Friday, February 8, 2019

LEESON ~ MURISON ~ GALLAHER CONNECTION


1914 home of Mrs. Clyde Gallaher
I came across this picture recently in a box of old family photographs. The following description is on the back.
"House on Gallaher ranch, Mansfield, Wa. James Kinney, Henry's maternal Grandfather built it in 1914 for Henry's mother, Mrs Clyde [Ruth Kinney] Gallaher."
 
Albert Edward Leeson was Elizabeth [nee Murison] Leeson's only son. Elizabeth's brothers married and had children. Some of them married into the Gallaher family.
 
When Elizabeth was widowed, she left the family's homestead in that farming country, and moved to Spokane, Washington where she supported her three children, Albert and his sisters, Alice and Ethel.

Albert was my father. I met his cousin, Johnny Murison, when I was a youngster. Johnny had a ranch in the Mansfield area, never married, and lived with his mother, Jennie.
 
It was decades later before I met dad's uncles, aunts and cousins who lived in and around Mansfield, Washington. During the late 1970's I visited his cousin Ethel and her husband. One afternoon, he drove me around the countryside, and stopped to show me this vacant
house. He told me its story, but of course I didn't remember the details he shared, only that Ruth Gallaher was Henry Gallaher's mother.

I would like to share more about the Gallaher clan and their history.



James Murison was a brother to Elizabeth. Ellen Gallaher was one of James and Ethel Murison's daughter. Mabel McLean was a sister.

Please contact me if you have anything that I can add to this post.


Thank you,

Mona Leeson Vanek
Broadway Court Estates
13505 E. Broadway Ave., Apt. 243,
Spokane Valley, WA 99216
mtscribbler@air-pipe.com
Mabel McLean.

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Albert and Ottillie Leeson


The following pages are from the Leeson familly section of the Family Ancestry Photograph Album I began creating in the 1970s. Family ancestry information has been posted previously. Use the Archives, scrolling downward and reading each previous post.

When Arthur Frank Vanek and Mona Inez Leeson wed on August 31, 1949 they linked the following family trees, [Maternal ~ Muench and Leeson] [Paternal ~ Vanek and Gremaux].


  
Although no pictures exist of the November 23, 1929 wedding of Albert Edward Leeson and Ottillie Muench, I was able to design the above picture page after our granddaughter, 11-year-old Valerie Lynn Vanek, modeled her great-grandmother, Tillie's wedding dress and veil, including the picture of my mother in her bridal finery, that I 'created'.
 
Al and Tillie had a home wedding on Emil & Rosalie's house at Chester, Washington. Ottillie 'Tillie' descended their farmhouse stairs dressed in an oyster-white calf-length dress beaded with tiny pearls and rhinestone scrolls around skirt, and a white floor-length veil crowned with a wax-petaled orange blossoms headband.
 
 
 
 

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Biography and Recollections of Ottillie Muench Leeson

I came across a biography my mother, Ottillie Muench Leeson wrote and I can't recall if I published any of it on the Leeson blog. Please forgive me if it's a duplicate of a previous post.


OTTILIE "Tillie" LEESON (nee MUENCH)

OTTILIE was born May 24, 1906 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada to Emil and Rosalie Marion (ne: Herr) Muench. (It pleased Tillie that her birthday was also Queen Victoria of England's birthday.) 

In 1910, when Tillie was four years old, she moved with her parents, two sisters, Martha (6) and Wanda (1), and two brothers, Richard (2) and Robert (born enroute) to a homestead chosen by her father about 16 miles southeast of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, on the S.E 1/4 of Section 34, Township 13, Range 11, in the Bigford District. The family always referred to their farm as the Bigford Homestead. Two more brothers, Edward and Reinhold, and two more sisters, Emma and Olga were born there and two babies were stillborn.
"My mother's heart stopped during labour when Edward Fredrick was born, February 24, 1913 on the farm." Tillie said. Luckily, Rosalie revived and lived to raise all of her children to adulthood."

On June 27, 1920 Olga was born prematurely and their mother again nearly lost her life. Olga was the only bottle-fed baby and was Tillie's special care. 

Tillie's youth was one of hard work, and during years of crop failure, they lived in dire poverty as well.
"Even in good years, during the summer time, we kids had to go out in the pasture and pick up dry cow chips for cooking fuel. This was usually done barefooted and once in a while we stepped into a fresh green cow plaster and it oozed up between the toes. In wintertime, we had many terrible blizzards and it was best to stay home," she said. 

