Thelma G. Eesley

Thelma — recorded in the family’s Ancestry death record as Thelma G. Eesley — was the wife of Dale Dudley Eesley. Born about 1906, she married Dale in Franklin County, Ohio on 15 November 1927, when they were each 21. The marriage lasted eleven and a half years. She appears in the c. 1928 Black Lake cottage group photograph, seated in the front row between Dale and his younger brother Lyle.

The marriage record

Marriage License Application No. 79220, Probate Court of Franklin County, Ohio. License issued 9 August 1927; granted 15 October 1927; marriage solemnized 15 November 1927 by N.V. Lechler; filed and recorded 16 November 1927. Recorded in the Ohio, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1774-1993, Franklin County volume covering 1925-1928. The application names Dale’s parents as C.L. Eesley and Lillie Chenoweth. The marriage certificate names the bride as “Thelma G. Haughn,” confirming both the middle initial G and the Haughn maiden name; it records her residence as Grove City and her occupation as bookkeeper. (An earlier “Thelma Z. Haughn” reading was a misreading of the G.) The family’s death record names Dale’s wife as Thelma G. Eesley (died Columbus, 10 August 1974), consistent with the certificate.

Widowed at 33

Dale drowned at Black Lake, Michigan on 14 July 1939. Thelma was 33 years old. By September 1939 — less than two months later — she was packing up the home she had shared with Dale and moving in with a Mrs. Hudson. Lillie Dale’s September 1939 letter to her son Leonard and his wife Helen (see the letter document) records the move:

I must tell you that Thelma is moving in with Mrs. Hudson. Papa & Mr. Blair (came Sunday) are over taking the last of the little things down — Lyle has helped two days with his old car & the trailer. Then tomorrow everything goes. I am expecting Thelma, her sister & brother for supper tonight.

So in the immediate aftermath of Dale’s drowning, Lyle — Dale’s younger brother, who himself had three years to live before he died as a Japanese POW in the Philippines — spent two full days with his old car and a trailer helping his sister-in-law move out of the house she had built with his now-dead brother. And on the evening before the last load went down, Lillie Dale was hosting Thelma, her sister, and her brother for supper at the Cassidy Road house in Bexley. In the weeks after Dale’s death, his family helped Thelma start over — doing the literal work of moving her into a new home.

”A friend of the family”

Thelma stayed in Columbus and remained part of the family’s life for decades. Helen Eesley Burnes’s children knew her growing up — the eldest, Barb, knew she was their aunt, while her younger sisters Roberta and Katie grew up thinking of her simply as “a friend of the family.”

What is recorded about her death

Thelma died in the 1970s — the bare framing the family memory holds. Specific dates, place of burial, and any remarriage between 1939 and her death are not in the archive at this writing. The next research-task is to find her in the 1940 and later US census records (now under the Eesley name in 1939-1940 but possibly under a new surname by the 1950s) and locate her death record.

Sources: Franklin County, Ohio Marriage Record (book pp. 308–309), Marriage License #79220, recorded 16 November 1927 — FamilySearch, ark:/61903/3:1:9392-S59M-MH, image 699 of 861, Image Group 004017602 (Ohio Historical Society); Lillie Dale Eesley’s September 1939 letter to Leonard and Helen Eesley; family memory transmitted by Roberta Burnes, June 2026.