PLEASE NOTE: A Memorial Service will be held on Saturday, May 19, 2018 at 3 PM at Carleton-Willage Village Auditorium, Bedford, MA. Peggy Jo (Ellis) Gill, 85, a longtime resident of Carlisle, died Sunday, December 17, 2017 at Carleton-Willard Village in Bedford. She was the beloved wife of Paul B. Gill. Born in Marion, Virginia, on September 11, 1932, she was the daughter of Joseph and Margaret (Johnston) Ellis. She graduated from Marion High School in 1949 and went on to obtain a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Upon graduation, she took a position in the research lab of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. That assignment included a one-year fellowship to Basel, Switzerland, where she worked in research at Ciba. Although she learned neither French nor German while there, she did expose the multilingual Swiss to yet another language: English with a southwestern Virginia twang. After returning to the U. S., she did graduate study at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. She soon sought new horizons for graduate study and research work, and that eventually brought her to Massachusetts, where she took a position at the Bedford U.S. Veterans Administration Hospital laboratory affiliated with Boston University. There she co-authored a number of ground breaking research papers depicting what transpires deep inside human cells as they age. Shortly after settling in Bedford, she met and married Paul Gill, an electronics systems engineer from Boston. She and Paul moved to Carlisle, a nearby country village that rather reminded her of her roots. There she enjoyed gardening, gourmet cooking, and wine appreciation. She and Paul raised Irish terrier show-dogs, and before long her enthusiasm for that catapulted her to the presidency of the Irish Terrier Club of America. In a bad tumble down a flight of stairs in 2008, she suffered a spinal-cord injury that left her quadriplegic. She lived nine comfortable years in a nursing home with cognizance that surprised many people. She leaves Paul, her husband of 48 years, a sister Annette Osborne of Westerville, Ohio, and a number of nieces and nephews and their families. A memorial service will be announced. Contributions in her memory may be made to the Irish Terrier Club of America, c/o the Treasurer, 4730 Michigan Blvd., Youngstown , OH 44505. Arrangements are under the care of the Dee Funeral Home of Concord. To share a remembrance in Peggy's online guest book visit www.deefuneralhome.com