Bampo, as my grandfather Samuel Relf Durand was called, wrote the following about his mother in his big book of biographical sketches of his ancestors:

 "My mother, Lucia Relf Kemper, was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on December 28, 1871, [the eleventh of her parents' twelve children].  Her girlhood was spent at her parents' home in Milwaukee and at their summer home 'Cedarly' on Upper Nebahbin Lake, about thirty miles west of Milwaukee.  This lovely summer home was set in cedar woods overlooking the lake.  It was close to Nashotah House Episcopal Seminary and to Bishopstead, where her grandfather Bishop Jackson Kemper lived before his death in 1870.  My mother's great love of flowers, birds and the beauties of nature  must have been fostered by having lived in the country part of the time when a child.  Most years, the family moved in the wintertime [back] to Milwaukee where mother's father, Samuel Relf Kemper, was engaged in the produce commission business.  In the summertime, my grandfather commuted by train from Milwaukee to Nashotah station where mother's older brothers would meet him, with horse and carriage, for the drive to their home.  My mother's mother and several older sisters taught her at home when she was a young girl.  I have some drawings she made of flowers and fruit when she was ten years  which are exceptionally well done for a small child.
 When about thirteen years of age, she was sent to Kemper Hall in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  This Episcopal boarding school for girls was named for her grandfather.  She was a fine student and won various prizes for scholarship in literature, French, and mathematics.  She maintained a great interest in English and French literature and in poetry all of her life as a result of her fine education.
 My mother's mother died of cancer in March [of] 1890 when the family were spending that particular winter in a rented home in Wauwatosa, a suburb west of Milwaukee.  Due to my grandmother's precarious health that winter, doctors had recommended not staying in their city home on Prospect Avenue on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.  Mother was just eighteen years old at the time.  She graduated from Kemper Hall a year later, in June, 1891.  After completing her education she worked for a time in a government office in Milwaukee on public health work, which required [her] using a microscope many hours a day.

