Mary Elizabeth Clapp
Mary Elizabeth Clapp was born in October 1878 in Oregon County, Missouri, the elder daughter of Lewis M. Clapp, an Alabama man of about thirty, and Sarah Jane Barton, a girl of seventeen from Alton. The census of June 1880 found the three of them in Oak Grove Township, Mary a year old, in the same township as Jasper and Rachel Risenhoover and their ten children, among them Washington, five, who would be her husband. Her sister Delia was born in May 1882. Her father died in 1886, when she was seven. That September her mother married his brother, William Adrian Clapp, a widower with a small son, and Mary grew up in her uncle's house. The census of 1900 found the family in Goebel Township, with Mary, twenty-one, entered as William's daughter, among seven children: Mary, William, Delia, Leslie, Edgar, Ivin and Otis. The old Confederate Jasper Risenhoover and his wife Rachel were farming in the same township that year.
About 1901 or 1902 she married their son George Washington Risenhoover, two years her senior. Their first child, George Wesley, was born at Alton in April 1903, and five more followed over the next sixteen years: Amanda Josephine, called Manda, in 1905; Lewis Jasper in May 1908 at Alton; Nathan Noel in 1912; Luther Paul in November 1914 at Alton; and Harvey William in June 1919, by which time the family had moved south into Arkansas. When Luther applied for a Social Security number he gave his mother's name as Mary J. Clapp; the stone and every other record make her Mary Elizabeth.
In the 1920s the Risenhoovers went west to Cahone, a dry-farming settlement in Dolores County, Colorado. The census of April 1930 found Mary there at fifty-two with George and the four younger children, Manda, Nathan, Luther and Harvey. Her son Lewis and his Oklahoma bride Helen joined them within a few years, and her grandchildren, Delbert among them, grew up around her.
Her mother and stepfather were still living in Oregon County in 1930, old people in her half-brother Luther's house. Her stepfather died in 1937 and her mother in 1949, four years before her. She died in 1953, aged seventy-four or seventy-five, and was buried at Cahone Cemetery under a grey granite stone with ivy, cut to match the one George would have beside her six years later.
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Cite: Heirology, "Mary Elizabeth Clapp (1878-1953)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/mary-elizabeth-clapp-1878-1953-41ebaa.