Delephine Elizabeth Bieker
Delephine Elizabeth "Betty" Bieker was born on 29 December 1927 at Russell, Kansas, the second child and only daughter of Jacob Bieker and Elizabeth Delaphene Riedel. Both her parents were children of Volga German Catholics who had come to Kansas from the colonies of Obermonjou and Herzog on the Russian steppe in 1875 and 1887. Her brother Alvin was ten years older. She carried her mother's middle name, Delaphene, and passed it on to her own daughter.
She grew up on the family farm in Big Creek Township near Gorham, a few miles west of Russell. The census of 1940 found her there, aged 12, with her father Jacob, 43, a farmer, her mother Lizzie, 44, born in Colorado, and her brother Albin, 22. She went to Bellmount Rural School and graduated from Russell High School in 1945. After school she helped her family on the farm.
In April 1949 she married James Wakefield "Jim" Height at Russell. He was a machinist from Pennsylvania, ten years older, divorced, with four children in the east. A year later the census of 10 April 1950 found the two of them in Wichita, where Jim was a turret lathe machinist in the aircraft plants: James W. Height, 33, and Betty, 22. They had four children, James, Delaphene, Larry and Michael, and lived at Wichita, Medicine Lodge, WaKeeney and Coldwater before they came back to rural Russell. She was a homemaker. In the early 1990s they moved into Russell. Jim died on 5 October 1993.
Her mother died in 1961 and her father in 1972, both at Russell, and her brother Alvin, a bachelor farmer and stockman who had served in the Army in the Second World War, died at the Fort Dodge Soldiers Home in May 2002, naming her as his only survivor: "a sister, Betty Height, Russell."
Betty Height died at Hays Medical Center on 31 August 2003, aged 75. Her obituary in the Hays Daily News named her survivors: "three sons, James, Hays, and Larry and Michael, both of Russell; a daughter, Delaphene Zamecnik, Russell; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren." Services were at Pohlman's Memorial Chapel in Russell, and memorials were asked for the building funds of St. Mary Catholic Church and Russell Regional Hospital. She is buried beside Jim in Russell City Cemetery, under the stone that names them as the parents of Lee, Delaphene, Larry and Mike.
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Researched October 2026. Cite: Heirology, "Delephine Elizabeth Bieker (1927-2003)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/delephine-elizabeth-bieker-1927-2003-277bd2.