Musselman, Rose Lambert (1878-1974)

WORD was received here by Dr. and Mrs. Robert Kreider that Mrs. Rose Lambert Musselman, 96, of Inez, Texas, a pioneer Mennonite missionary in Turkey in the early 1900s, died Dec. 27, 1974 at a Victoria, Texas hospital. She was an aunt of Mrs. Kreider.

Funeral services were held at the First United Methodist Church of Victoria.

Rose Lambert as a young woman of 21 went to Turkey in 1899 to open a mission program among the Armenian people for the United Orphanage and Mission Society, mission board related to the Mennonite Brethren in Christ. She served in Hadjin, Turkey for 12 years as matron of an Armenian orphan school.

HER EXPERIENCES in living through the period of the Armenian massacres of 1908-09 are described in her book, "Hadjin and the Armenian Massacres." This mission work in Turkey was one of the earliest overseas mission programs of any Mennonite conference. The Armenian work received support from a variety of Mennonite groups in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Russia.

Mrs. Musselman was preceded in death by her husband, David G. Musselman, who died in 1933. She was born in Vera Cruz, Pa., on Sept. 8, 1878, the daughter of George and Amanda Gehman Lambert. She lived most of her childhood years in the Elkhart-Mishawaka area of northern Indiana except for a brief period at Peabody, Kan.

Her father, on two trips to India in the 1890s, returned to the North American Mennonite churches to call for a relief and mission effort in India in response to famine and church-planting needs. He also was instrumental in opening the Mennonite mission program among the Armenians of Turkey.

THE YOUNG Rose Lambert studied nursing and orphan school management in Cleveland, Ohio, before going to Turkey in 1899.

Due to ill health she returned after 12 years of continuous mission service to the United States in 1910 and married D. G. Musselman, a Chicago inventor-businessman.