Massachusetts National Cemetery, in Bourne, on Friday, November 8, at 12:45 p.m. The Memorial Service is Saturday, November 9, from 11 a.m. to noon at Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, with a reception until 2 p.m