Tillie related stories her mother had shared about her own youth in Russia. She had told Tillie of the time one of her ancestors died. As was the custom, her clothing was sold. Later the family learned that the woman had sewn the few coins they'd saved into the hem of her skirt – what little wealth the family had was gone. 

For a time, before the older children began to leave home, there were 11 people at the table. The three eldest girls and one boy had finished the eight grades of school before Reinhold and the younger girls started. When Olga began school, there were five Muench children attending school together. Whenever Mother gave them a part of an apple for lunch, she cut it in four or five pieces, however many were going to school that particular day. Sometimes it would be one plum or sometimes a nice piece of sausage that went into their lunch. 

Tillie often spoke of the fun times she and her siblings enjoyed, picking Saskatoon berries and wild goose berries, which made very good pies. Tillie became a very good cook, like her mother. 

When Tillie was 17, she went to Swift Current to work, as family housekeeper, for a lawyer named Cathrie. That's when she first saw a bathtub and electricity, and had a bed to herself. For five years she worked for various families. She moved to Moose Jaw in 1924, where she worked as housekeeper for a Doctor whose practice was in his house. A year later she moved to Coderr, Saskatchewan where she worked until April 3, 1928 to join her parents at the farm they'd bought near Chester, Washington, just south of Spokane, Washington, USA. She only returned to Canada for infrequent visits with her family, who in 1931 had returned to Canada. 

She and Albert Edward Leeson were married on November 23, 1929 in a traditional home-wedding in her parent's two-story white frame house at Chester, Washington. Tillie descended the staircase, dressed in an oyster-white calf-length dress beaded with tiny pearls and rhinestone scrolls around skirt and a white floor length veil crowned with a headband adorned with orange blossoms and tiny white blossoms sculpted from wax. 

They moved to Klamath Falls, Oregon in July 1930, left there in March 1931, traveling to Helena, MT and then returned to Spokane. All three of their children were born in Spokane: Chester Floyd (1931), Mona Inez (1932) and Carol Elizabeth (1936.) 

Tillie wrote in her memoirs,
"We lived on Morgan Acres until we sold our home in 1939, moving to 6, N. Lee Lee Street, where we rented until February 1940. We moved into our small house that Al built at 1502 Front Street, one block from our shop that he'd built, The Spokane Blacksmith and Welding Works, at 1503 Trent Ave. We lived on Front Street two and a half years, moving to E. 734 Baldwin in the late fall of 1942, where we'd bought a twelve-room house. We stayed there until November 1, 1945 when, after contracting to sell our house and business, we moved to the Bull River valley, fifteen miles from Noxon, Montana onto a 160 acre ranch we bought.
"Our children found it a drastic change. In town they had a ten-minute walk to school. Now they had to be on the bus by 7:20 a.m. We often didn't see them in daylight for five days a week for several months in the wintertime. The house was always cold in the wintertime as I never really found all the cracks. The upstairs was hand-hewn shakes over poles for a roof and COLD!"

She failed to record her love of all children, or to tell how she never failed to give any child lots of affection and attention. She often raced or wrestled with her own three, even after they were teenagers. All during her life she loved gardening, cooking, canning and being outdoors. She was outgoing and always friendly. Tillie was well known for growing beautiful flowers, and for sharing whatever she had with others. She was frugal, and when she lived in Spokane she walked to thrift stores, bought wool garments and took them home. After laundering them, using a razor blade, she'd carefully take them apart so she could cut quilt pieces from the best part of the material. Using as many embroidery stitches as she'd mastered, Tillie made turned out lovely quilts, which she gave freely to those less fortunate than she.

She shared with her friends and neighbors the produce from the gardens she grew, milk and hand-churned butter, pastries from her kitchen, and flowers, and meat when there was any to spare. Her table was often shared with anyone who stopped in, either on business or for a visit. She did not like playing cards, abhorred alcohol, hated smoking, wished she could dance, and loved swimming and hiking. She enjoyed both ice and roller-skating, sewed, knitted, crocheted and did embroidery, too. She loved shoes and hats and always had a sizeable wardrobe of each. Because she'd frozen the tip of one ear and it curled over a tiny bit, and because a bout with influenza when she was a child had thinned her hair, she preferred wearing a hat wherever she went.

