To them, she was more than a first lady. Rosalynn Carter was the wife with strong opinions and few reservations about sharing them, the mother who had to intervene when her eldest son’s catastrophic attempt at baking a cake led to a kitchen fire, the grandmother who kept a stash of blueberries in the freezer and the great-grandmother who would race toddlers with her walker. “She was happiest whenever there was a new baby,” Josh Carter, one of her grandsons, recalled on Wednesday from the pulpit of Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, the small town in Georgia farm country from which she never strayed too far even as she was drawn out into the world. The simple red brick church, where Mrs. Carter had worshiped for decades, was filled for her funeral on Wednesday with the people who had known her as a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt, neighbor and friend. Her husband, Jimmy, who is 99 and has been in hospice care since February, was also there, sitting in a wheelchair near the front of the church.

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Persons: Rosalynn Carter, ” Josh Carter, Carter, Jimmy Organizations: Maranatha Baptist Church Locations: Maranatha, Plains, Georgia