Eleanor Gerda Cornell

  General Notes:

census and Portland City Directory

Interviews in February and July, 2003 at her home and at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande OR
February 13th, 2003. We are going to get Gerda Brownton life story today. Okay, Gerda, I would like first of all your birth, when and where, and your parents and your maiden name and we start off with that. GB: Alright. I was born on January 27th, 1919 in Worchester, Massachusetts. My maiden name is Cornell. My father name was Lynnwood Brownell Cornell. And he had been a native of New England. He had ventured out into the wild West and met my mother and they gotten married. Her name was Eleanor Menape. And so they got married then she became Eleanor Cornell and they had a baby in Portland, that my older sister. But he decided he could probably make more money if he went east so we went east and I was born in Worchester and it was a bad winter. Only the street car tracks were cleared so he had to drive along the street car tracks in order to get to the hospital. [laughs] And I was born with yellow jaundice which was a…as well as a instrument cuts on my neck, you know. So you when my mother saw me I was covered with blood and had yellow skin. So she kind of wanted to reject me, but she couldn so there we were. By the time I was two years old we were back in Portland and so I was basically raised in Portland. My sister and I were the only children until about ten years later a couple of boys came along.
My sister and one brother have died. I have one brother in Portland,
[children]
The first one is Carol, she was born in 1942 in Everett, Washington. Sally was born in Chicago, Oak Park, Illinois, actually, in And then we were mustered out of the Army in and bought…decided to work on this piece of property and so we lived in the little house up by the barn that we had remodeled, where you lived, when Mark was born in And so when he was three years old we moved into this house.
Then Cindy was born in 1956. So Carol has a son named Eric who is thirty-five tomorrow on Valentine Day

http://library.eou.edu/ohgr/edited%20brownton%20transcript.pdf

Eleanor married Westley Frederick Brownton, son of Herbert Seymour Brownton and Edna Clarice Bates, on 15 Sep 1940. (Westley Frederick Brownton was born on 6 Jul 1908 in Oregon and died on 10 Jan 2000 in LaGrande, Union County, Oregon.)

  Marriage Notes:

Feb 2003 interview with Gerda