Mother was a very beautiful young lady, and much admired. Her brother, Poyntell Kemper, was a Sigma Chi fraternity brother of my father's at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Mother and [her] friends had occasionally been invited to fraternity parties in Madison, where my father was living during his college years - his mother having given up her home in Milwaukee to have a home in Madison while her two sons were in college there. Also, my grandmother spent summers with her two sons at Nashotah Lake, renting a home on the Nashotah Seminary grounds. So, my father and mother became devoted to each other in the early years of the 1890s. However, after graduating from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1891, due to the difficulty my father had in trying to get established at this time in a large law firm in Milwaukee on account of the business depression of 1893-1896, they were engaged to be married for four and one-half years before my father was in a position to support both a wife and a widowed mother. Dad's father had died when he was only three and one-half years old, and his mother's inheritance was about gone at the time Dad and his brother completed college. My mother and father were married on October 6, 1898 in St. Sylvanus Chapel at Nashotah. Her brother-in-law, Rev. James Slidell, officiated at the marriage service, and her brother, Rev. Poyntell Kemper, performed the betrothal ceremony. The wedding reception took place outdoors on the lawns of my grandfather's Cedarly country home, it being a beautiful warm autumn day. It was a large wedding and reception, for Dad and Mother had many friends and relatives. They were a handsome couple, mother being about 5'4" tall, with light blond hair and blue eyes. Dad was 6'4" tall, with dark hair and brown eyes. They had a honeymoon trip in the East, where they visited many relatives. On returning to Milwaukee, they set up housekeeping in a rented home on Racine Street. Their house was about one block north of a home rented by Dad's mother, which was in a group of houses called the "Ogden Row," on Ogden Avenue, near Farwell Avenue. Mother and Dad made several trips to the East in the early years of their marriage. In a letter I have dated February 27, 1901 from the Raleigh Hotel in Washington D.C., my mother wrote to her father of visits she and Dad had had with friends and relatives in Washington, Baltimore, and Norfolk, and planned to spend a few days in Philadelphia and New York. She also wrote of having seen portraits of Colonel and Mrs. Daniel Kemper in the Corcoran Art Gallery, and also several portraits of relatives from the Sitgreaves, Morton, and Quincy families. My brother Loyal Jr.. born July 12, 1902, I born March 12, 1904, and my oldest sister Lucia born March 13, 1906 all came into the world while Mother and Dad lived on Racine Street in Milwaukee. My [paternal] grandmother [Maria Elizabeth McVickar] came to live with us when we moved into the Lake Drive home [in 1906], and Dad became her sole support, since his brother, Samuel Benjamin Durand, had died in 1900. Also, a nurse, Mrs. McGuire ("Guire," as we called her) took care of the children for many years; and there was always a staff of servants, consisting of a cook and two maids, who lived in the house, as well as a laundress and seamstress who came for two days each week. Mother, besides managing our home, was a very social person who loved to be with her many friends, and her married sisters. In reading some old diaries of hers, I was surprised to find that almost every day she had some sort of social engagement. There were frequent 'sisters meetings' when my Aunt Sally (Mrs. James Slidell), Aunt Mary (Mrs. Charles Lemon), Aunt Sue (Mrs. Selden Sperry) and Aunt Sophy (Mrs. Frederick Best) would meet for afternoon tea and, if at our house, we children had to come in to pay our respects. For many years, Mother was on the Board and President of the Episcopal St. John's Home for the Aged. She was a devout christian, and active in the work of the auxiliaries of St. Paul's Episcopal Church. Additionally, she was a member for 69 years of the Women's Club of Wisconsin, where she served on many committees. From 1945 to 1947, after Dad's death, she was President of this large club of several hundred members. Dad and Mother belonged to a family social club, the Town Club, which had five clay tennis courts, four bowling alleys, and in winter an excellent ice rink on the tennis courts. Dad won many trophies in tennis and bowling tournaments, but Mother mostly enjoyed ice skating and dances at this club. When I was about thirteen she taught me to play tennis, a game that I loved and excelled in for many years. Dad bought our first automobile in 1910, a Cross-Country Rambler made by the Nash Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin (later the American Motors Company). At that time it was most unusual for a woman to drive a car, and most of Mother's friends who had cars either drove battery-operated 'electrics' at a top speed of about 12 m.p.h.., or had chauffeurs to drive gasoline engine cars. However, Mother was determined that there was no reason why she should not drive our car, and she rather astounded her friends by learning to drive. She drove her own car for more than 50 years, until she was 90 years old. When we were small children, she drove us in bad weather in the early morning to the grade school of the Milwaukee State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee), which was more than a mile north of our home. In good weather in the spring, summer, and fall, Mother and Dad were fond of driving in the the country on Sundays and taking picnics. We stopped often in Delafield, thirty miles west of our home, to see Mother's oldest brother, Jackson Kemper, [who was] an invalid, and his sweet little wife, Aunt Helen. Quite often, too, we stopped in for tea in the afternoons at the summer homes of various friends on the nice small inland lakes, about twenty to thirty miles west of Milwaukee. During the First World War, from 1914 to 1918, Mother worked very hard in Red Cross activities, preparing bandages and clothing. She was in charge of a large group of volunteer ladies doing this work. She contributed to the care of several French war orphans, and corresponded with soldiers at the front. She was a member of the Alliance Francaise, and enjoyed talking and reading in the French language with several friends. For a short time in early 1918, her health was poor, and she took my two sisters with her to Summersville, North Carolina. They stayed in an inn near to where her sister, Gertrude, and her husband Samuel Hall had a home. In April, Dad took me and my brother to Washington to meet Mother and my sisters on their return trip. After the First World