Helen Louise (Eesley) Burnes

Helen Louise Eesley was born January 16, 1924 in Columbus, Ohio — the youngest of Charles Leonard and Lillie Dale Chenoweth Eesley’s eight children — delivered at home by her aunt Dr. Scioto Mafry “Aunt Ota” Chenoweth Smith, her mother Lillie Dale’s older sister and the family’s physician. Ota’s birthday-delivery for Helen is the earliest documented instance of Aunt Ota’s medical practice working within the Eesley household, and it began the six-year relationship between Helen and her aunt that would later produce the family’s most striking medical-deathbed story (see Scioto Mafry Chenoweth Smith’s page). She married Edwin William Burnes in 1946 and lived in Worthington, Ohio.

She and Edwin had seven children — a son and six daughters — listed here in birth order:

• Brian Carlson Burnes (b. March 6, 1948), the eldest.
• Barbara “Barb” Lynn Burnes Hester (b. September 13, 1950); married Phillip Hester (took his name). Barb made photocopies of all of Grandpa Charles Leonard’s 1940s letters; the photocopied set is the most likely entry point for any future deciphering pass through that collection.
• Shelley Burnes; kept her own surname.
• Cindy Burnes; kept her own surname.
• Elizabeth “Liz” Burnes (b. May 15, 1955); married Donald Faux but kept her own surname.
• Roberta Marie Burnes (b. August 6, 1963); married John Walker but kept her own surname. The keeper of the 1940s Eesley letter collection in its original form and one of the four paternal-side keepers credited on this archive’s homepage.
• Katherine “Katie” Burnes McKeel (b. February 15, 1965); married into the McKeel family.

Four of Helen and Edwin’s six daughters kept the Burnes surname when they married — Liz, Cindy, Shelley, and Roberta — and two (Barb and Katie) took their husbands’ names. The pattern is itself a small piece of mid-twentieth-century-into-modern women’s-naming history in this family.

Helen and Mary Bean were the two sisters who survived Will in 1986.

What she carried — Dale, Black Lake, and a request for chocolate

The single most consequential thing Helen carried out of her childhood was the drowning of her brother Dale at Black Lake, Michigan on 14 July 1939. She was fifteen. He was thirty-two.

Mom carried deep pain and guilt over Dale’s death. She always blamed herself because she asked him to go across the lake to buy her some chocolate at the general store.

The errand was the kind a younger sister might ask of an older brother on any ordinary summer day at the lake. Dale took the boat across and never made it back. The body and the empty boat were eventually found; Helen lived the rest of her life with the belief that her request had led to her brother’s death.

She would have been just beginning her last year or two of school in Bexley. Three years later her brother Lyle would die in a Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan. Six years after that she would marry Edwin Burnes and begin raising her own seven children. For the next sixty-one years — until her own death in 2000 — the chocolate-across-the-lake story stayed with her.

The earliest first-person record of her grief in this archive is a handwritten one-page journal entry she wrote on 1 September 1939 — forty-nine days after Dale’s drowning, on the literal first day of WWII in Europe. The entry describes a dream the previous night: “I had a dream last night about Dale, that he had come back and had […] memory and wandered off — no one would believe me when I told them he had come back and that the man we buried was someone else.” The morning’s loss returns at the end: “In a week I’ll be going back to school, without him — it’s going to be hard.” She kept the page across the rest of her life; her daughter Roberta emailed it to Chuck in June 2026. The word “war!” is written at the top edge of the page — the day Germany invaded Poland.

It may also bear on a small family question: Helen’s eldest daughter Barb knew that Thelma was their aunt, but her younger sisters Roberta and Katie grew up knowing Thelma only as “a friend of the family.” See Thelma’s page.

The toddler-in-overalls photograph — Jean Goldie Eesley (resolved, 2026)

This is the only known solo photograph of Jean Goldie Eesley, Helen’s older sister. Roberta Burnes printed it in high school from negatives in her mother Helen’s papers; the full negative also shows Aunt Mary Eesley Bean holding the other child as a baby (cropped off here). With Jean’s birth confirmed as 28 October 1921, Jean is the standing toddler and Helen (b. January 1924) the baby. See Jean’s page.

On the Pacific shore at twelve — westbound trip with Grandma Lillie Dale, winter 1936

The most adventurous frame of Helen this archive holds, surfaced from Roberta’s 2026 batch:

Photo 2: My mother on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, taken during her trip out west with Grandma.

The “Grandma” Roberta refers to is Lillie Dale Chenoweth Eesley — Helen’s mother and Roberta’s maternal grandmother. This is Helen on a mother-daughter westbound trip from Bexley, Ohio to California in the winter of 1936. Helen’s own journal from the trip fixes both the season and the place: it carries entries dated 29–30 January 1936 about visiting the Santa Barbara Mission. Born in January 1924, Helen had just turned twelve.

The trip came before the losses that would define her adolescence — her brother Dale’s drowning at Black Lake (July 1939) and her brother Lyle’s Pacific deployment and 1942 death at Cabanatuan were both still years ahead. But the ocean a twelve-year-old stands smiling beside here is the same Pacific that Lyle would die on the far side of — a parallel only the next generation could see.

Helen as the family’s Aunt Ota carrier

Helen had six years and twenty-four days with her aunt Ota — from her 16 January 1924 birth (which Ota delivered) to Ota’s 9 February 1930 death at the Bexley house on Cassidy Avenue (which Helen, age six, was present for). Across those six years Helen also watched, as a curious four- or five-year-old peeking through an upstairs bedroom door, her aunt give her final anatomy lesson to Helen’s older brother Don Eesley — Aunt Ota unwrapping her radiation-burned abdomen as the textbook for Don’s possible medical career. Helen never forgot. She told the stories often to her daughters across the rest of her life, and Roberta — in a June 2026 email to Chuck — passed them on to this archive. The full set of Aunt Ota stories is now on Scioto Mafry Chenoweth Smith’s page; the chain of family memory ran from Aunt Ota to Helen to Roberta to here.

Helen was also her sister Aunt Jean’s eldest-surviving sibling-witness — though Jean’s October 1925 death (when Helen was 21 months old) is not something Helen could have remembered firsthand. The Jean-car-crash story Helen passed down came from her mother Lillie Dale, who told her daughter the story of the older sister Helen had barely known.

Sources: Mary Eesley Bean, Eesley Family History, p. 8; Roberta Burnes, email June 2026 (Aunt Ota delivered Helen, the anatomy-lesson story, the Cassidy Avenue death scene, the Jean-car-crash story).