Roberta Marie Burnes

Roberta Burnes is Helen Louise (Eesley) Burnes’s daughter and Chuck Eesley’s first cousin once removed on the paternal Eesley side. She married John Walker and kept her own surname. She has five sisters — Barb Burnes Hester (the oldest; she carries the photocopied set of Grandpa Charles Leonard’s 1940s letters), Shelley Burnes, Cindy Burnes, Liz Burnes, and Katie Burnes McKeel. Roberta is credited on this archive’s homepage as one of the four keepers who built the paternal side — alongside Mary Eesley Bean, Maggie Eesley, and Aunt Jeanne Eesley Kamiab. Many of the Eesley photos and stories on this site flow through her.

What this archive owes to Roberta

The 1940s Eesley letter collection — held, not yet on this site. Roberta holds, in her own description from a July 2019 family email, “a huge collection of mostly 1940s letters [that] may shed some light on this” — this being the unresolved question of how Stella Sunn came to live with the Eesleys. The letters are written in Grandpa Eesley’s hand, which Roberta characterizes as “almost indecipherable.” They have not been read, transcribed, scanned, or digitized — none of them appear on this site. The collection is the single most consequential undeciphered source still to come. The 1940s were the years of Uncle Lyle’s death at Cabanatuan in 1942, of Stella’s arrival in Bexley shortly after, and of the wartime correspondence between Charles Leonard and his scattered children. If those letters are read, the moral history of Charles Leonard’s wartime — already remarkable in outline — would gain its primary documents.

The Joseph Hill Chenoweth and John K. Timmons photograph scans — upstream provenance. Roberta is the keeper of a family album inherited through the Burnes-Eesley side — a Chenoweth family album of photographs from the 1800s and an 1860s handwritten family register — and it includes the only known photographs in this archive of Chuck’s great-great-grandfather Joseph Hill Chenoweth (c. 1865–1870) and great-great-great-grandfather John K. Timmons (c. 1880s). Scans from that album reached Aunt Maggie Eesley, who included them in her Four Generations of the Eesley Family PowerPoint deck. The Joseph Hill Chenoweth and John K. Timmons portraits that appear on this site flow through Maggie’s deck — the family album in Roberta’s keeping is the upstream source one layer back. Without it those two faces would not be on this site at all. Roberta has noted that the album also contains photographs not yet on this site — of Mary Ohio Timmons as a child, of Mary’s father, and of Elijah Chenoweth (Joseph Hill’s father) — plus Mary’s teacher’s certificate dated 1862, plus the 1860s handwritten Chenoweth family register that anchors the Chenoweth Family Association’s online genealogy.

The c. 1948–1949 Eesley family group portrait at Bexley. Roberta transmitted the family-label transcription that resolved the cast of the c. 1948–1949 Eesley family group portrait at Charles Leonard’s Bexley home — the eleven-person frame with Grandma Lily Dale at its center, Will and Don and their wives, Mary Bean, and Stella and Ted Chong. (This is a different photograph from the c. 1937–1939 group of Charles Leonard with his five sons and grandson Tommy: that one carries its own hand-written “July 1940” label, which is a year late rather than a decade, since Dale — who died in July 1939 — is standing in it and grandson Tommy is still a small boy.)

The c. 1971–1972 Charles Leonard extended-family reunion at Highland Ridge. Roberta also provided the labeled version of the c. 1971–1972 reunion portrait that captures five of Charles Leonard’s eight children together — Will, Don, Len, Mary Bean, and Helen Burnes — along with the Charles Leonard + Lilly Dale Chenoweth children-roster reference box. The cast of twelve (with three spouses, two of Helen’s children including Roberta herself, Will and Peggy’s daughter Anne, and the Chenoweth-side cousin Mafry Hyatt) was identifiable only because Roberta’s labeled version arrived in the archive.

The Stella-after-Lyle reconstruction. Roberta’s 2019 note that Stella “may have joined the scene after Lyle died” is the family-memory line that placed Stella’s arrival in the Bexley household within months of Uncle Lyle’s July 1942 Cabanatuan death — turning what had been two separate family chapters into one connected story of Charles Leonard’s wartime response.

Where she shows up across the site

Roberta is named on the following pages of this archive:

• Charles Leonard Eesley — the Stella-after-Lyle 2019 family-email reconstruction and the 1940s letter collection
• Joseph Hill Chenoweth — photograph provenance via the family album she inherited, reached this archive via Maggie’s deck
• John K. Timmons — photograph provenance, same source
• Helen Burnes — as her mother’s daughter

Details otherwise withheld — living.

Sources: Mary Eesley Bean, Eesley Family History, p. 9; Roberta’s July 2019 family email; the c. 1948–1949 group portrait family-label transcription provided by Roberta.