Anna K Thurman

Anna K. (Ashley) Thurman

Anna was born on November 16, 1918 in Bisbee, Arizona. Her parents were from Kentucky, but had moved to Arizona because her father had a job working in a copper mine. The family returned to Kentucky in 1919.

In 1927, her father died in a Kentucky coal mining accident. Anna was eight years old. In 1930, after staying with relatives for almost four years, Anna and her three-year-old sister were placed in an orphanage. Anna was the primary caregiver of her baby sister.

Anna left the orphanage at the age of seventeen and moved to Detroit, Michigan to help her mother who was running a boarding house. She married in 1936 and subsequently had two daughters. In 1942, the family moved to Los Angeles, California finally settling in the San Fernando Valley. Anna began working for Sears Roebuck & Co. in 1947.

Her first marriage to Thomas L. Sutton ended in 1959 after a long separation. In 1965, she married Roy H. Thurman and moved to Simi Valley, California. After the passing of her second husband in 1979, she continued to maintain her home and work at Sears until her first retirement in 1987 at age sixty-nine. Her position at retirement was in the payroll division of the Accounts Payable Department. At age seventy she returned to Sears and worked for five more years, retiring for the second time in 1993 at age of seventy-five. Forty years at Sears!

In 2006, her daughter Ellyn moved to Simi Valley from Spokane, Washington to assist Anna, who was recovering from hip replacement surgery. With Ellyn’s assistance, Anna was able to remain in her own home until placement in Simi Valley Residential Care in February 2016 at age of ninety-seven and then Breen Residential Care in July 2016.

Anna was a kind and caring person. As her brother’s wife and later her brother became disabled from ill health, Anna was there to care for them by providing clean clothes and food items. Later, she became the primary caregiver of her second husband throughout his long illness.

Anna was always neat and clean, taking great pride in her personal appearance and in the appearance of her home. When her family was young, she demonstrated wonderful homemaking skills with sewing, crocheting and embroidery, but this declined with the need to work outside the home. In her free time, she enjoyed gardening, reading, attending movies and shopping. Anna was a very loving, caring and responsible mother, and she was extremely fond of her pets – dogs and cats alike.

Anna is survived by two daughters Ann Siebert (Robert) of Orange and Ellyn Sutton of Simi Valley.

Donations

Humane Society of Ventura County