1952 – 1999
Mary Clingan Nelson 1932
I cannot leave this story without telling very briefly Mother’s adult story. To the very end she lived the life of her sturdy, determined American ancestors. She was fortunate that her genetic inheritance provided her with physical health and the will to cope with whatever problems she had. She refused all medications, carefully managed her own healthy diet, and solved her problems with clear thinking logic. She continually sought information and wisdom through her reading. Because there were no funds to pay high school tuition she completed her formal education when she finished the eighth grade in the one-room schoolhouse in Nachusa, Illinois. Thereafter, she gained considerable knowledge through self education.
With husband John William Nelson around 1949.
Mother was a faithful, supportive wife for my father who struggled with some health issues resulting from his military service in France during World War I. For about thirty years he managed special services for military veterans for the state of Illinois. When he died at the early age of 58 years, both her daughters had married and three grandchildren had arrived. She then turned her attention to being a grandmother and looking after family whenever needed. She was imbued with the family loyalty and closeness she had experienced in her Nachusa childhood. She often paid extended visits to her children especially with my sister and her family who had moved from Illinois to Texas to Michigan, and eventually California. These visits gave her the opportunity to see parts of the country she had not seen before as well as catch up with a new grandchild when one arrived.
Visiting with her grandchildren in 1957
Being a woman of her time, her life’s work had been managing a family. She had clothed, fed, advised, encouraged, and supported both her immediate and her extended family. She had been trained as a seamstress but not as a business woman. She was smart and practical, an independent thinker and doer. So after spending several months in Galveston, Texas near my sister’s family and working as a clerk-receptionist in a resort hotel, she decided to explore! My father’s Swedish aunt lived in Sacramento, California, and one day Mother decided to pay her a visit. She packed her bag and took off in her car for a drive across the southern United States and up the California coast, to see land she had never seen before and leaving the impression that she would return to Galveston when she had explored all she wanted to explore.
With her second husband Wilner Seegar in 1962
She never returned to Galveston! On the way back she paused in San Diego County, California – a pause that lasted for almost fifty years, and would have lasted longer if events had been different.
In California she studied to earn a real estate license and to participate in the housing boom of the time. After a number of years she met and married another real estate broker named Wilner Seegar. She took his name briefly but reclaimed her first married name later. They enjoyed several years together before he died from a stroke.
 At her new home on Sunset Drive in Vista, California in 1962. |
 Vacationing in Disneyland with grandchildren and daughter Catharine in 1961. |
With daughters Barbara and Catharine at Oceanside Harbor in 1985
In the meantime my sister Barbara and her family had migrated to southern California as well. So again she was close to family, and once again Mother was needed. Mother’s residence in California provided a welcome and comfortable vacation destination for our Illinois family. When my sister became a widow, mother and daughter lived together for several years until Barbara suddenly died of a heart attack.
Then, though it was a difficult decision, Mother was wise enough to realize that at the age of 97 she should accept the invitation to stay with her daughter’s family back in Illinois. Robert Anderson, the son of her Nachusa cousin Erma Eicholtz, also lived in California. He was a retired dentist living in San Diego not far from Mother. When Mother left California for the last time, he hired a limousine to take her to the airport to return to Illinois for her final days.
She never complained about being back in Illinois, although it was no longer home for her. The climate was not to her liking, and as much as we wanted her to feel at home she wasn’t. She bravely and softly lived the life of her sturdy ancestors, only a couple months short of being another centenarian among those of her remarkable American heritage. Her ashes have been buried in San Marcos, California on the opposite side of America from where her immigrant ancestors arrived 300 years before. My military veteran father’s ashes are in Arlington National Cemetery, both parents in resting places dear to each of them and representing the scope of Mary Catharine Clingan Nelson’s heritage.
Mary Catharine Clingan Nelson (1899 – 1998)
