Ida P. Andrews was born about 1852 to fish dealer, Francis, and Sarah Andrews. She married Fred O. Smith, a jeweler, in 1874 when he was 25 and she was 23. They had a daughter who was born in 1876, but the marriage did not last long. By 1880, Ida was living at home with her parents, daughter, Francis (Fannie), and two brothers, in Providence, Rhode Island. The census recorded that she was divorced.
In 1884, Mrs. Ida P. Andrews Smith married Lewis L. Whitlock according to the Boston Evening Transcript. The couple, from Providence, Rhode Island, were given a party, according to the Banner of Light, the following year. L.L. Whitlock was editor of Facts Publishing Company and very active in with Spiritualism the Boston area. Ida was active in her own circles.
The Banner of Light, 5 September 1891, reported on Ida at the Onset Bay meeting. “After reading a poem conveying the thought that we are ‘only remembered by what we have done,’ she proceeded to speak upon “Spiritualism and Its Relation to the World’s Growth and Development,” Spiritualism, she said combines religion and philosophy. It has demonstrated the fact that there is no death, and that those who have passed from this into the other life can and do return. The phenomena of Spiritualism are the working-tools of our profession. They do not come into the world as playthings, but as educators—something more than to teach that man lives beyond the death of the physical body.”
During the 1890s, Ida was a speaker at many meetings in New England and New York. She attended Lily Dale and the National Spiritualist Conventions as well as the Providence Spiritualist Association events. The titles of her lectures included: “Faith without Works is Dead,” “The New Heaven and the New Life,” and “The Spread of Spiritual Philosophy.”
In the Banner of Light, 28 October 1893, Ida wrote that she was in Buffalo. “During the month of September, it was my privilege and pleasure to speak to the First Spiritualist Society of this city.” She continued. “I was very much impressed with the interest manifested by young people, many of whom came to me after the meeting and said they were earnestly seeking light, by forming a circle for the development of the mediumistic gifts which different ones had learned they possessed.”
Ida was also President of the Ladies’ Industrial Society in Boston, advertised as a Psychometrist who gave readings from a lock of hair and handwriting, was a state agent for the Rhode Island National Spiritualist Association, and was known in Maine as a speaker and psychometric reader. She travelled to England at least twice in the early 1900s, and after being widowed moved in with her brothers in Providence. Her brother Frank was also active in the Spiritualist community. By 1930, she was living with her daughter Frances Dixon, both widowed, in Manhattan.