[citation needed] Anna was the only child to George and Mary Hughes Gilbert Jonas and grew up in Bridgeton, New Jersey.

Her parents ran a family-owned business called the Williamstown Glass Company where she worked during World War I as a cashier.

Her classmates included Eleanora Knopf and Julia Gardner, and she mentored under Florence Bascom,[2] one of the pioneer women of geology.

During Anna's long career in the scientific community, she made numerous geological contributions, including identification of structural characteristics and trends by using maps that she printed in colour.

Stose and Knopf provided many contributions when it came to defining and naming important places, such as the Conestoga Limestone, this being a major part of Pennsylvania, the major units of the Blue Ridge Province, many of the granite plutons in both there and Piedmont, and gave the Mount Rogers volcanic sequence in southern Virginia.

The Piedmont and Blue Ridge provinces in the southern and central Appalachians were the locations where Anna's studies led her to one of her greatest achievements.

Anna printed a map in colour of the Piedmont and Blue Ridge Rocks[5] on the 1982 Virginia State Geological map, which was not accepted in the geological community at the time, but with today's enhanced understandings and technology, we[clarification needed] have realized her theories and findings were ultimately correct, and her discoveries are still used in science today.

[citation needed] Throughout her research over the Appalachian Mountains, Anna worked alongside her husband George W. Stose, and many of their findings were published together.

In 1965, she published her last paper that described the cataloging of lithologies, and the potential origins of 18th-century tombstones in old cemeteries located in Cape May County, New Jersey.

[2] In a book called Studies of Appalachian Geology: Central and Southern, which was published in 1970 and edited by George Fisher, Stose is the geologist with the most listings in the author index.