Marion 9 BIGELOW
(more photos)
16167.1113 Marion 9 BIGELOW,
dau of Henry 8 (
Harry Foster 7 , Henry 6 , Simeon 5 , John 4 , Joshua 3 , Joshua 2, John 1), and Anna (Sigel)
BIGELOW, was born at Williamsville, Erie co, NY on 26 June 1893. She
married on 08 June 1913 John N. Higgins. John Higgins died 06 June 1949
in California. Marion died 02 March 2006, age 112 at Seal Beach,
CA; (see obits)
Children of John N. and Marion (Bigelow) Higgins:
16167.1113.1 John Higgins, b 04 Aug 1919 Cascade,
ID; d ______ ;
16167.1113.2 Horace Higgins, b 09 Oct 1922 Cabarton,
ID; d ______ ;
16167.1113.3 Robert Bigelow Higgins, b 21 Apr 1925 Cabarton,
ID; d ______ ;
Sources:
Bigelow Family Genealogy Volume II page 465; child
Howe,Bigelow Family of America;
Obituary 1:
MARION BIGELOW HIGGINS.
Marion B. Higgins, 112; Oldest Person in California Lived During
the Terms of 20 U.S. Presidents
By Jon Thurber, Times Staff Writer
March 4, 2006
Marion Bigelow Higgins, the oldest person in California, whose
life spanned the terms of 20 of the 43 presidents of the United States, died
Thursday at her home at Leisure World in Seal Beach. She was 112.
Marion Higgins had been in declining health for the
last couple of months with congestive heart failure, according to her son
Horace.
"Her mind was sharp right up to the end," he said.
When Margaret "Madge" Russell died late last May at the age of 112, Higgins
became the oldest living Californian. George Johnson of Richmond is now
the state's most senior citizen. He is 111.
Higgins was a "poster girl" for an active lifestyle.
At the age of 88, she participated in
the 1981 Senior Olympics and took three gold medals in "the sprints." (She
later admitted that she had few rivals in the 85-90 age bracket.
At 102, she self-published her life story
and sold 1,000 copies. She was a rock and mineral hound and collected
stamps well into her second century.
She was born June 26, 1893, in Williamsville, N.Y., a village outside
Buffalo. Higgins was raised first on a farm in Maine and then on farms
in Ohio, Michigan and finally Idaho, where she graduated from high school
After graduation, she went to what is now the University
of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash. She earned her bachelor's degree and a
teaching credential there before taking a faculty job at a one-room schoolhouse
in Cascade, Idaho.
She married John Higgins, who worked for a logging company, in 1918, and
for the next 10 years the family moved wherever the work was.
She had her first child in 1919 and, while bearing and raising two more
boys, continued to teach school.
One of her sons was born with a deformed leg that made movement in the
snow difficult, so in 1927 the family moved to Los Angeles for the weather.
Her husband's parents and a brother were in Pomona, so that's where the family
settled. Her husband got a job as a machinist.
During World War II, she worked in the BF Goodrich plant in Pomona
making de-icers for the tails of B-17 bombers.
She recalled that the day of the Japanese surrender, a supervisor told
all the women in the plant to clean up and go home. That was the end of
her war work.
She became a widow four years after the war ended, when her husband died
of a heart attack. He was 60. She never remarried.
Her eldest son, John, died last May. In addition to her son Horace, she
is survived by another son, Robert of Laredo, Texas; nine grandchildren;
12 great-grandchildren; and 15 great-great-grandchildren.
She had a career with the Los Angeles County assessor's office
from 1947 to 1963, when she was forced to retire at the age of 70.
She began drawing Social Security checks during the first Eisenhower administration.
In her retirement years, she sang with a choral group called the Ontario
Oratorio for 15 years and delighted her grandchildren, great-grandchildren
and great-great-grandchildren with her ability to recite the alphabet backward
and forward.
Her son Horace said that at the age of 105 his mother started reciting
poems she recalled from her childhood. And, he said, she remembered them
flawlessly.
She avoided doctors as much as possible and found that chiropractors generally
could cure what ailed her.
She ate and lived moderately and was active in her church.
"I face every day one at a time, and I'm always learning something new,"
she told a Times reporter last year. "I'm just a slow learner."
Obituary 2:
Received this from M. Bigelow..................................................ROD
From Horace Higgens re funeral arrangements:
"Plans for both the burial and the memorial celebration have been firmed
up somewhat.
