Lady Sarah Consuelo Spencer-Churchill, a volunteer worker who was a cousin of Winston Churchill, died on Friday in Middletown, Conn. She was 78 and lived in Old Lyme, Conn. Her family said she died during surgery.
Lady Sarah was a sister of John George Vanderbilt Henry Spencer-Churchill, the 11th Duke of Marlborough. She was a granddaughter of the American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, whose marriage to the ninth Duke of Marlborough ended in divorce.
Lady Sarah raised funds for battered women and other charitable causes in Connecticut. She paid for a church and did volunteer hospital work in Jamaica. There, gunmen attacked and robbed her in 1977 in her home near Montego Bay.
During World War II, she did war work as a mechanic in a London factory. She came to the United States in 1945. She was a volunteer for the Heart Fund, the Kidney Foundation, the Parkinson's Disease Foundation, Southampton Hospital on Long Island, and Just One Break, a nonprofit placement agency for the disabled. Lady Sarah was born in Northamptonshire, England, and grew up partly in Blenheim Palace. Her father was the 10th Duke of Marlborough. Her mother was born Alexandra Mary Cadogan, a granddaughter of the fifth Earl Cadogan.
Her marriages to Edwin F. Russell in 1943, Guy Burgos in 1966 and Theodorous Roubanis in 1967 all ended in divorce. Besides her brother the duke, she is survived by four daughters, Serena Balfour of London, Consuelo Russell and Jacqueline Williams, both of Manhattan, and Alexandra Birch of Pennsylvania; a sister, Lady Rosemary Muir of Berkshire, England; a brother, Lord Charles Spencer-Churchill of London; and 10 grandchildren.
