Chauncey 'Chant' Chenoweth
also known as Chant (the family-letter shorthand); Chauncey Chenoweth
Chauncey Chenoweth — called “Chant” in the family-letter shorthand of his cousins — was the son of Thomas Chenoweth (1828–1908) and therefore Lillie Dale Chenoweth Eesley’s first cousin on the Chenoweth side. He moved to California at some point as a young or middle-aged adult; by 1922 he was living on the West Coast and was the family-network contact for Lillie’s eldest son Leonard during Leonard’s solo cross-country car trip out west that summer.
The 3 September 1922 letter
Roberta Burnes’s June 2026 email transmits the earliest letter currently held in the Charles Leonard Eesley letter collection — a letter from Lillie Dale to her son Leonard David Eesley, dated 3 September 1922. Leonard was in the middle of a solo cross-country car trip to California; the letter is a mother writing her young-adult son on the road. Among the things she asks of him: “to be sure to visit Chant” — meaning Chauncey. The letter is the document that puts Chant inside the active family network.
The Harding Hospital aftermath and Helen’s California trip
A second story comes through the same email. After Charles Leonard suffered what Roberta describes as “a schizophrenic episode” — threatening violence at home, leading to a stay at Harding Hospital in Columbus, Ohio (the well-known Methodist-affiliated psychiatric hospital that operated 1916–1999) — Lillie took her youngest daughter Helen (Roberta’s mother, born 16 January 1924) on a train trip west. On that trip Helen met Chant in person. The timing of the trip is not yet pinned down; if Helen was a young child it would be late 1920s, if a teenager early 1940s.
Either way, Chant is the connecting figure: the California cousin who knew the Ohio family well enough that Len would visit him in 1922 and Helen would meet him in person years later, and who appears in Roberta’s family memory as one of the relatives the Ohio Chenoweth line kept in touch with across the country.
His birth and death dates, his California address, his profession, his own family if he married, and any photographs of him are queued research.
Sources: Roberta Burnes, email June 2026 (the Chant identification, the 1922 letter, the California-train-trip aftermath of the Harding Hospital episode). The September 1922 letter itself is the primary source for Chant’s presence in California by 1922.