"Grandmother was a heavy woman. She wore her hair parted in center and drawn smoothly back. I guess with her large family and the many "hired men", which "layed" around, she had plenty of cooking to do. Grandpa liked his corn bread, and corn cakes. I remember her red and white checked table cloth, the "salt gourd" she kept in the pantry. This was a large gourd with the neck cut off, dried, to serve as a container for salt. I remember the ginger snaps in a round paste board box about the size is a gallon bucket, the little white milk glass hen on a nest where she kept paraffin and would give us kids some to chew for chewing gum. Only it made my jaws so tired. She was always having some of her 9 children or their families in to eat. At Christmas we would all congregate and usually it was a roast goose, or maybe turkey or chicken for dinner. She ground her own pepper in the pepper mill and the spice was course and easily seen on the food. In the summer time she would pull the table out on the porch and we would eat out there. If the flies got too thick there were always peach limbs cut and ready to wave over the table while people ate.
Grandmother smoked a pipe. It was a customary thing with her. I don't know when she began it. She had asthma and maybe the pipe smoking was supposed to be of benefit. I can still hear the soft pop- pop- of her lips as she drew on the pipe and gazed away-way off into space a she sat and rocked and sang on old hymn, or a mournful mountain ballad such as "Barbara Allen". I wonder now if she was not thinking of her long ago girl hood home, with parents and children all united. She used to walk along the road side in the spring and gather greens in her big tie apron which she wore."
".........In the years which I knew her, Grandmother was a lover of home, rarely going anywhere and then anxious to return home early in the afternoon. One time, on a wedding anniversary her children went together and bought their parents a full set of blue and white dishes. It was a big surprise to her, and being a little girl I could not understand why Grandmother put her big tie apron up to her eyes and cried. "

Copy of Original Obituary (Source Unknown)
"Bathsheba Clendenen died at her home 6 miles southwest of Mt. Pulaski, Thursday Apr. 20, 1916, aged 80 years and 10 days.
Bathsheba Jones was born Apr. 10, 1836 near Hallsville, Ross Co. Ohio. On Feb. 23, 1854 she was united in marriage to Sylvester Clendenen. To this union was born 9 children; Taylor, James, Mary Jane, William, George, John, Minnie, Charles, Anna.
She became a member of the Christian Church early in life and at the time of her death was a member of the Copland Christian Church. She had lived in this community for a number of years being a neighbor to her son John.
The funeral was held in the home at 1 P.M. Apr. 22. Rev. W. H. Kern, pastor of the Copeland Church officiating. Burial was in Steenbergen Cemetery by the side of her husband."
From the memoirs of Ruby Clendenen Quandt - Bathsheba's grand-daughter - written in the latter 1960's