Tillie became a naturalized citizen of the United States on March 22, 1954 at Thompson Falls, Montana. They ranched in Montana for 16 years before retiring in a small house Al built on Highway 200, about 5 miles west of Noxon.

Tillie attended churches of several denominations while living in Spokane. After moving to their Bull River Ranch, she had no opportunities to attend any church and missed that very much. After their children were grown and had left the ranch Jehovah's Witness members visited her frequently. They encouraged her to study with them, and shortly afterwards Tillie joined the Jehovah's Witness Church at Noxon. She remained faithful to that religion the rest of her life.

Tillie and Al returned to Spokane in 1962 where Al was working with Chester, who had bought back the welding business Al had sold in 1945. Al died of a heart attach in April 1964. Tillie became very active in the Jehovah Witness Church and traveling as much as she could afford to. She died of a brain-stem level stroke following a gall bladder surgery, in October 1987. Both are buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Spokane, WA.

Her three children each credit both their parents for instilling in them honesty, love of family, good character, good morals, and a strong work ethic.

Tillie also wrote these memories of her life:

I married ALBERT EDWARD LEESON in an evening ceremony on November 23, 1929 in my parent's farmhouse near Chester, Washington. I descended the staircase, dressed in an oyster-white satin wedding gown. It was calf-length and beaded with tiny pearls and rhinestone scrolls around the skirt. I wore a floor length veil cascading from a headband of wax orange blossoms.
 
Al and I moved to Klamath Falls, Oregon in July 1930, leaving there in March 1931, coming back to Spokane, Washington after traveling to Helena, Montana in search of work. We rented a two-story house on Sixth Street.

Our son, Chester Floyd Leeson, October 19, 1931, wasborn in a rented house on East Sixth Street, Spokane.

We bought a house at N. 1772 Smith Street on Morgan Acres, a suburb of Spokane and Hillyard, Washington. Mona Inez, was born there November 26, 1932. Our third child, Carol Elizabeth, was born there February 11, 1936.  (In 2002, the house number was 7819 N. Smith.)

We lived on Morgan Acres until we sold our home in 1939, moving to 6, N. Lee Lee Street, where we rented until February 1940. We moved into our own small house that Al built at 1502 Front Street, one block from our shop, The Spokane Blacksmith and Welding Works, at 1503 Trent Ave. We lived on Front Street two and a half years, moving to E. 734 Baldwin in the late fall of 1942, where we'd bought a twelve-room house. We stayed there until November 1, 1945 when, after contracting to sell our house and business, we moved to the Bull River valley, fifteen miles from Noxon, Montana onto a 160 acre ranch we bought. [I became a] Naturalized citizen, March 22, 1954, at Sanders County Courthouse, Thompson Falls, Montana.

The years have all run together in my memory. We'd decided to move out of Spokane, to get back to the country. During 1945, the day we drove to Montana to look at a ranch we had taken no food, so we had to drive north from the ranch about eight miles to a store on Bull Lake, to buy some canned food and bread. When we went outside to eat it, the mosquitoes were so thick we had to get in the car, shoo all the pests out, and shut the windows or we got a mouth full of mosquitoes.
 
The children went wading in the lake and we had our first encounter with leeches! We were to find the waters in the area were not only a breeding place for mosquitoes, but full of leeches too. The livers of deer and cattle would be full of leeches. They didn't seem to affect the cattle, they grew fat and seemingly otherwise healthy.

World War II had been raging and then they finally signed the Armistice. We'd bought the ranch and while I stayed in Spokane during that summer, Al was up on Bull River haying [June 1945] with horse drawn mower and a one horse rake, which Chet drove raking the hay into mounds that Al then loaded onto a horse-drawn hay rack with three slings in it.

When it was full, they hauled it to the barn, attached a long rope to the sling. The rope went over pulleys and out the back of the barn, where they hitched the horses to it and pulled the slings into the haymow. Then by means of a trip rope attached to the bottom of the sling, dumped the load of hay into the haymow.

[Al and Chester returned to Spokane in July, 1945.] We had finally sold our house n Spokane, and on the first day of November 1945, the children and I moved up to the ranch on Bull River [in Sanders County, Montana], which we had previously bought.

The ranch house was made of logs with chinking, which I was to learn needed constant repair and unless the chinking was of cement the rats and mice used it for nests. One could look out of the cracks and see the meadowland!