There will be a graveside service at1 pm on Wed, Mar 8 at the Pomona Valley
Memorial Park, 502 E. Franklin, Pomona CA. Pastor Joseph Prettyman
will be officiating. Mary Gilliland will sing one of Grandma's favorite
hymns. Others might be heard.
A memorial celebration will be held, probably March 17, in Clubhouse 4 at
Leisure World. It will take at least this amount of time for the word to
get out to all of her friends and aquaintances via the Leisure World News,
a weekly paper. We plan to have displays of memorabilia. Bring
your favorite picture or whatever, to add to the display. Horace"
===
There was a nice longer article in the Orange County Register newspaper
on Saturday, March 4, 2006, which can be accessed directly after a short
registration process for access to the article. Here is the URL to
the story:
<http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/news/obituaries/article_1029373.php>
[OC Register March 4, 2006 article:]
State's oldest resident dies in Seal Beach residence Marion Higgins and
her son Horace in a photo taken on her 111th birthday at her Leisure World
home in Seal Beach. Marion Higgins died Thursday morning. She would have
been 113 years old on June 26.
Arrangements A service is to be scheduled at Todd Memorial Chapel in Pomona.
A memorial service will be held at a later date at Leisure World.
SEAL BEACH Marion Higgins, a farm girl born in the age of the horse-drawn
carriage and the kerosene lamp who lived to see the miniskirt and the space
shuttle died Thursday in her Seal Beach Leisure World home of congestive
heart failure. She was 112 years and 249 days old.
Higgins was the oldest person in California, the sixth oldest American
and the 11th longest-lived person in the world, according to the UCLA-based
Gerontology Research Group, an independent research group that investigates
and tracks longevity.
Her name sat near the top of an elite list of "supercentenarians" - people
who live past 110 years of age. She was widely profiled in the media and
studied by gerontology institutes curious to discover the secret to her long
life.
There was no secret according to Higgins.
"With me, I always had something to keep me busy," she told the Register
at her 112th birthday party in June 2005. "It was important to me."
The ceaseless activity that marked her life and kept her mind sharp enough
to recall a sunset over a childhood lake 100 years past was paired with an
optimistic nature and a family tree that included nine generational branches
of men and women who lived an average of 85 years each.
More than diet, exercise and mental attitude, the genetic gift received
from her progenitors may explain the source of Higgins' long life, according
to scientists.
"The pattern of longevity in the genes is very strong," said Dr. Stephen
Coles, co-founder of the Gerontology Research Group, which studied Higgins
as well as the estimated 300-450 other supercentenarians worldwide.
"(Supercentenarians) all have parents who were long-lived and siblings
that were long-lived. They sometime will outlive all their relatives, including
all their children."
But a positive mental outlook, moderate habits and an active lifestyle
may also help, Coles said.
Higgins' second son, Horace, 83, said his mother didn't just possess a
positive attitude but an incredible intellect and had a sense of humor about
her notoriety.
"She used to say, 'You get to be interesting if you live long enough.'"
Horace said. "I'm going to miss the camaraderie we had. I'll probably wonder
what to do on my Fridays."
Born on a farm in Williamsville, N.Y., on June 26, 1893, Higgins spent
her youth and much of her adulthood in the still-wide-open spaces of the
American Midwest and West. Her father, Henry Bigelow, was a farmer and
carpenter who hopscotched from farm to farm in Maine, Ohio and Michigan
until he settled on an 80-acre homestead in Idaho in 1908.
It was there in a spartan toolshed built with vertical siding and batten
boards, then later in the farmhouse her father built near the small town
of Nampa, that Higgins passed some of her happiest childhood days.
Years later, she still longed for the days when her father would lash railroad
rails between two teams of horses and drive them like a scythe through fields
of luxurious green sagebrush. She and her seven brothers and sisters would
stack the smaller branches to be burned.
"It was fun," Higgins recalled later in a self-published memoir, "Ripples
on a Quiet Stream." "I thought my life was lovely and fulfilling."
She went to school in Tacoma, Wash., then returned to Idaho to teach school.
Her time there coincided with some of the great expansion projects of the
American frontier, including the damming of the Boise and Snake rivers for
electric power, as well as a logging industry boom that gave life to country
towns and a teaching job to Higgins.
The blue-eyed, dark-haired Marion Bigelow taught school at a church in
Cascade, Idaho. Classes were divided by sheets of tarpaulins strung along
the walls. At a dance she met a young "hoisting engineer" for the logging
company. He was from the town of Yellow Pine, a place so remote it could
only be reached by snowshoe during the winter months. His name was John
Higgins.
