Helena “Lena” (nee’ Whitney) Johnston Branham 1888-1932
Headstone GPS Coordinates: location unknown
Birth: 16 June 1888, Illinois
Death: April 29, 1932, Seabeck, Kitsap County, Washington
Relatives in Seabeck Cemetery: William Johnston, Norma Lovell Johnston,
Infant boy Johnston, Wayne Johnston
American Revolutionary War Patriots*: Unknown.
Helena “Lena” Whitney was born on June 16, 1888, in Illinois, the daughter of Jim Whitney of Ohio and Emma Thomas of Arkansas. Like many women of her generation, Lena’s life was marked by frequent moves, hard work, family responsibility, and personal loss, much of it unfolding across Missouri, Oklahoma, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
In 1907, at the age of nineteen, Lena married William Franklin Johnston in Missouri. William, a Missouri native born in 1867, was twenty years her senior. Their early married life followed William’s farm and labor work, and Lena began raising a growing family while moving frequently with him for work opportunities.
Lena became the mother of four children with William. Their first son, William Norman Johnston, was born in Carter County, Missouri, in 1907. A year later, James Loyal Johnston was born in Hunter, Grandon County, Missouri. In 1910, while the family was again in Carter County, Lena gave birth to a daughter, Hazel Helena Johnston. By 1913, the family had relocated to Kiefer, Creek County, Oklahoma, where Lena’s youngest child, Ruth Elizabeth Johnston, was born. During these years, the family rented farms and lived wherever William could find work, while Lena managed the household and raised the children.
By 1920, Lena was living in Mounds, Creek County, Oklahoma, where William worked as a laborer in the oil industry. This period coincided with Prohibition, during which William operated an illegal gin distillery. Family stories later recalled the secrecy surrounding the operation, including William’s habit of calling the car’s glove compartment the “gin box.”
Sometime between 1920 and 1925, Lena and William divorced. On August 27, 1925, Lena remarried in Sanders, Benewah County, Idaho, to Ray Branham. She married under the name Helen Parker, suggesting that she may have had an additional marriage between her divorce from William and her marriage to Ray, although no documentation of a Parker marriage has yet been found.
By 1930, Lena was living in Yankton, Columbia County, Oregon, listed in census records as a boarder in William Johnston’s household. She was recorded as divorced and working as a cook in the restaurant industry, reflecting her independence and continued labor to support herself. Two of her children, William Norman and Ruth, were also living in the household. During this time, Lena’s son Norman worked as a bucker in a logging camp alongside his father. A young married woman, Amber Kelso Hanby, was also lodging in the home; she would marry Norman the following year. Lena later signed as a witness at Norman and Amber’s marriage in February 1931 in King County, Washington.
The early 1930s brought repeated tragedy to Lena’s family. Her granddaughter, Norma Lovell Johnston, born April 18, 1931, died on December 6, 1932, from tubercular meningitis before reaching her second birthday. Another grandson, an infant son of her son James and his wife Gertrude Sage, was born on April 2, 1931, and died a week later from a seizure disorder. Both children were buried in Seabeck Cemetery. A few years later, Lena’s grandson Wayne Johnston, born in 1935 to Norman and Amber, died at less than three months old from excessive bone growth and was also buried in Seabeck.
According to family accounts, Lena moved to Camp Union, likely with her son Norman and daughter-in-law Amber, where she worked as a cook. Her daughter Hazel and Hazel’s husband, Kenneth Whitaker, were living nearby in Seabeck, Washington, placing Lena close to her surviving children and grandchildren during her final years.
On April 29, 1932, Helena “Lena” Whitney died at the age of forty-three from carcinoma of the uterus (endometrial cancer) with terminal pneumonia. She was buried in Seabeck Cemetery. Her daughter Hazel served as the informant on her death certificate and reported that Lena was still married to Ray Branham at the time of her death. No further records concerning Ray Branham have been located.
Neither Lena nor several members of her family are known to have marked graves in Seabeck Cemetery, and their exact burial locations remain unknown.