Our first night there was sure an eye opener, for lo, when I got up the next morning to make the fire, on going out onto the porch where I'd left the house plants sitting on the floor, all had been neatly topped and in their place were carrots, bulbs, grain and various other things.

On returning to the bedroom to report to Al this awful calamity, he just laughed and said, "Just go out there again and look up toward the ceiling and you'll see the culprit."

Sure enough, two beady black eyes were staring at me There sat a rat called a pack rat. For everything they take they leave something in its place. This was my first encounter with these smelly creatures.
 
There were to be many more in the fourteen years we were to spend there, and not only did he top my plants but he also got into the kitchen and chewed a large hole in the hem of Carol's coat and I had a time persuading her to go to school with it as I had nothing to mend it with, and needless to say, no other coat. Town was 28 miles away!
 
About two weeks later we had about eleven inches of snow, but Hurrah! it all melted off in two weeks and we had no more until in December, and then we were to get four feet and more! This was to be much of the yearly pattern after that.
 
The first day we took our children to school. I dressed me in my fur coat and nice hat. After we got the children enrolled in school, we found out that the blue gills [kokanee salmon] were running. Nothing would do, but Al bought fishhooks and lines and we went fishing, fur coat, hat and all, and we came home with a gunny sack full. Smoked, they were a rare treat. The river was full of black patches and if you got your hooks in the middle of that patch, you could always catch two to three fish on the three-pronged snag hooks.
 
That first winter we bought some of Mrs. Hayes' cattle, as we had plenty of hay. The cattle watered from the north fork of Bull River as it flowed through our property. We pumped the water from a well at the back door for house use, and carried water from the river for drinking. The river was at least twenty feet deep just down the hill from the house. Our heat was wood, and there would often be ice on the water bucket in the morning, as we never could keep a fire all night.
 
The children found it a drastic change. In town they had a ten-minute walk to school. Now they had to be on the bus by 7:20 a.m. We often didn't see them in daylight for five days a week for several months in the wintertime. The house was always cold in the wintertime as I never really found all the cracks. The upstairs was hand-hewn shakes over poles for a roof and COLD!
 
One winter, for a couple of months we had a man staying with us. And, his head being bald, he tried to wrap the blanket around it. As the only light we had were kerosene lamps, the corner of the blanket caught over the chimney of the lamp. It finally went out but not before it guilt up a small stack of soot. Lucky yes, that it didn't start a fire!

We went back to town two weeks after moving up onto the ranch, to sign the papers on the house sale. On the way back to Montana when we hit the hill, it was icy and the truck started to slide. Since we had a load of building material, Al had tied two of the older children on the back of the truck and we had one in the front. I was tired and dozing when Al suddenly said, "You'd better start praying. We're sliding." And a bad curve was coming up. If we couldn't get around that, we would have all perished. My thoughts, of course, flew to the children tied on the back. Fortunately the bank caught and we made it. Whew!

The first year we were on the ranch we bought a tractor, a John-Deere Linderman cletrack crawler and Al decided to plow up some of the meadow. The Bull River flowed between the house and part of the meadow to the south of the house. He put Kenny Hayes to plowing. Kenny was watching the plow and forgot about the ditch at one end of the piece of meadow and drove off into the ditch and the tractor turned completely over. It was a miracle that Kenny wasn't killed.

Later Al decided to plow a stretch along a stretch of Bull River, to the north, across our bridge, when suddenly the back of the tractor went down and even the seat was under water. He came back to the house to get the truck, to help get the tractor out, but got the truck stuck, too. Finally, the next day he decided to chain a log over each track and with this he was able to drive the tractor out on its own power. It was found the tractor had dropped into a beaver hole!

Al planted Canary grass, which grew well in water, and our meadows were flooded every spring, into late July. Haying usually started then on the higher parts. One year Al decided to clear some more land at the far end of the meadow behind the Island (a raised portion of ground situated in the center of the meadow land that was timbered) where there was buck brush. He rented a breaker plow, which has an extra wide deep plow share. Al tied the anvil and some heavy rocks on the back of the plow and finally, for added weight, I stood on it too and he plowed under not only buck brush, but young trees went under it too. Thus he made considerably more land suitable to grow hay.