Marion had turned down other suitors - "I had a mind to remain single,"
she wrote later - but the backwoodsman with the mischievous smile and the
ability to whistle without moving his lips or face was too much for her.
They were married in 1918.
The marriage had its initial bumps. Marion wanted to work to pay off a
student loan; John wanted a housewife. John won.
But when the couple bought an Overland 90 automobile in 1918, Marion learned
to drive it - despite her husband's protestations.
"He'd just yell at me, 'Don't do that girl, you'll strip the gears!'" Marion
recalled with a smile at her birthday party in 2005. "He was not a good teacher."
The couple lived in a tiny, portable house that could be relocated at will
by John's employer, Boise-Payette Lumber Co. They moved five times and welcomed
all three of their sons inside its wooden walls.
Rusticity suited them. In 1921, when electricity came, Higgins was disappointed
to give up her "beautiful milk glass" kerosene lamp. Eventually a bathhouse
arrived, too, in which the young housewife enjoyed the first indoor plumbing
of her life.
Rather than be bored in the remote woods, she and her husband studied plants
and wildflowers, eventually planting 26 different native plants around her
home.
"The neighbors thought I was peculiar for going to such trouble," she recalled.
The ability to find joy in humble things was a pattern that would repeat
her entire life. Higgins collected rocks, sewed quilts, sang in choirs,
and later in life took to caning chairs.
She was thrifty but never cheap. When a barnstormer biplane came to Cascade
in 1923, she and her husband splurged on a $25 airplane ride, their first.
"I wasn't scared, I was exhilarated," she recalled.
"She was a joy to be around and didn't let things get her down," Horace
said. "A lot of people bring stress on their lives. She never let things
get her down and let things go. If people were nasty to her she'd just
ignore it and smile and go on her way."
Her optimistic spirit was tested a few times. Her third child, Robert,
was born with a shriveled leg and so sick the doctor predicted he would
not live out the night.
Marion wrapped him in her arms and prayed.
"I touched the bottom level, as some say. I prayed through, as others say,"
she recalled. "I awoke at daylight. I looked down at my baby at my side.
He was breathing. God had done His will."
Robert would live but be unable to walk for much of his childhood. It was
in part his inability to crawl through Idaho snowdrifts that prompted the
next major shift in Higgins' life: California.
The year was 1927 and for the first time the family would live in the "small
city" of Los Angeles, eventually moving to Pomona, Chino, and finally Ontario.
"I never drove a car in a paved place until I got to California," Higgins
recalled.
The family survived the Depression and the Second World War; Marion Higgins
worked in a factory manufacturing airplane wing de-icers.
Horace Higgins later recalled his mother pushing him and his older brother
to go to university on a Navy scholarship. That advice sent him on to Caltech
and a career as an engineer.
"She was always steering you on a straight path," Horace said. "She'd never
get cranky or angry. But she'd push."
She kept on pushing, even after the death of her husband in 1949. For 15
years she worked as a deputy assessor for Los Angeles County, dabbled in
real estate, traveled the country and the world with friends and relatives,
and even competed in the 1981 Senior Olympics, setting records in the 100-,
200-, and 400-meter dash. Higgins moved to Leisure World in Seal Beach in
late 1989.
Throughout it all her mind remained strong and her memory, which she likened
to the "Holy Spirit," remarkably intact.
In the last years of her life she credited her longevity to her deep faith,
which she likened to the Bible's 1st Psalm: "Blessed is the man who does
not walk in the counsel of the wicked, who does not stand in the place of
sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers."
"After telling wisecracks about the secret of my long life, that Psalm
came to mind," she said. "And I realized I had been doing it all my life."
Rosabell Fenstermaker of San Juan Capistrano had been the second oldest
person in California before dying at 111 years, 348 days on Oct. 14, 2005.
Marion Bigelow, daughter of Henry Bigelow, was born 26 Jun 1893
in Williamsville, NY. They left Williamsville when her father, Henry
inherited the Staples estate in Newfield, Maine. See article in "Forge,
Bigelow Society Quarterly", Vol.27, No.1, January 1988, page 7, for
her biography. The article is from parts of Marion's book, The Story
of the Life and times of Marion (Bigelow) Higgins, called "Ripples On
A Quiet Stream". At age 104, she is the Bigelow Society's oldest
active member. Although her eyesight and hearing are fading, she
lives in her own condominium in a seniors' complex, is still able to quilt,
collect stamps, and attend several church functions weekly. Most recently
(to January 1998) she took a trip in August 1997 with her son Horace and
wife, Liz, flying to Boise, Idaho and then motoring some 2200 miles home,
taking in all the sights between. In 1997, Marion published her memoirs
under the title "Ripples On A Quiet Stream", and has kindly given permission
to reprint excerpts, which will appear on this web site.
