After a grace filled and courageous confrontation with brain cancer, Ginna Holmes Moore of Hudson, New York succumbed on June 29, 2021 at her home on a hill overlooking the city.  As damnable as was the shadow of the COVID pandemic pervading most of her last months, she found a measure of comfort and peace looking out over the city, the Hudson River, and the Catskill Mountains.  Ginna’s beloved stepchildren, Katherine and Peter; grandchildren, Dezi and Iris: husband, Don; Holmes siblings Kim (Beth), Pad and Casey; Moore siblings, Susan, Judith and Bob; friends far and near accompanied her as intimates and as familiar attendants on her journey. Also mourning Ginna’s loss are Casey’s daughters Nora and Merrill; Aunt Lorraine and daughters Emily and Lily; Moore nieces Heather, David, Kevin and Rachel; Hamilton cousins Rick (Nancy), Derek (Kim) and Schoens: Aunt Joan, Catherine and Peter. 

In recent years, with the advent of grandchildren, Ginna adopted Omi as her matriarchal name.  There was no imagined young adventure that was beyond Omi’s eagerness to participate.

Ginna thrived on the mountains, as did her mother, Linda, with whom she first moved to the Hudson Valley.  She transferred upstate to work with the Department of Environmental Protection, the agency that maintains the watershed supply of fresh water to New York City. It is impossible to overstate Ginna’s love of public service.  She was devoted to her profession, to her siblings, to her communities and to her Moore family of twenty-five years.

Ginna was born in Hagerstown, Maryland to Paul Mills Holmes and Virginia Linda Schoen on May 29, 1947. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1969.  Ginna then immediately immersed herself in public service in New York City and her beloved Brooklyn. Ginna was a gifted writer and editor. She served as press secretary to New York City Comptroller and Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden, followed by positions in public affairs in NYC DEP and the Office of the DEP Commissioner. She volunteered with the campaigns of New York City Mayor John Lindsay and Maryland Senator Charles (Mac) Mathias. From her teen years, she was an avid baseball fan, it must be stipulated -- the National League. Later, expressing her broad mindedness, Ginna adopted her husband’s love of the Tour de France.

Ginna became an intimate of New York City from youthful visits with her paternal grandmother, her own Omi, which then led to a life-long love of Brooklyn and the City’s singular embrace of musical theater, the American songbook and jazz. Ginna was open to all forms of live music and theater with an almost eidetic memory for lyrics and music.

If it is possible, and it is, to be selfless and bristling with opinions, with a smile that lit up many, many lives, that was Ginna. She honed a sense of social justice on issues of women’s rights and racial equity.  Both came naturally to her.  In her quarter century in the Hudson Valley, Rhinebeck and Hudson, she threw her energies into work with Columbia County Habitat for Humanity, and as an ardent congregant and active volunteer at St. John the Evangelist in Barrytown and Christ Church Episcopal in Hudson.  A jewel in her crown came in 2019 as the five-year co-chair of her 50th Alumni Reunion campaign at Mt. Holyoke, a triumph in the recent history of the college. Ginna was a dedicated adherent of Alcoholics Anonymous, proud of her forty years of sobriety and steadfast in admiration and support for other pilgrims on their own journeys. 

Please direct contributions in Ginna’s name to Perfect Ten Hudson and Friends of Hudson Youth.

Written by Ginna's husblad Don Moore on her Caring Bridges site.