Milestones: Jan. 7, 1966

Born. To Kathy Kersh, 23, ex-wife of Vince Edwards, 37, TV’s hairy Ben Casey, whom she married in June and divorced in October: a daughter; in Los Angeles.

Married. Anne Ford, 22, Henry’s younger daughter; and Giancarlo Uzielli, 31, Wall Street stockbroker; he for the second time; in Manhattan (see MODERN LIVING).

Married. Nan Merriman, 45, mezzo-soprano whose abrupt retirement last April ended a brilliant 25-year concert career; and Tom Brand, 48, Dutch tenor; he for the second time (his first wife died in 1963, leaving ten children); in Heerlen, The Netherlands.

Died. Sarah Mellon Scaife, 62, art patron and philanthropist, heiress to a share in the estimated $2.5 billion Mellon industrial and banking fortune, who in 1941 established the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation (one of six similar Mellon foundations which have given away over $300 million), through which she donated $26 million to Pittsburgh universities, museums and charities; of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage; in Pittsburgh.

Died. Sir William Francis Forbes-Sempill, 72, nineteenth Baron Sempill and Baronet of Nova Scotia, a Royal Air Force officer and Air Ministry adviser until his retirement in 1941; of a stroke; in Edinburgh, Scotland. His death poses unprecedented problems of succession, since the claimant to the baronetcy is Younger Brother Dr. Ewan Forbes-Sempill, 53, born and raised as a female until 1952, when she legally changed name (from Elizabeth) and sex following hormone treatments.

Died. Frederick Kiesler, 76, visionary architect and sculptor, Vienna-born designer (with Partner Armand Bartos) of Jerusalem’s underground Shrine of the Book, who is also credited with fathering off-Broadway’s theater-in-the-round; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. As tiny (4 ft. 10 in.) as a sparrow, Kiesler spent his life seeking “a continuously flowing world” in such structures as his free-form 1934 “Endless House,” which had “no beginning and no end, like the human body.”

Died. Lynn Thorndike, 83, medieval scholar and longtime (1924-50) Columbia University history professor, who in his eight-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science disputed the notion that the Middle Ages’ magicians were charlatans, regarding them instead as “experimental scientists,” and tracing into the 18th century a residue of the occult that affected even such logic-minded men as Sir Isaac Newton; following a stroke; in Manhattan.