Six Saints from Allegany

Three days later on Friday, May 28, 1943, tragedy struck the Whitlock brothers, but not Clare. It was Ellen's husband Ray. At 2 AM., Ellen called her sister-in-law, Grace Whitlock, and told her that Ray had suddenly died of a heart attack. Clare's condition was so severe that the family never told him of Ray's passing. Clare died on July 7th in Saint Francis Hospital in Olean, New York.
In a span of two months, Ellen had lost her husband and brother-in-law. The sudden loss of a husband is usually devastating and no different for a Christian woman like Ellen. After all, she had already lost a child. Sabrina Beasley McDonald, in an article written after losing her young husband in an automobile accident, tells that her "soul bled profusely like a severed limb," and she "need a tourniquet to stop the bleeding." She found that "many wonderful books about grief, heaven, and peace, were helpful" but did not address the wound. To address the wound in her heart, she realized that she needed to go back to the Bible so that God could help her renew her mind.
Romans 12:2 Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Fast forward with me again to 1945. Ellen's oldest son, Paul, and his family, are now ready to return to Tanzania. After placing the two eldest boys in boarding school in Florida, Paul, Helen, and the three youngest boys boarded the China Clipper for Africa on January 7th.
At about 9:00 PM on January 8, 1945, while landing at Port of Spain, Trinidad, tragedy struck when the Clipper crashed into the water at an incorrect angle when flying too rapidly, apparently due to pilot error. All of the Whitlocks on board were killed.
Suddenly, Ellen Jane Linderman Whitlock, who lost one of her children at an early age (Dana), her husband, and her brother-in-law just two years before the crash, was faced with the loss of her oldest son, her daughter-in-law and three grandsons. Committal services for 13 of the crash victims (including the Whitlocks) were held at the Port of Spain Cemetery on January 11, 1945 by chaplains, with Pan American Airlines staff in attendance. As a boy of four and one half years of age, I did not understand the full implications of the crash. I do remember the sorrow in my mother's eyes. Because of the love of family and Christian missions, the death of Ellen's son Paul and most of his family, reverberated through the entire Five Mile Valley.
Ellen immediately turned to God and her other children for comfort and support and went to Chicago to live with Lenna, her oldest daughter, and was there to see Lenna graduate from Moody Bible Institute. Ellen and Lenna moved to Philadelphia, where Lenna became a teacher at the Northeast Christin Day School.
Ellen Jane Linderman Whitlock, a woman of strong faith, tested repeatedly in the face of tragedies, died in Philadelphia in 1962, and is buried back home in Allegany Cemetery, SectionS3, Plot 18, Grave 2. Her supportive daughter, Lenna, moved to Florida in retirement.
"If thou but suffer God to guide thee, And hope in Him through all thy ways, He'll give thee strength, what e'er betide thee, And bear thee thro' the evil days; Who trusts in God's unchanging love Builds on the rock that naught can move.