Ms. Julia Margaret Mathewson

Julia Margaret Mathewson passed away on August 23, 2015 at the age of 96 in Grants Pass, Oregon. A Memorial Mass will be conducted on Saturday, August 29 at 11:00 a.m. at St. Anne's Catholic Church and burial at 12:30 p.m. at Hawthorne Gardens, both in Grants Pass. Julia was born to Lydia (Czarnecki) and Walter Kovalcik on March 2, 1919 in Manistee, Michigan, one of 9 children (two died in infancy). She lost her mother at 12 years of age. When her father remarried and moved to a farm, she remained in Manistee as a companion to an elderly Civil War veteran's wife to attend high school. After graduating from Manistee High School in 1936, she followed her sisters to Chicago to find work and live with her aunt. In the later 1940's, she and some of her siblings came "out west" to California on Route 66, seeing their first mountains, cactus, and citrus trees, and visiting Hollywood. They initially lived in San Bernadino, but soon settled in Sacramento. She met William R. (Bill) Mathewson in Sacramento and they were married in Las Vegas in 1955. They settled in Gabbs, a small mining town in central Nevada near Bill's hometown of Fallon, and had one child, Suzanne. They lived in Yerington, Nevada before moving back to Sacramento in the mid-1960's. She and Bill later divorced, and Julia worked for the State of California Bureau of Automotive Repair before retiring at the age of 67. She moved to Grants Pass in 2005 to be near her daughter. Her former husband and her siblings, Celia "Lucille" (Edward) Seymour, Frank (Mary) Koval, Al (Bettie) Koval, Irene (Jack) Nolan, Bernadine Kovalcik, and Leonard (Kate - still living) Koval, died before her. She is survived by her daughter and son-in-law, Suzanne and Ken Myers of Grants Pass, and grandson, Callen Myers of Chico, California, in addition to 17 beloved nieces and nephews and their many descendants.