Daughter and 5th of 8 children born to Seaborn Ivy and Dovie (Whitman) Denson in a rural area near Heflin, Alabama in Cleburne County. She was the only one of her full siblings to graduate from high school and attend college. Having a love for music, she learned how to sing Sacred Harp music (fa-sol-la), a style of singing (mostly religious in nature) that originated in early America (18th-19th centuries), taught to her by her grandfather, Seaborn McDaniel Denson (see Find A Grave memorial #27673269). She and her family moved to Winston County Alabama around 1920 or shortly thereafter, and lived on several locations there and also in Lawrenceburg Tennessee for a short period. After she graduated from Meek High School (Arley, Alahbama) in 1932 with honors, she obtained a scholarship to attend Florence State Teachers College (now University of Northwest Alabama) in Florence, Alabama to pursue her desire to become a teacher. She was forced to drop out in her 2nd year because she contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitarium in Ohio for treatment, near where her oldest sister (Gertrude) lived at the time. She ultimately recovered and worked in New Philadelphia Ohio as a nanny and around 1940 she moved back to her parent's home near Helicon AL to help take care of her ailing Mother. When WWII broke out, she and some of her friends and cousins moved to Dalton GA sometime in early 1942 to work at a factory that made tents for the U.S. soldiers. Not long after that (mid-1943), her oldest sister had life-threatening surgery, and she moved to Lima, Ohio to help take care of her until she was able to recover. She took a job at a local woolen mill to help with the living expenses. While in Lima, she received a letter from an Army soldier who found her name and address (from Dalton Georgia, before she moved to Lima; the letter had been forwarded to her new address in Lima) in a tent that he and several other soldiers opened up to use for their winter training in Camp McCoy Wisconsin. She and her coworkers had written their names and addresses in this tent to see if they could correspond with some soldiers who were in the Army. The name of the soldier who wrote to her was Gerhard Bjornstad. After corresponding through letters for a short period, he was able to obtain a 3-day pass and traveled by train to Lima OH in order to meet her. They hit it off instantly. He went back to Camp McCoy to complete his training and shortly afterword received orders to go overseas, to Northern Ireland for additional training in preparation for the Normandy D-Day invasion. He sent her a telegram with the news and asked if she would come to Camp McCoy and marry him. She responded back with a "yes" and traveled by train to Camp McCoy. However, when they applied for a marriage license, they learned that Wisconsin has a five-day waiting period and they did not have that much time before he was to depart to go overseas. They were advised that Minnesota had no waiting period so they traveled across the state line to Winona and were married at a Lutheran Church there on September 15, 1943. She returned to Lima and continued to work at the woolen mill until World War II ended. In 1946, after her husband came back to the US from the European Theater and was honorably discharged from the Army, they moved from Lima OH to Elkhart IN. There were two sons born to this union; David Morris Bjornstad (June 10, 1946) in Lima and William Brian Bjornstad (April 11, 1950) in South Bend Indiana. She is also survived by 4 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren. She was very religious and a born-again Christian (her Father was a Church of God preacher) and taught the adult Sunday School class of the churches that she attended. She was extremely knowledgeable of the Bible and did her best to live a Christian life, to be a living example to others. She loved flowers and had many flower beds with roses, peonies, iris, gladiolas, petunias, and flowering trees and bushes (snowball, pink dogwood, lilac) at her home in Elkhart IN. She also loved her entire family, to include all her siblings and their extended families, and cherished the memories of her visits with them every year as most of them still resided in Alabama. She and her husband put in a large garden every year at their Elkhart home and spent countless hours tending to it as well as canning and freezing the fruits and vegetables that were harvested, and always had plenty to give to others. She was also known within her church community, family, and the neighborhood for her excellent skills for baking pies and cobblers. They were the best ever. She made her pie crust from scratch. In 1988 she and Gerhard moved to Belleville, Illinois to be close to their son, William, whose wife, Angela, was soon to give birth to a daughter, their 1st granddaughter. In 1993 she collapsed teaching her adult Sunday School class at the Collinsville, Illinois Church of God and was taken to the hospital, where we soon learned that she had a large inoperable aneurysm on her aorta, located directly above her heart. After being released from the hospital, it was impossible for her to maintain their home due to her health issues and she and Gerhard, along with William and Angela and their two children, purchased a 5-bedroom home in Smithton, Illinois because their house and their son and his wife's house were each too small for six people to live comfortably. She gradually got weaker over the course of her final year and a few days before her death, she slipped into a coma and then died of heart failure early on Easter Sunday morning, April 3, 1994. If she had to choose a particular day to die, I feel confident it would have been Easter Sunday for what it represented in her Christian faith, a promise of the Resurrection. At her request, she was buried at the Nesmith Methodist Cemetery in Nesmith, Alabama, just a few miles from where she spent much of her childhood and early adolescent years, with her immediate family, aunts, uncles, and many, many cousins on her Father's side of her family. Gerhard died on September 6, 1988 and is also buried next to her at Nesmith Methodist Cemetery.