February 1, 1938 – March 20, 2025
VISITATION
Thursday, April 10, 2025
5:00 – 7:00 P.M.
Martin-Mattice Funeral Home
Emmetsburg, Iowa
GRAVESIDE SERVICE
Friday, April 11, 2025
10:30 A.M.
Powhatan Cemetery
Plover, Iowa
INTERMENT
Friday, April 11, 2025
Powhatan Cemetery
Plover, Iowa
We have established a memorial fund at Westminster Presbyterian Church to be used to renovate the landscaping at the church. We will particularly concentrate the landscape renovation on the courtyard at the front of the church where the bell tower is adjacent to Park Ave. If sending a check to the church, include Jenese’s memorial landscaping fund in the memo section.
We also encourage anyone who would rather send flowers for the service to consider flowering plants such as azaleas that can be installed in the garden as part of the renovations. The church is in USDA plant hardiness Zone 9a (20°F-25°F), though recent winters have been more like 8b (15 °F-20°F), as a guide to plants that might work.
When the original church building burnt in 1980, one of the few things that survived was the church bell. When the new church building was designed and built, a new bell tower was not included due to the structural requirements and cost. Jenese, Sue Jernigan and other church members raised funds for a small separate structure to be built to display the bell and make it usable. It was long in being fulfilled but the bell structure was completed last year in the courtyard area at the front of the church. This was very important to Jenese. Over the years, this area at the front of the church that forms an open courtyard adjacent to Park Avenue has lost a huge tree and its landscaping has died or deteriorated. Making this publicly viewed area a beautiful, welcoming asset to the church and community will be a wonderful tribute to Jenese Truelsen.
Jenese Catherine Miller Truelsen was born at her family’s home in Rodman, Iowa on February 1st, 1938, as the fifth of eight children; she entered her eternal rest in Christ on March 20th, 2025 following a catastrophic hemorrhagic stroke on March 18th. Jenese was a resident of Milton, Florida since 1968. In her 87 years, Jenese lived a life rich in teaching, service, travel, creativity, and family.
As a child, Jenese enjoyed being outside on the farm her family sharecropped in Iowa, and she dreamed of teaching and traveling to see exotic places. She accepted Christ as her Savior at a young age, and she enjoyed singing in her church and school choirs; her musical interests
included playing the saxophone and the piano. During high school, Jenese met her future husband, Marlan Truelsen. According to a favorite family story, Marlan saw Jenese at the roller rink and told his buddies, “I’m going to marry that girl.” Which he did, of course, several years later. In the meantime, Marlan began his career in the US Navy as an aviation electrician on aircraft carriers, and Jenese graduated from Rodman High (1955) and went on to achieve her dream of teaching.
In 1957, Jenese graduated with her teaching certification from Iowa State Teachers College and began teaching elementary school in Jamaica, Iowa. After her wedding to Marlan in 1958, the couple drove cross-country from Iowa to California for their honeymoon, before flying to their first duty station together on Midway Island. Jenese loved the snow-white sand beaches and watching the gooney birds (albatross) make their ungainly take-offs and landings. By the time the couple left Midway Island, they had two baby girls: Jenet and Melinda. At their next duty
station in Meridian, Mississippi, the family welcomed Cindy, another daughter. With the addition of a stray dog they named Suzy, their family was complete.
Jenese resumed classroom teaching and became Jenet’s 1st grade teacher when Marlan was posted to White House, Florida, near Jacksonville. Jenet called her “Mrs. Truelsen” like all the other students, and her classmates never realized the connection! Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was the family’s last duty station before Jenese and Marlan purchased a home on five acres in Milton, Florida in January 1968 because Marlan had promised the girls a horse. They created a mini-farm, planting a big garden and raising pigs, calves, chickens and a variety of other fowl. Dusty, the horse, and Tippy, the stray collie-mix puppy, were very popular with the girls. Marlan alternated between duty stations in Milton and Pensacola, with the occasional assignment to an aircraft carrier, so they never moved again.
