Monday, March 31, 2014

Military Monday: Fearless Female Major Isabella Martin Henry, 1910-1994


 
My mother's college friend, Isabella Martin Henry, was born September 27, 1910, in Waco, Texas, the second of five children of Lawrence Seymour Henry Sr. and Anna Sloane Ingram.  Her father was a printer who owned the L.S. Henry Printing and Stationery Company in Waco. On August 22, 1942, 31-year-old Isabella, a stenographer with a life insurance company in Waco on the 1940 Census, enlisted in Dallas with the Women's Army Corps as an aviation cadet.  At that point she had a year of college, at the College of Industrial Arts in Denton, and was single with no dependents.  Her U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS) Death File shows that she later re-enlisted, July 28, 1949, after earning her bachelor's degree at the University of Texas in Austin, serving through December 31, 1960.  She retired January 1, 1961, at the rank of major in the U.S. Army.

Isabella passed away on February 20, 1994, and is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Waco.  Her younger sister Mary Catherine Henry (1916-1998) donated Isabella’s papers to the TexasCollection at Baylor University in Waco in March 1995.  Baylor has placed a number of images of items in this collection online in Flickr as part of a set on women serving in the war effort.


© Amanda Pape - 2014 - click here to e-mail me.

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