Memorial services are pending for Jeanne Louise Struve Chandler, 82, who lived in the Visalia area for half a century. She died peacefully surrounded by her four children on Jan. 14, after suffering a stroke.
She was a sixth-generation Californian and a descendant of Don Manuel Boronda, a member of the 1769-1770 expeditions that founded Spanish California. He and his family were early settlers of Monterey County, living on a land grant in the Carmel Valley.
She also was a descendant of Hans C. Struve, one of five Danish brothers who settled in the Pajaro Valley during the 1850s.
She was born and raised in Watsonville, where she attended Moreland Notre Dame Academy and graduated from Watsonville High School in 1940. Her parents were Elmer H. Struve and Mary Constance Harney.
In 1944 she graduated from Stanford University. Following graduation she worked for the U.S. Army at Tourney General Hospital in Palm Springs. She married Captain Wilber F. "Bill" Chandler, of Exeter, in San Diego on March 12, 1946 when he mustered out of the Marine Air Corps. They settled on a ranch near Exeter and moved to Visalia in 1954. He passed away in 1984.
During the final decades of her life, her love of travel took her on many cruises and tours ranging from Alaska to Africa. She loved to escape the sizzling San Joaquin Valley summers at her rustic mountain cabin in Silver City, a small resort community now surrounded by Sequoia National Park. For five decades, she treasured moments spent there with her family, especially her grandchildren, Daniel and Benjamin Sauv
