Helen Bernadine (Alspach) Eesley

Helen Bernadine (Alspach) Eesley was the wife of Leonard David “Len” Eesley — the eldest of Charles Leonard and Lillie Dale Chenoweth Eesley’s eight children. She is “Big Helen” in the family-memory shorthand, distinguished from her sister-in-law Helen Louise “Little Helen” Burnes (Leonard’s youngest sister) — the two Helens of Chuck’s grandfather’s generation who needed everyday-family disambiguation.

The Bloom Township beginning

She was born 5 October 1902 in Bloom Township, Fairfield County, Ohio — a rural-Ohio township about 30 miles southeast of Columbus, in the same broader Columbus orbit where Leonard’s family lived in Bexley. The two were nearly the same age (Leonard b. November 1904, Helen b. October 1902 — Helen was two years older). They married in 1925, when she was 23 and he was 21.

The Alspach surname is of German-American Pennsylvania origin — Pfalz / Württemberg / Hessen Germans who came to Ohio via Pennsylvania in the early 19th century. Bloom Township carried multiple Alspach-family lines into the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Earliest photograph — Sault Ste. Marie, 1929

The portrait at the top of this page is drawn from the 1929 Sault Ste. Marie photograph, where Big Helen — about twenty-seven, four years into her marriage to Leonard — stands with her brother-in-law Don and his aunt Sciota “Ota” Chenoweth Smith on a waterfront. It is the earliest image of her in the archive, and long clarified a recurring confusion: the “Helen” of that label is Big Helen, not her sister-in-law Helen Burnes, who was only five in 1929.

The reunion portrait

She appears at the right-center of the c. 1971–1972 Eesley extended family reunion portrait — identified in the typed caption as “Helen ‘Big Helen’ Eesley (Len’s wife).” In her early seventies in the photograph, she would have been twelve years widowed in Minnesota at the time she came down for the Marietta-or-elsewhere reunion.

The 1986 ending

She died July 1986 in Hennepin County, Minnesota (the Minneapolis area), age 83 — six weeks after her brother-in-law Will Eesley’s death on 2 June 1986. The summer of 1986 closed two members of the Charles Leonard Eesley extended family within weeks of each other.

She is Chuck’s great-aunt by marriage on the paternal Eesley side.

Source: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Helen Bernadine Alspach (LY62-XPG); c. 1971–1972 Eesley extended family reunion portrait typed caption.