Betty Jenny Wallner
Betty Jenny Wallner was born in February 1928 at Fallon, a farming town in Churchill County, Nevada. Her father, Erhart Wallner, called John, had come to America from Bavaria as a boy. Her mother, Dolores Marguerite Lehman, had been born at Idaho Falls. Betty was their first child. She was named for her father's mother, Babette Wallner, who went by Betty.
In April 1930 the census taker found the family at Fallon. John was 26 and German born. Dolores was 21. Betty was two, and her brother William was a few months old. A sister, Julia La Verne, followed in 1931.
Betty married young. In November 1945, at seventeen, she married Roy Connely at Reno, and they had two daughters. The elder, Cheryl Arlene, was born in 1953. In November 1954 Betty married again at Reno. Her second husband was Manuel June Gragg, an Oklahoma coal miner's son a few months younger than she was.
Their children came quickly and in many places, because Manuel took work wherever it was: timber, general labor, warehouse docks. Michael Manuel was born on 17 August 1955 at Geyserville in Sonoma County. Robert John followed on 23 August 1956 in Siskiyou County, near the Oregon line. Gary D. was born on 29 January 1958 in Los Angeles County. The California birth registrations of all three give their mother's maiden name as Wallner.
The family then moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where much of Manuel's family lived. Ronald Earl was born there in 1959. Karel Jeane followed in 1960. Later the family lived at Colorado Springs, and Manuel went off on his own to other places, St. Louis among them. Dolores Kristine was born on 28 July 1963 in Shasta County, California.
An account written by one of her sons after her death says the marriage was violent and that Manuel did not spend his wages on his family. Betty divorced him. She took the children back to Redding, where her parents were living, and the oldest children helped raise the youngest.
In Redding Betty went to work. She was an administrative assistant for a dentist, Dr. Handly, in the Enterprise district of Redding. Then she moved to the admissions department of Mercy Hospital, the Catholic hospital in Redding, and stayed more than twenty years until she retired.
On 7 February 1981, at Reno, she married Alton Ordell Chatham. Her family remembered him as the love of her life. He died in 2008. Her father had died in 1987 and her mother in 2000. Her brother William died in 1980, her daughter Dolores Kristine in 2013 and her son Robert in 2015.
Betty Jenny Chatham died at her home on Freebridge Street in Redding on 8 November 2016. She was 88. Her obituary in the Redding Record Searchlight named her as the daughter of the late John Erhart and Dolores Marguerite (Lehman) Wallner. It listed her sister Julia Watson, her sons Michael M., Gary D., Ronald E. and James S. Gragg, and her daughters Donna L. (Connolly) Marshall, Cheri A. (Connolly) Estes and Karel J. (Gragg) Glassburn. She was buried on 2 December 2016 in Redding Memorial Park, where her parents also lie.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Betty Jenny Wallner (1928-2016)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/betty-jenny-wallner-1928-2016-b717c9.