Sources: in two parts over the next two issues of "Forge".
January 1998 she resided in Seal Beach, CA 90740, 1301 Oakmont Rd., #145B.
She married John Higgins and they had 3 children; Article in "Forge" October
2001, Vol. 30, No.4 when Marion was 107 years of age.
"BIGELOW MATRIARCH CELEBRATES 109TH BIRTHDAY"
The family of Marion bigelow Higgins celebrated
her 109th birthday at the home of her grand-daughter, Robyn, and her husband,
Keith Randle, in
Newport Beach, Ca on 26 June 2002. The attendees included Marion's
three sons John and his wife Olive; Horace, and his wife, Liz; Robert,
and his wife Marisela, and numerous grandchildren, great-grandchildren,
nieces and nephews, and their offspring. Marion has 9 grandchildren,
10 great-grandchildren and 12 great great grandchildren in all.
A very special and most welcomed guest was
Loring Bigelow who came to honor the occasion. Loring presented Marion
with a cap that was emblazoned with the Bigelow Coat-of-Arms. Marion's
hope is that the annual meeting of the Bigelow Society will be held in southern
California before long.
Marion did not let a bad cold at the time
of the party slow her down. A few days later she was admitted to
hospital with pneumonia. She was sent
home after three days and has now completely recovered and is back
to normal. As is to be expected, Marion has lost some eyesight and hearing,
and can no longer walk so well. Although a person is bound to show
a little wear and tear at the age of 109, however, she can still carry
on a great conversation. Just speak into her good ear. She is sharp
as ever, and while she remembers the past as if it was yesterday, she also
has a good handle on today. She laments being behind the times in
this age of computers. "I ignored the computer," she says, "Now I don't
know what people are
talking about when they talk about Web sites."
Marion was born 26 June 1893 in williamsville,
NY. she wrote her life story seven years ago with the help of her
friend, Thelma Kramer [see
"Forge", January 1998]. She still continues to tie quilts, work
with the Salvation Army and other church groups, and attend monthly meetings
of the
stamp club.
My constant prayer is to accept what God keeps
me here for." Marion says. "I don't know why I'm alive."
"Forge" Oct 2002, Vol.31, No.4, p.64.
New Note:
Subject: Marion Bigelow Higgins
Date: 09/30/2004
From: M. Bigelow>
Hi! Rod,
Did you happen to hear cousin Marion Bigelow Higgins being interviewed this morning on Morning Edition on NPR as one of the supercentenarians?
The homepage has her picture on it today:
http://www.npr.org
You can listen to the interview; here are the instructions, etc.:
"NPR : The Secrets of America's Supercentenarians"
<http://www.npr.org/dmg/dmg.php?prgCode=ME&showDate=30-Sep-2004&segNum=14&mediaPref=RM>
Please click on the headline or the audio icon to listen to the story
using a RealAudio or WindowsMedia player. To download a player or to find
solutions to common problems, please visit NPR's audio help page at
<http://www.npr.org/audiohelp/>.
Want a transcript of this story?
<http://www.npr.org/transcripts/story.html>
==============
Marion appears to be the only Bigelow making the list of world's all time
oldest people, too. See:
http://www.recordholders.org/en/list/oldest.html
Cheers!
Cousin M. Biglow
Descendant note:
From: Norma J. Johnson email johnsonn@javanet.com
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1998 17:39:53 -0400
My Line is:
1-John Biglo & Mary Warren;
2-Joshua Biglow & Elizabeth Flagg;
3-Joshua Bigelow & Hannah Fiske;
4-John Bigelow & Grace Allen;
5-Simeon Bigelow & Sarah Foster;
6-Henry Bigelow & Lucy Barnes;
7-Harry F. Bigelow & Mary Lucy
Staples;
8-Henry Bigelow & Anna Sigel;
9-Doris Bigelow & Chester Wohlgamuth;
10-Norma J. Johnson
Rod Bigelow
Box 13 Chazy Lake
Dannemora, NY 12929
rodbigelow@netzero.net 
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