Connie Christine Belcher

May 17, 2013

Connie Christine Belcher, 89, passed away Friday.

She was born in the house of her parents, George Lee Gilbreath and Myrtle Ann Collins Gilbreath, at Spruce Pine. The fourth of six children, she graduated from Phil Campbell High School in 1942 and then joined the US Navy, spending WWII as a WAVE. After being honorably discharged, she married Bernie Belcher in 1947.

She and her two children followed her Army husband to Japan, France and several bases in the USA before moving to Huntsville in 1959. After retiring, they traveled extensively in the western US, Mexico and Alaska before settling down to focus on their growing residential rental business.

Connie spent many years doing genealogical research on her various family branches.  She published five books, one is in the Library of Congress, on John Hampton of Lawrence County, “The Old Home Place,” a genealogy of the Collins, Hardy, Snead, and Hard families, plus the Genealogy of the Fields and Hardens of Jefferson County.

She published a mapped survey of the Friendship, Graham, Hodges and Mt. Olive Cemeteries of Jefferson, along with a separate book about the above cemeteries’ tombstone inscriptions, “Gone but Not Forgotten.”

Connie was an avid reader and quilter. All of her numerous extended family members have two or more quilts keeping them warm in the winter.

Survivors include sons, Jerome and wife, Nancy, and Steve and wife, Ellen, three grandchildren, two great-grandchildren (the apples of her eye, Gwynn and Luke); brother, Sheldon, of Tuscumbia; sister, Gereda of Washington D.C.; plus many nieces and nephews.

A graveside service will be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Mount Olive Cemetery.