Parents: Willis Mastin Burris and Martha Bowlin.

She was the eighth of twelve children. On 4 March 1918 she married Harry Edward Weatherholt, the son of James E. and Ann Cowden Weatherholt.

Oma and Harry had two daughters: Willis Ann Weatherholt and Audrey Joan Weatherhold. Willis Ann married Thomas Morton Wolff and had three children Diane, Catherine, and Thomas. Audrey Joan Weatherholt married 1) William Herbert Rivers. They had three children: Tamara Joan, Daniel, and William Rivers and 2) Jesse Xavier Petit. They live
in San Diego and have no children.

They are buried side by side in the Burris Family Cemetery, which has been renamed the Tuscumbia Cemetery.

(Obit dated April 22, 1978)

In Loving Memory of OMA BURRIS WEATHERHOLT
February 3, 1894 - April 18, 1978
by Catherine Wolff

There was a big, old walnut table in my grandparents' dining room. Around it the family would gather - the aunts and uncles, the grandchildren and cousins. We would feast on the best potato salad I've ever tasted, my grandfather's special biscuits and apple butter, lots of ham and chicken and Martha's German Chocolate Cake. After meals - and in between them - leaning over cups of inexhaustable coffee, the family would visit and catch up on each other's feelings and lives. Politics and movie stars, business and food, clothes and hairstyles would all be discussed passionately. But those topics would soon give way to family talk and memories.

Around this table, as a child and an adult, I learned a lot about my grandmother - Oma Burris Weatherholt. I learned how she grew up in Olean with nine sisters and brothers; I heard about the hard times, but never described, especially by my grandmother, with any bitterness. I learned how her father had a livery business that died with the horseless carriage and how later he and his wife ran a boarding house in Eldon.

At that hotel one summer, my grandmother met and fell in love with Harry Weatherholt. Sixty years later she remembered and told me clearly of the beauty of the sweet pea flowers that climbed up a fence that summer out back of the hotel.

Harry Weatherholt worked for the Rock Island Railroad and over the years that job and others took them to many different towns. My mother has told me how her mother would no sooner have gotten the curtains at the windows of their new home when it was time to move on again. My grandmother loved having a home, fixing it up, keeping it clean and full of love. But with all the moving, she never complained. It wasn't her nature.

Eventually, they always would return to Eldon and no matter how far they went, the Burris family kept closely in touch. They were, and are, beyond blood, friends. They support each other - however they can - in times of
crisis, births, joys, and deaths.

Hard times had cut short my grandmother's formal schooling, but when her daughters and niece brought home their studies, she would sit with them at the dining room table and learn their lessons as well as they did. Their friends quickly became her friends too, but she rarely tried to live her daughters' lives - only share them. That sharing continued with her grandchildren.

We lived in New York when I was a child, thousands of miles from Missouri. But whenever we could - at Christmas, Easter or in the summer - we would pile into a car or get on a plane and travel to gather around that dining room table.

Nine years ago, when I turned 21, I was a student at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Turning 21 usually meant a time to party. But, instead, I got on a bus that day and came to Eldon to sit around the table again with my grandparents. It wasn't out of a sense of duty. It was because I couldn't think of any two people I'd rather spend that day with and being with them always gave me a feeling of continuity - of a rich and full past that went far beyond my own life. And my grandmother gave me something else too - an outlook on life, a strength and a goodness that I hoped I also could achieve.

She loved life deeply and quietly. She wasn't the flamboyant type. She loved to visit new places, go to plays and movies, hear about books and ideas. And she loved people. She was a judging woman - she knew what was right and disliked what was wrong. But she never passed judgment. And she gave love unconditionally.

Around that dining room table, when talk turned to individuals, as it almost always did and somebody not present was getting a lot of criticism, my grandmother would sit quietly listening and then softly say something good about that person.

Almost everyone who met her loved her. She was a good listener and her spunk and sense of humor - which she learned eventually to direct even at herself - warmed all those who knew her. Her faith in Christianity also strengthened her. She never saved it only for Sundays,
but tried daily to live a Christian life of giving, forgiving, and accepting whatever happened.

Her father used to tell her: "Keep your back straight and walk with pride." My grandmother lived that way. When her arthritis bent her back and later paralysis deprived her of walking, she still lived with that lesson in mind.

Oma Burris Weatherholt is not dead. She will continue to live eternally, but also through the people who knew her and through the family and friends who gathered around that dining room table over the years to share a cup of coffee.