Butler County Genealogy Trails Kansas Mrs. Walter Fletcher McGinnis Bio

BUTLER COUNTY'S EIGHTY YEARS BIOS

MRS. WALTER FLETCHER McGINNIS, SR.

(Transcribed by Lori DeWinkler)

Walter McGinnis married Miss Ida May Surdam, of Towanda, at El Doardo, June 23, 1885. Mrs. McGinnis died in El Dorado, July 28, 1933. She was the daughter of Tunis Surdam who moved to Kansas in 1870 and settled in Sedgwick, then Butler County. The Surdams were one of the pioneer families in that section. Five children were born of the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. McGinnis; Faith M., wife of R. C. Loomis,El Dorado; Hazle, widow of the late Jud P. Hall, El Dorado oil man, accidentally killed by an automobile in Wichita in 1920; Aletha, wife of Lieutenant Rolland Ainslee Browne, U. S. A., now stationed at Fort Ethan Allen, Vermont, and who returned in December 1934 from the Philippine Islands, where Lieutenant Browne was stationed two years and eight months; Walter Fletcher, Jr., El Dorado attorney, who married Wannah Mosier of Towanda; and Pauline Lylian who married Walter C. Gallatin, of Ponca City, Oklahoma, and whose death occurred in that city July 1, 1928.

There are four grandchildren, Pierson McGinnis Hall, Richard Clayton Loomis Jr., Allyn Mosier McGinnis and Walter Fletcher McGinnis III.

Mr. McGinnis, although not an enrolled member of any church, was reared in the faith of the Methodist Episcopal. He has joined the Odd Fellows and Modern Woodmen and, until late years, was active in the affairs of the Chamber of Commerce and the Country Club. Politically, he is a Republican.

This tribute to Mrs. McGinnis, written by R. A. Clymer, editor of The El Dorado Times, was published in that newspaper:

Mrs. Walter F. McGinnis, Sr., was a woman of lovely character. She was gracious and charming. She devoted her life to her family and reared children who are filling places of useful service in the world, inspired by the ideals she taught them and exemplified daily by her own method of living. In her span of life—more than fifty years of which was spent in this town—she had seen the civilization about her undergo great changes. She had seen her state emerge from its primitive pioneer condition into a commonwealth of great power and prosperity. She had seen both the highs and the lows, had witnessed the booms and the depressions and had noted the great turbulent forces at work in the changing character of the modern world. But her own life through all was changeless. She lived a quiet, serene, peaceful, beautiful life presiding as a queen over the sanctuary of her home and ministering to her loved ones in the devoted, effective fashion of countless women whose influence is after all the strongest element in the careers of men. Her annals are simple ones but her contribution of motherhood and wifehood is strong and sweet and enduring and leaves a heritage of priceless worth to those who knew her best.