Wanda Lee Westfall
Wanda Lee Westfall was born on 25 April 1943 at her parents' home at Lewis, a farming settlement in Montezuma County, Colorado, the daughter of Orin Kellogg Westfall, called Tub, and Dessie Mae Hubbs. Lewis was rural enough that the doctor did not arrive until the next day, and he dated her birth certificate 26 April. She liked to say that gave her two days to celebrate her birthday.
She was the middle child of five, all girls: Nina Mae, Neoma Joyce, Wanda, Olinda and Dixie. The census of April 1950 found her at six in her parents' house in Montezuma County with Nina, eleven, and Neoma, nine. Her family called her Gabby. She went to the Lewis School for grades one to eight and to high school in Cortez, and she kept fond memories of helping her father with his honey bees. His stone at Lewis has a beehive cut between his name and her mother's.
In 1959, at sixteen, she married Delbert Raymon Risenhoover of Cahone, twenty, whose family farmed fifteen miles away across the Dolores County line. They had two children, Monty, born at Gallup, New Mexico, in 1960, and Cindy. Delbert and Wanda later divorced.
In 1972 she married William Turner, called Bill. He brought two boys, Alvin and Jason, and they had a daughter of their own, Torry. Wanda and Bill raised the family at Lewis. She worked at various businesses in Montezuma County, among them the Molly Gibson Restaurant and Lounge, where a woman who worked beside her for years remembered all the laughs they had. For many years she was the caretaker of the Lewis Sunnyside Cemetery, where her grandparents Levi and Annie Westfall and Thomas and Emma Hubbs were buried, and where her father was laid in 1973 and her mother in 2000.
When Bill retired they moved to Fredonia, Arizona, on the Utah line, and she went on working in convenience stores, including one at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. When her former mother-in-law, Helen Faye Smith, died in 2005, the obituary still counted Wanda Turner of Sedona, Arizona, among the daughters-in-law. After Bill died Wanda moved back to Cortez, and when her health failed she went to live with her daughter Cindy at Grand Junction.
She died at Grand Junction on 26 June 2020, aged seventy-seven. Her obituary named her five children and four sisters, Nina Dennison, Neoma Jorgensen, Olinda Gigliotti and Dixie Kingsbury, and a granddaughter, Tanna Williams, who had died before her. Her memorial was held on 6 September 2020 at the Lewis-Arriola Community Center.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Wanda Lee Westfall (1943-2020)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/wanda-lee-westfall-1943-2020-9a51f9.