War, Mother and Dad became even more adventurous. We made several motor trips east to many different landmarks and relatives' houses. These trips were made when long distances had to be traveled over dusty gravel roads, and when we often had to stay in miserable small-town hotels, since it was before the days of concrete highways and modern motels. Mother was a mighty good sport to make these trips of several weeks' duration, for she did not, I am sure, enjoy them nearly as much as Dad did. She had to contend with four children who would get mighty tired out during some days of long, uncomfortable driving, but who nevertheless received a wonderful firsthand education on the history and geography of the eastern and midwestern parts of our country. Mother and Dad made several trips to the south in the 1920's and early 1930's in the wintertime, sometimes going by train and other times driving. On these trips they visited friends in Florida, and also spent a few days with another brother of Mother's, Lewis Kemper, and his wife in Hendersonville, NC. Each summer from the time I was about 7 until about 16 years of age, we spent several weeks in the country in cottages rented on one of the lakes west of Milwaukee. Mother, in spite of the burden of caring for four children, enjoyed being in the country near to where several of her sisters' families and many friends had country homes. Tea parties in the late afternoons were a daily occurrence. My father spent the week [at work] in Milwaukee...and would arrive in the country early Saturday afternoon. Mother was always very much interested in literature, and when her children were quite young she enrolled in a correspondence course on short story writing. She worked hard on this course, and purchased several books on the techniques or writing, and many volumes of collections of short stories. She wrote several stories and submitted them to various magazines, and finally was successful in having a number of her stories published. She must have felt satisfied with her accomplishment, for she never wrote any more short stories, in spite of the urging of her family and publishers to continue. She always said that she became too involved in other activities to find time to write for publication. Starting in 1924, one of her most cherished activities for many, many years was the work of the Colonial Dames of America. To join this society, you had to have geneaological proof of descent from an ancestor who had been an important public servant in one of the thirteen colonies prior to the Revolutionary War. Mother went in on the service record of her ancestor, Captain Sylvester Salisbury, who was commander of Fort Orange at Albany, NY in the mid-1600's, after the English captured New Netherlands from the Dutch. Mother was responsible for many years for the publishing and distributing to schools of historical booklets on Wisconsin. This practice was one of the chief sources of income for maintaining the Old Indian Agency House at Portage, Wisconsin. She had worked very hard in the Wisconsin Society of the Colonial Dames to restore and furnish this historical house in 1932. Mother was president of the Wisconsin Society for several years, and for many years in her old age she was honored with the title of Honorary President. She was also honored by the National Society by election to the Roll of Honor for Distinguished Service. After my father's death in 1937, Mother maintained her home for thirty more years, even though she had great difficulty at times in getting and keeping a satisfactory cook/housekeeper, and in maintaining such a large home. However, she was always eager to have her home available for he married children and her grandchildren to come to whenever they could, and many happy family reunions took place over the years with Mother in her home. She made many trips to visit her families in New England, Louisville, Knoxville, and Palo Alto, California. She also spent several weeks and month away from home. Plus, she spent many weeks and months in various years away from her home in the wintertime. She went on cruises in the Caribbean, and around South America with a good friend, a Mrs. Williams of New York. She spent many weeks several times with friends in Mexico, and in La Jolla and Pasadena, CA. She also made many visits to Palo Alto, part of the time staying with us, and part of the time staying in a nice boarding home. One year when my brother, on a sabbatical leave from the University of Tennessee, was teaching at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, Mother and my sister Glee spent some time visiting there. In 1948, Mother made a trip to England and France with my sister Lucia. In England, they visited Ringwood in Hampshire, where my mother's mother had been born. Several times she went on long tours with us by car to Mexico (as far as Acapulco), to Canada and the East, and to many places in Wisconsin and California. On the occasion of Mother's 90th birthday, we had a reception of more than 60 friends for her in her home in Milwaukee. Many of her dearest friends of her age had died, but she was loved and admired by many more much younger friends and relatives. She had such a keen intellect, and interest in people and current events that she was regarded as a person about twenty years younger than she actually was. Only at the age of nearly 94, in December of 1965, did she become handicapped, when she suffered a partial injury to one knee that caused her to be hospitalized for a month. Afterward, she went to the Colonial Manor Retirement Home to recuperate. However, due to the impossibility of getting reliable servants and nurses, it became necessary for her to stay most of the time at Colonial Manor, only getting back to her home on occasions when one of her children could spend a short time in Milwaukee with her. She was most courageous, and generally in good spirits during the last three and a half years of her life, although suffering from various handicaps that kept her confined almost entirely to her room. Her keen intellect never left her, which was a great blessing. Even at the age of 96, she started the study of the Spanish language, with lessons on a radio program. Mother died June 19, 1969 in her 98th year. A memorial service was held in St. Paul's Episcopal church, the church she had loved for more than eighty years. Her life had been one of great devotion and loyalty to her family and friends. She had met all the difficulties and discouragements in her long life with the greatest of courage, and had always maintained a cheerful and optimistic spirit. She had been dearly loved and admired by all who knew her. She was a dear, lovely, precious person."

Facts about this person:

Education 1885 Kenosha, WI

Burial 1969 Milwaukee, Milwaukee Co., WI