James Wakefield Height
James Wakefield Haight was born on 2 April 1917 at East Hickory, a lumber hamlet on the Allegheny River in Forest County, Pennsylvania, the first of the eight children of Benjamin Whitefield Haight and Elsie Evelyn Silvis. His parents had married at Tionesta on 5 June 1916. He carried the middle name of his great-grandfather David Wakefield Haight, a Civil War soldier of Clarington, and his family wrote the surname Haight, as it had been written since his ancestors came from Westchester County, New York, to the Clarion River country in the 1830s.
He grew up in the woods. His father was a bark peeler and later an iron-works hand, and the family moved among the lumber camps and small towns of Forest and Warren Counties. In 1930 they were at Howe Township in Forest County: Benjamin, 37, Elsie, 36, and seven children, James at 13 the oldest, then Merle, Warren, Glenn, Nellie, Edna and the baby Lawrence. Raymond, the youngest, came in 1934. In 1935 the family was still in rural Forest County.
On 18 October 1939 he married Evelyn Ruth Atwell at Sheffield, Warren County. She was seventeen. The census of April 1940 found the young couple living with her parents, Everett A. and Florence E. Atwell, and her seven younger brothers and sisters in Mead Township outside Clarendon. On 16 October 1940, when every man of his age registered for the draft, he gave his home as Clarendon and his employer as the state Department of Forests and Waters. The registrar wrote him down as six feet tall, 160 pounds, with gray eyes and brown hair and a light complexion. He and Evelyn had three sons and a daughter, among them James E. Haight, born 1942, and Russell G. Haight, born 1943. In 1941 his brother Warren married Esther Eleanor Atwell, so two Haight brothers were married to two Atwell sisters.
The marriage ended in divorce. Jim went west. By the spring of 1950 he was in Kansas, living on the Riverside side of Wichita and working as a turret lathe machinist in the aircraft industry, the trade that was pulling men to Wichita from every state. The census of 10 April 1950 lists him as James W. Height, 33, born in Pennsylvania, with his wife Betty, 22, born in Kansas. From the time he came to Kansas he spelled the name Height instead of Haight, and the Height spelling is the one his Kansas children carry. His Social Security file and his death record kept the old spelling to the end.
He had married Delephine Elizabeth "Betty" Bieker at Russell in April 1949. She was the daughter of Jacob and Elizabeth (Riedel) Bieker, Volga German farmers at Gorham, and a 1945 graduate of Russell High School. Her obituary gives the wedding as 2 April 1949; the stone the two of them share says 22 April. They had four children, James, Delaphene, Larry and Michael. The family lived at Wichita, Medicine Lodge, WaKeeney and Coldwater, all in Kansas, before they returned to rural Russell, and in the early 1990s they moved into the town. His first wife, Evelyn, married Bruce Freeman Crossley, an assistant police chief, at Frewsburg, New York, in 1952, was later ordained, and died in Florida in 1993.
Jim Height died at Russell on 5 October 1993, aged 76. He is buried in Russell City Cemetery under a dark granite stone that reads HEIGHT, James W. "Jim" Apr. 2, 1917 Oct. 5, 1993, Delephine E. "Betty" (Bieker) Dec. 29, 1927 Aug. 31, 2003, Married Apr. 22 1949, Parents of Lee, Delaphene, Larry, Mike. Betty followed him ten years later.
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Cite: Heirology, "James Wakefield Height (1917-1993)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/james-wakefield-height-1917-1993-1ea007.