Bender, Elsie Kolb (1875-1949)

Mennonite Weekly Review obituary: 1949 Jun 2 p. 3

Birth date: 1875 Sep 17

text of obituary:

ELSIE KOLB BENDER

Elsie Kolb Bender was born near Breslau, Waterloo county, Ontario, September 17, 1875, the daughter of Joseph and Nancy Stauffer Kolb; and died at Memorial hospital, South Bend, Indiana, May 5, 1949, aged 73 years, seven months 19 days, as the last surviving member of her family.

She had been in relatively good health, continuing her lively interest in her family and in her church, of which she had been a devoted and faithful member since girlhood, until she was taken to the hospital for a serious operation in the hope of extending her life, from which she failed to rally.

On October 12, 1896, she was married to George L. Bender at Elkhart, Indiana, with whom she lived at Elkhart for 25 years in happy wedlock until his decease in January, 1921, sharing with him the burdens and privileges of his long-time service as first treasurer of the Mennonite Board of Missions and Charities and as deacon of the Prairie Street Mennonite church. In 1925, four years after his death, she moved to Goshen with her children, where she spent the remaining years of her 28-year widowhood. Since her residence in Goshen she has been a member of the College Mennonite church.

Elsie Bender was the mother of a large family of children, to whom she gave herself with complete and unassuming devotion and in whom the found great happiness. Seven of the children survive, the eighth, George Howard, having died shortly after birth. They are: Harold Stauffer, dean and professor of Church History in the Goshen College Biblical Seminary, Goshen, Indiana; Florence Elizabeth, assistant professor of Home Economics at Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio; Wilbur Joseph, dean of Harvard college, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Violet Esther (Mrs. J. Sheldon Turner), of Garrett Park, Maryland; Cecil Kolb, physician and surgeon of Goshen; John Ellsworth, specialist in remedial English at South Philadelphia high school, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Robert Leighton, physician and surgeon of Elkhart, Indiana. Fifteen grandchildren also survive.

Funeral services were held at the Goshen college chapel in charge of S. C. Yoder and G. J. Lapp. Burial was beside her late husband in the family plot in the Prairie Street Mennonite cemetery at Elkhart, Indiana.