*****

Saturday, January 30, 2016

Mackie-Murison Connection


When Arthur Frank Vanek and Mona Inez Leeson wed on August 31, 1949 they linked the following family trees, [Maternal ~ Muench and Leeson] [Paternal ~ Vanek and Gremaux].

Family ancestry charts were posted previously. Use the Archives to find them, scrolling downward and reading each previous post.

During the 1970's I began creating a family ancestry album. My intent was to feature each succeeding generation of the four families.

Later on, I discovered after a couple of computer upgrades the programs I used to create the pages did not work in the newer computers.
 
Because the task of retyping all that I'd written would be enormous, I've decided to scan each page, save it as a picture, and post them here. I hope that in addition to seeing the portraits and photographs viewers will be able to enlarge the pages on their screen and read the stories. I'm starting with the eldest members and will subsequently add each generation that follows.
 
The Mackie - Murison Families
 
Family ancestry charts were posted previously. Use the Archives to find them, scrolling downward and reading each previous post.
 

 
 
 

Monday, January 18, 2016

Elizabeth Leeson's Daughters

These portraits and photographs of Elizabeth Leeson's daughters were also in the faded and dusty box I took from a closet and started scanning to preserve them. The three children of Alfred and Elizabeth, Alice, Ethel and Albert (born October 3, 1897 at W. 458 Williams Street, Port Chester ~ a suburb of New York city) were baptized in St. Peters Lutheran Church of Manhattan. [Information furnished by Alice Leeson Dworak, who received it from Mildred Westerman, clerk.]


Alice was the eldest daughter. This portrait
could have been taken when she was about
eighteen, or perhaps when she married John
Dehaven. They had a daughter, Frances, and
a son. Later, Alice married a man named Bailey.
 
Frances married Peter McCurdy February 3, 1938.
Their two children, Paul and Pamela, died at a
young age in Gold Hill, Oregon.
 
Whether later widowed or divorced, Alice re-married.
At the time of her death in 1970 her name was Alice Dworak.

,
This snapshot, taken September 7, 1937
in Medford, Oregon is labeled, "Dew
and Alice."
 

 
Ethel's portrait was also undoutably taken in Spokane, Washington before she married.

 

 Family portrait of Ethel, her husband,
Ray Garland, and their son, Ellsworth.
During the early 1930s they lived at
Spirit Lake, Idaho where Ray cut cordwood
and sold it to Spokane businesses. Later,
Ray and Ethel moved to Oregon, and then
to California. Ethel was always clever with
her hqnds, making all sorts of crafts, and
selling them.
 
As a young girl, she sold belts and purses she
made from rattlesnake-skins. She and Ray had
a small gift shop, and for some  years, earned
their living from handmade items they sold. 

Ethel died in Stockton, California in 1970.


Family ancestry information has been posted previously. Use the Archives, scrolling downward and reading each previous post.

When Arthur Frank Vanek and Mona Inez Leeson wed on August 31, 1949 they linked the following family trees, [Maternal ~ Muench and Leeson] [Paternal ~ Vanek and Gremaux].
  
 
 

Sunday, January 17, 2016

A Box of Old Photographs

When Arthur Frank Vanek and Mona Inez Leeson wed on August 31, 1949 they linked the following family trees, [Maternal ~ Muench and Leeson] [Paternal ~ Vanek and Gremaux].
 
January is the month I traditionally do house cleaning. And although for the past several years I haven't browsed the contents of a frayed and graying box sitting in a closet, the people in those photos came to mind every now and then.

I'd met some of them as I grew up, but many I know only through stories told by my parents during the era before television when the box was brought out to entertain visitors.

During my childhood photos and portraits were passed from hand to hand and memories of times spent with them became stories of not only them, but also of their past. I wish I could recall the vivid past our parents evoke in those intimate stories today. However, you'll find some of the details in the pages posted on this website, from time to time.

Tonight, I'm simply going to upload digital scans of a few photos from the old box, and name each one. Perhaps I'll write a paragraph or two, but more likely most of their life stories won't show up for quite a while yet. My immediate goal is to show our kinfolk as they looked during various periods in their lives.

Please enjoy them and share them with other kinfolk. I'll start with my father's mother, Elizabeth Margaret (nee Murison) Leeson.


I found this September 7, 1926 image of Elizabeth
Leeson behind a studio portrait of her taken several
years later in Spokane, Washington.


