The first photo shows Elizabeth Crump Enders wearing her American Red Cross uniform in 1919, just weeks after she married Gordon Bandy Enders. Gordon was a bomber pilot in WWI and they met after his plane crashed. He was taken for dead, but recovered. They fell in love and were married in La Rochelle, France, on April 22, 1919. You'll see she is wearing an armband which is in memory of her brother, Lt. Samuel Crump, who had been killed in battle defending the Hindenberg Line in France on September 29, 1918, just seven months before this picture was taken. The pin on her hat was not part of her Red Cross uniform, it is likely Gordon's WWI pin which she added to her hat. This photo had been sent home to my grandmother, Julia Elder Crump Darling. The three stripes on Elizabeth's sleeve show she had served for 18 months. She was in the Home Communications Department with the Red Cross, tasked with writing letters home to families of soldiers, letting them know that their son had been injured or killed. She was a very compassionate person.

The next 16 years of Gordon and Elizabeth's lives were spent in China. After coming back to the States in the 1930's, Elizabeth developed a national reputation as a lecturer on Chinese and Japanese customs, sometimes using puppets to illustrate the Asian costumes worn in various ceremonies. She traveled to ten states giving her lectures.
The second photo shows her on the cover of her professional resume.

Elizabeth wrote two books; Swinging Lanterns, published in 1923, and Temple Bells and Silver Sails, published in 1925, both travelogues of her extensive travels to places few westerners had ever visited in inland China. Both of these books were widely read in the USA by individuals and book clubs and reviewed in newspapers nationally.

Elizabeth died in Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, which was her husband's last post in the Army. Gordon and Elizabeth never had any children. Gordon had served in France as a bomber pilot, taught the Chinese how to fly, served as a cabinet officer to the Panchen Lama of Tibet, was a professor at Purdue University, was the first military attache to Afghanistan and earned the Legion of Merit for his work with the Republic of Korea during the Korean War, ending his career in the G-2 sector. After his fascinating and international life in the military, Gordon retired as Colonel on April 30, 1961, less than three months after Elizabeth died. She was cremated and he took the urn with him that year when he moved to New Mexico to live in Albuquerque where they had planned to retire because the Sandia Mountains reminded him of India where Gordon had grown up with his missionary parents. On June 27, 1962 he married Liz Schwalbe Garrahan and they lived out their lives in New Mexico. Gordon died on September 2, 1978 of heart failure.

The urn with Elizabeth's ashes in it stayed with his second wife and when she died on June 13, 1987, the urn was inherited by her daughter. I discovered that my great aunt's urn was there after doing extensive genealogy research, eventually looking for Gordon's second wife's descendants. It was quite a surprise finding Gordon's second wife's grandson living 30 miles from me in Austin, Texas!

The burial of Elizabeth's urn was on Friday, June 30th, 2017, at 2:15. My husband, Joe, and I traveled from Austin, Texas, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to bury my great aunt whom I had never met but had developed a strong bond with her and her husband from my years of research about their lives and my quest to find out where she had died and was buried. This date was chosen because it tied three generations of our family together: her parents had been married on June 30th, 1868, in Stamford, Connecticut; her sister, Helen Crump, had been born on June 30th, 1886 in Montclair, New Jersey, and I was born on June 30th, 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio. Later I learned that Trudy Enders Huntington, the daughter of Gordon's brother, Bob Enders, had been married on June 30th also.

Gordon and Elizabeth had always wanted to be buried together, but he had to die first so he could be buried in the Santa Fe National Cemetery, a national cemetery for veterans. Gordon's second wife was buried with her first husband and the father of their children, Charles Justus Garrahan, at the Arlington Cemetery in Drexel, Pennsylvania, leaving room for Elizabeth to be buried with Gordon, her husband of 42 years, 56 years after her death. May they rest in peace.

Patty Darling Hoenigman
Austin, Texas
July 6, 2017

She was one of 15 children. The siblings whose burial places are not known are:

George Elder Crump ...who was the first born
b. March 17, 1870 in Brooklyn, NY
d. July 30, 1955 in West Haven, CT

And

Helen Crump (Loughran) Parsons
b. June 30, 1886 in Montclair, NJ
d. March 27, 1966 in Madison, NJ