Rosella Louise Kerr

The county clerk wrote in his record book: One day in August 1930, Mr. Arthur Lorenson walked into the office and told him that his wife Mrs. Ella Cederberg Lorenson had given birth to a live baby girl on July 29, 1930, at home on their farm in Laing Township. Rawlins County, Kansas, and that they had named her Rosella Louise Lorenson. She was their ninth child, and like all her older siblings and the younger one to come 8 years later, had been born at home.

Rosella died May 9, 2025, at her home in Ontario, California. She died of old age as her physical condition deteriorated too much over time.

She was preceded in death by her husband Ellsworth Kerr, her parents, and all her older siblings, and a few nephews and nieces and in-laws.

She is survived by her children, Elizabeth, Andrew, and David, her daughter-in-law Betsy, and her grandchildren, Nicholas, Eli, and Abby Jee, her younger sister Marilyn Schell, and many nieces and nephews and their children and grandchildren, and some cousins too.

The Lorenson family lived in Kansas until 1942, until her father sold the farm and moved with all the family members living at home, to Niles, California, to join the sons working in the Bay Area.

Rosella attended grades 1-8 at a one-room schoolhouse in Kansas and went to high school in Niles, California. She worked while she was in high school in a malt shop and in an office. After she graduated, she got a full-time job as a bookkeeper.

One Sunday morning, a handsome young man sat next to her in church and complimented her on her big white hat; that was Ellsworth. They dated and then in October 1949, they got married.

They lived in Newark, California, until 1957. Then, they moved to Ontario, California, when Ellsworth changed jobs. They lived in town until they bought a piece of property with a wonderful view of the local mountains above an orange grove. Rosella designed the house they had built there and watched over the construction crew to make sure they did things the way she had planned. The family moved in just before Christmas that year - the morning of THE day she was giving a Christmas dinner for the couples' group at their church. In 1965, they moved to Hemet due to another job change. But then in 1968, they moved back into the house they had built in Ontario and started their own business. She was the office manager/bookkeeper and he was the microbiologist/salesman.

All the while, she was active in wife-mother things: making all the clothes for her and her daughter and shirts for the males, canning fruits and vegetables, making bread, giving special themed birthday parties for her children, building shelving units and chests of drawers, serving as a room mother in her children's classes at Central School in Ontario, putting in a cement patio behind the house, building a block wall around the back of the patio to keep the mud out when it rained, and always visiting family whenever possible.

They finally closed the business in 1988 when Ellsworth became ill with progressive supranuclear palsy and could no longer work. Rosella took care of him at home - - - doing all the physical caretaking and taking him out to dinner, to the theater, and to visit friends and relatives whose homes were wheelchair-accessible.. She also hosted family members, inviting them to come visit and stay at the house for a while. She and her siblings had "sibling reunions" at her house that lasted at least a week and they included Ellsworth in the visiting. She continued to provide all his care until he died in 1995.

After that, she remained active at her church and with her family ...at home in Ontario and also travelling to visit those who lived elsewhere until 2019. Those sibling reunions continued until 2017. They had several in Ontario and then more in the Bay Area, in Kansas and in lowa. The reunions only came to an end when all the siblings began to age and were no longer able to travel. Even Rosella had to stop travelling around as the wear-and-tear of having physically taken care of Ellsworth during the 10+-years-long illness began to affect her body and she had to do less and less. Eventually, she also became physically disabled and Elizabeth and David became her caregivers. By the beginning of April 2025, her physical condition had deteriorated so much that she entered hospice. She was suffering great pain and God mercifully took her home on May 9, 2025. So, now she is no longer suffering but rejoicing.