Helen Faye Smith
Helen Faye Smith was born on 12 January 1913 at Agra, in the north of Lincoln County, Oklahoma, the first child of Orville Raymond Smith and Nora E. Neely, who had married at Chandler the year before. Her brother Glen followed in 1915.
Before she was seven the family had gone west. The census of January 1920 found Orville, Nora, Helen and Glen in Dolores County, Colorado, the same high dry country where Helen would spend most of her life. The stay did not last. Her mother died on 25 May 1924, aged thirty, and was buried at Pueblo, on the other side of the Rockies; Helen was eleven. Her father went back to Lincoln County, Oklahoma.
There, at sixteen, she married Lewis Jasper Risenhoover, twenty-one, of a Missouri family newly arrived in the county, at Chandler on 29 June 1929. In April 1930 the couple were keeping house in Osage Township with her father living with them. The family story is that the couple left Cushing, Oklahoma, for Colorado in 1930 in a Ford Roadster with a big box built on the back to carry everything they owned, and had seven flat tires on the way. Their first child, Darrel, was born in Oklahoma in 1931 by the censuses, and by 1933 they were in Colorado for good, first in rural Dolores County, then at Ruin Canyon in Montezuma County, where the 1940 census found her at twenty-seven with four children. Her father followed and settled at Cahone near her brother Glen, and when he registered for the draft in 1942 he named her, Helen Risenhover, as the person who would always know his address.
She had seven children in all: Darrel, Mary Alice, Rachel, Delbert, Donald, Margaret Helen and Carol. The 1950 census found the whole family together in Montezuma County, with Lewis farming. She loved to travel and always had her bags packed. She kept a large vegetable garden, loved to cook and to eat baked beans, and always had time to play with her children and grandchildren. She was a longtime resident of Egnar, the small community in Dolores County, and lived there through her widowhood after Lewis died in December 1987. Two of her sons, Delbert and Donald, and her brother Glen died before her.
Helen died at Vista Grande Nursing Home in Cortez on Sunday, 27 March 2005, aged ninety-two. She left five children, twenty-eight grandchildren, fifty-four great-grandchildren and ten great-great-grandchildren, and three daughters-in-law, among them Ruthie, the widow of her son Delbert, and Wanda Turner, his first wife. Her funeral was at the Cahone Community Church on 30 March, with the pastor of the Dove Creek Seventh Day Adventist Church officiating, and she was buried beside Lewis at Cahone Cemetery under their shared stone.
Sources
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Researched October 2026. Cite: Heirology, "Helen Faye Smith (1913-2005)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/helen-faye-smith-1913-2005-0f31d1.