I don't know the year this studio
portrait was taken of Elizabeth,
who had wed Jack Roberts earlier.
Mounted in a beautiful oval wooden
frame, her portrait hung on the wall
over her son and his wife, Tillie's bed
until Tillie died in 1987. The whereabouts
of this family keepsake is unknown today
is unknown.

After Elizabeth was widowed when her husband dropped dead of a sudden death heart attack when son Albert was 10 years old, she moved her family from their homestead at Stratford, Washington to Spokane, Washington, There, she purchcased this home and supported herself and her three children by turning it into a Board and Rooming House for working men. She also catered gormet dinners to wealthy Spokane residents.
 


Albert Leeson, circa 1909-10, holding his dog.

Please feel free to contact me. Email Mona: mtscribbler [and] @ [and] air-pipe.com.

Family ancestry information has been posted previously. Use the Archives, scrolling downward and reading each previous post.

 

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Leeson Scottish Family - George Mackie Murison


When Arthur Frank Vanek and Mona Inez Leeson wed on August 31, 1949 they linked the following family trees, [Maternal ~ Muench and Leeson] [Paternal ~ Vanek and Gremaux].

LEESON SCOTTISH FAMILY HISTORY


George and Helen Murison, cousin to Albert Edward Leeson family. 
GEORGE MACKIE MURISON

GEORGE MACKIE MURISON, third son of ROBERT and ELIZABETH, first went to sea at an early age but as was afore mentioned, joined his brother in Douglas County, Washington and homesteaded a place.
 
He married HELEN BELL in June 1911. She was a Scotch lady who had come to Douglas County with her brother, JOHN BELL, and Sister, MARY BELL, to homestead South of the town of Mansfield, which had just been plotted in 1909 when the Great Northern Railway built a line that far. 

HELEN, JOHN and MARY BELL had left Scotland for South Africa (Cape Town) but after a short stay, being disillusioned with the weather, etc., they came to Washington State. JOHN and MARY BELL kept on with the homesteads for a while after HELEN married GEORGE. But it was poor land and no water so they finally gave up and sold their property. 

In the meantime, GEORGE had brought his bride home to the 'dug-out' he and JAMES (JIM) had first lived in, but which had been added on to. He soon built a new house and a son they named JAMES WILLIAM was born to GEORGE and HELEN on May 21, 1915. He had a cleft palate and in those days not much was known in how to cope with this disability. So to their great sorrow he died June 11, 1915. Baby JAMES WILLIAM is buried in the Mansfield Cemetery.

HELEN BELL was born April 4, 1872, so the mother, HELEN, was 43 years old when her daughter was born. They didn't have any more children and she proved very restless. So she and her sister, MARY, traveled a lot to Portland, Vancouver and other seaport towns.
 
Finally, about 1918, Uncle GEORGE rented his farm and he and his wife bought a home in San Diego, California, at 2331 State Street. Here they lived during the winter months, coming back to Mansfield in the summer where for a while brother, JOHN BELL, had a little house. 

MARY BELL lived with GEORGE and HELEN most of the time as she was a spinster, older than HELEN, but a very dear little lady that the Murison children dearly loved.

They usually traveled between Seattle and San Diego by boat as GEORGE never really lost his love of the sea. They bought a house in Mansfield, about 1925, and spent their summers there, and after selling their house in San Diego, spent a few winters in Mansfield.

George and Helen celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary in Mansfield, June 1936. In May 1938, they boarded a boat in Vancouver, B.C. for Sydney, Australia to visit George's brother, ALEXANDER, and families. The brothers hadn't seen each other in over forty years so they had a grand visit and stayed until July 1938.

In the winter of 1940, while GEORGE and HELEN were spending the winter in San Francisco, California, GEORGE got pneumonia and died on February 6, 1940. He is buried in Olivet Memorial Park, Grave 869, Lawn E-Sec.H Plot Sycamore. 

After GEORGE's death HELEN continued to travel, having sister MARY with her at times. Brother JOHN had passed away. MARY passed away in Seattle about 1944. HELEN was living in Mansfield at the time and didn't go to the funeral.

HELEN continued to live in her big house in Mansfield, getting to be quite a recluse, and suffered several minor strokes before she finally died of a stroke November 4, 1951 at the age of 79, leaving her remaining property to a nephew, ROBERT BELL, son of her older brother, ROBERT BELL, SR, of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

HELEN BELL MURISON is buried in the Mansfield Cemetery at Mansfield, Washington.