Elizabeth Bowers

Elizabeth Bowers was the first daughter born to Charles and Alexena Bowers in 1871 in Ottawa, Illinois.[1]  Elizabeth grew up in Ottawa, Illinois.  Elizabeth graduated from Ottawa High School.[2]   Elizabeth became a school teacher and taught school at Lincoln School in Ottawa, Illinois.[3]  She was educated at the University of Chicago.  Later she became a primary supervisor in the Ottawa grade school system.  Elizabeth spoke at teacher institutes and professional meetings throughout the state. Elizabeth lived in Ottawa until the time of her death in 1947.[4]  She attended the First Church of Christ, Scientist of Ottawa.[5]  She is buried at the Ottawa Avenue Cemetery in Ottawa, Illinois.[6]

A personal Note:  When I was a child we would visit family friends in Ottawa.  They had a daughter, Barb, who was about my age, and I would spend anywhere from a week to three weeks during summer staying with the family.  Barb and I would play on the Lincoln School playground.  Of course I wasn’t interested in genealogy at the time.  I had some vague knowledge that my grandmother came from Ottawa, Illinois and we had ancestors who lived there, but that was all.  While playing on school playground, I didn’t know that I had an ancestor who had been a school teacher at this school.  Now I think about how I walked on the same ground that Elizabeth walked on many years before me.  It makes me feel connected to her in some small way. She looks like my grandmother or should I say my grandmother looks like her so I feel as though I knew her.

Elizabeth’s Retirement Party

Copyright © 2013 Gail Grunst