George Washington Risenhoover
George Washington Risenhoover was born on 2 March 1876 in Oregon County, Missouri, in the Ozark hills on the Arkansas line, where his father Jasper Newton Risenhoover had settled about three years before after a lifetime in Wayne County and a few years in Ozark County. His mother was Rachel, a Tennessee woman. The census of June 1880 found him at five, entered as Washington, in his parents' house in Oak Grove Township with nine brothers and sisters, from Sarah Anna, eighteen, born in Arkansas, down to Viola, one. He was among the youngest of a dozen children; his father, a Confederate veteran, would live past a hundred by the family's count and become a local celebrity as the oldest man in the Ozarks. The same township that summer held the Clapps, whose daughter Mary, a year old, he would marry.
About 1901 or 1902 George married Mary Elizabeth Clapp, a neighbour's daughter born in October 1878, whose Alabama-born father farmed in Goebel Township beside Jasper and Rachel. Their first child, George Wesley, was born at Alton, the county seat, on 18 April 1903, and the census of 1910 found the family in Piney Township: George, thirty-four, Mary, thirty, George Wesley, seven, Manda, five, and the baby Jasper L., who would grow up as Lewis Jasper. Nathan Noel came in 1912 and Luther Paul in November 1914, at Alton.
The family then went south into Arkansas, where the youngest, Harvey William, was born in June 1919, and from there, in the 1920s, west to Colorado. By April 1930 George, fifty-four, was farming at Cahone in Dolores County, a dry-farming settlement on the high ground north of Cortez that was then filling with families from Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri. Mary and four of the children were with him: Manda, twenty-four, Nathan, seventeen, Luther, fifteen, and Harvey, ten. Lewis, married in Oklahoma in 1929, followed with his own family within a few years, and the Cahone Cemetery would in time hold three generations of them.
Mary died in 1953. George died at Cortez on 11 February 1959, a month short of eighty-three, and was buried beside her at Cahone under a grey granite stone cut with ivy, GEORGE WASHINGTON RISENHOOVER, 1876, 1959.
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Cite: Heirology, "George Washington Risenhoover (1876-1959)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/george-washington-risenhoover-1876-1959-fba528.