ALTAMONT — Natalie S. Michaels “was a fun-loving person, whose smile would light up a room,” said her wife, Eileen Margaret.

“When I first saw her, that’s what I saw — just that smiling face,” Ms. Margaret said.

Natalie S. Michaels died at her Altamont home under hospice care on Dec. 30, 2017. She was 71.

Ms. Michaels was born in Brooklyn, on June 16, 1946, to the late Lillian Vinikoff and Irving Fractor.

Mr. Fractor owned a dry-goods store, while his wife worked for the city of New York.

Growing up, Ms. Michaels loved going to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and visiting all of the world-class museums in the city, her wife said.

After graduating from high school in Brooklyn, she attended New York City Community College to become a dental hygienist, a job she did for more than 20 years.

Ms. Michaels married at the age of 20, and had her son, Ian, at 21.

Mses. Michaels and Margaret first met about 30 years ago at a workshop at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the world's largest collection of materials by and about lesbians, in New York City.

“I saw her, and I told my friends that I was interested,” Ms. Margaret said.

There was an upcoming women’s weekend in Newark, Delaware and both women were to attend. “My friends made sure she was in the cabin,” Ms. Margaret said with a laugh.

“After that long weekend, I said, ‘Can I call you?’”

She said, “Sure.”

“I said, ‘When?’”

She said, “How about tonight?”

It wasn’t too long after that, that the couple made their way north.

“She was in Brooklyn and I was in New Jersey, and neither one wanted to go to the other place,” Ms. Margaret quipped. “And we both wanted to get out of the city.”

Ms. Michaels had been offered a hygienist’s job in Glens Falls.

“We drove up there — but we didn’t care for it,” Ms. Margaret said.

“On the way back down, we decided to come into Albany and see what it was like,” she said.

The couple settled on Guilderland, and moved there in 1990.

By 1993, they had purchased a home on Gun Club Road. Ms. Margaret found work at Atlas Copco in Voorheesville, while Ms. Michaels continued work as a hygienist until a slip-and-fall injury prohibited her from continuing to do that job. Luckily, someone who sold policies to the dental office where Ms. Michaels worked suggested that she come work with her at New York Life.

The couple were married on Oct. 11, 2008, in Northampton, Massachusetts.

It wasn’t until 2008, that New York State began recognizing valid out-of-state marriages of same-sex couples, but Ms. Margaret notes that it was in the first year of their relationship some two decades earlier that she knew she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Ms. Michaels.  

Ms. Margaret said that her wife was an avid reader, with books filling the walls of their home. She enjoyed the mystery genre as well as the authors James Patterson, Alexander McCall Smith, and Patricia Cornwell.

Ms. Michaels’s newspaper and magazine habit, her wife said, consisted of consuming The New York Times, The Altamont Enterprise, the Times Union, and just for fun, the New York Post, The Week, Vogue, Elle, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and New York.

Recently, Ms. Margaret said, her wife began playing Mahjong with a lovely group of women, “who have since told me I still need to come there, even if I’m not playing.”

The couple had shared a love of bird-watching that dated back to that first weekend together in Delaware 30 years ago, which, to the uneducated bird enthusiast, could have been misconstrued as flirting.

“When we were away at that original women’s weekend, she talked about going bird-watching and I said, ‘I’ll go with you.’ And she thought it was just because I was interested in her,” Ms. Margaret said. “Like that I was going to make believe I was a bird-watcher.”

You can imagine Ms. Michaels’s surprise when her future wife “got out there, and started calling out the different birds.”

But really, it was about being there with her.

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Natalie S. Michaels is survived by her wife, Eileen Margaret of Altamont; her son, Ian Michaels of New York City; and her grandson, Leo Michaels of New York City.

A service was held on Jan. 1 at Levine Memorial Chapel in Albany.

Memorial contributions may be made to National Jewish Health, Post Office Box 17169 Denver, CO, 80217-0169.

— Sean Mulkerrin