Delbert Raymon Risenhoover
Delbert Raymon Risenhoover was born on 31 January 1939 at Cahone, in Dolores County, Colorado, the fourth child of Lewis Jasper Risenhoover and Helen Faye Smith. His parents had come out from Oklahoma a few years before and were farming in the dry-land country between Cahone and the Utah line.
He was a year old in the census of April 1940, when the family was living in the Ruin Canyon precinct of Montezuma County with Darrel, nine, Mary Alice, seven, and Rachel, three. By April 1950 the family was back in Montezuma County with three more children, Donald, born in Utah during the war, Margaret Helen and Carol, and Delbert, eleven, was at school.
In 1959, at twenty, he married Wanda Lee Westfall, sixteen, the third daughter of Tub and Dessie Westfall, who farmed and kept bees at Lewis, fifteen miles from the Risenhoovers across the county line. Their son Monty was born at Gallup, New Mexico, in 1960, which puts the young couple in the Gallup country, a hundred and fifty miles south of Cortez, at the start of the sixties. A daughter, Cindy, followed. Delbert and Wanda later divorced, and in 1972 she married Bill Turner and raised a second family at Lewis. When his mother died in 2005 her obituary still counted Wanda, by then Wanda Turner of Sedona, Arizona, among her daughters-in-law.
Later he was back at Cortez. He married Ruth Ann Byers, called Ruthie, a Cortez girl born in 1933 who had five children by her first husband, Smoky Taylor. Together they owned and ran a small gas station and quick stop about ten miles south of Cortez on the highway toward Shiprock. Her family's account of her life, written when she died in 2016, names Delbert as her second husband and lists a son, Lewis Risenhoover, among her children; the name is his father's.
Delbert died in April 1997 in Montezuma County, at fifty-eight. His Social Security record gives the date as 15 April and his stone as 21 April. He was buried at Cahone Cemetery, near his parents and his grandparents George and Mary Risenhoover and Orville Smith, under a grey granite stone cut with a mountain skyline, a saddled horse at a fence, and a cowboy. His mother outlived him by eight years, and her obituary names him among the sons who died before her.
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Cite: Heirology, "Delbert Raymon Risenhoover (1939-1997)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/delbert-raymon-risenhoover-1939-1997-9af35e.