Jenese continued in her love of learning and teaching as she earned both a Bachelor of Arts (1971) and a Master’s degree (1978) from UWF in Elementary Education. She taught classes for 27 years at W.H. Rhodes Elementary (formerly Oakhurst) before her retirement in 1998. As a teacher, Jenese’s biggest passion was ensuring her students learned to be readers, but her passion did not end with the students in her classroom. Jenese frequently combined her love of travel, teaching, and learning about other cultures, through her involvement in the Florida Reading Association and the International Reading Association. She attended conferences and served through programs in China, the Ukraine, India, and Papua New Guinea. Jenese was also chosen to travel to China with the organization “People to People” and to India with the
Wycliffe Association.
Jenese and Marlan provided their three girls with a wide variety of travel experiences, but their grandparents’ farm in Iowa was always their favorite. After the girls graduated and left home, Marlan and Jenese continued to travel recreationally by car, RV, train, plane, and cruise ship.
They visited all fifty United States of America, as well as traveling internationally, visiting a total of seven continents and more than seventy islands. Their travels stretched from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America. In many of the places Jenese traveled, she also served others. She worked to clean and restore a Ukrainian church that was being returned to the people for worship after the fall of the Soviet bloc. In several destinations, she worked with people learning to speak and read English. Jenese would travel whenever she could and was happy to help
others who did not want to travel alone or could not travel on their own. She rewarded her grandchildren’s graduations from high school or college by taking them on trips. Although she kept saying she was done traveling, Jenese made trips to Iceland and Hawaii in the past year.
When she was not busy exploring the world, Jenese used her passion for literacy to serve her community in Milton, Florida. In 1998, Jenese helped to found and fund the “Books for Babies” program, which ensured that all newborns at Santa Rosa Medical Center received books and
helpful information for parents on reading aloud and preparing their children for kindergarten. Jenese also developed a program that she presented at the Mississippi State Reading Conference in 1982 that used food packaging to teach reading and math skills; this program was later adapted by the Mississippi Department of Education to teach these skills to American immigrants. With great joy, Jenese worked to support fellow women in education as a charter member of the Delta Chi chapter of Alpha Delta Kappa and served two terms as the chapter’s president.
Jenese also served her church community as an active member of Westminster Presbyterian Church; she sang in the choir, taught Bible school and Sunday school, and served as president of Women in the Church up until her death. She was particularly passionate about supporting
missions and missionaries, organizing conferences to bring missionaries to the church and sending packages and encouraging letters to those in missions overseas.
Jenese always kept her hands busy. In recent years, many strangers, hospitality workers, nursing homes, teachers, missionaries, and family members received tiny, beautiful, colorful boxes folded from calendar pages. These boxes were often filled with candy, Bible verses, and
cross-shaped bookmarks that she crafted from plastic mesh and thin ribbon. Her embroidery and crochet grace many hand towels, pillows, and quilts that she created as gifts. Her daughters fondly remember the coordinating Easter outfits she sewed for them each year as children,
noting that she often used the same fabric in different styles for each girl so that her outfit would be unique. Jenese’s more recent projects included making quilts for all her great-grandchildren!
Jenese is survived by many loving family members, including her three daughters and their spouses: Jenet (Joe) Hattaway of Pace, Florida; Melinda Truelsen (fiancé David Brown) of Siler City, North Carolina, and Cindy Hood of Fernandina Beach, Florida; her five grandchildren and their spouses: David (Peanut) Hattaway, Laura (Trevor Thomas) Hattaway, Timothy (Erin) Smirniotis, Patricia (Stanley) Jackson, and Dustin (Jessica) Hood; her great-grandchildren Carter and Paislee Smirniotis; Andrew, Michael, and Rachel Hattaway; Patrick and Stanley Carl Jackson; and Caleb Thomas; her sisters Anna Belle Hinz, Bonnie (Al) Riggert, Ruth Miller, and Mary Petersen; sisters-in-law Marlene (Robert) Joens and Linda Miller; and brother-in-law Lonnie Laws.
Jenese was preceded in death by her husband of 61 years, Marlan Kenneth Truelsen; her parents E. Dale and Helen Miller; her three brothers, Lloyd, John, and James Miller; her in-laws, Kenneth and Lena Truelsen; three sisters-in-law, Carol Miller, Lavonne Miller, and Harriette Laws; and two sons-in-law, Jim Smirniotis and Mark Hood.
Arrangements by Martin-Mattice Funeral Home
martinmatticefuneralhome.com