Lillian Bucknam went home to be with the Lord Jan. 16, 2005. She was 103.  She was a resident of Whidbey Island Manor and for the past 11 years she lived in Oak Harbor, having previously been a long-time resident of Laconia, N.H.

She was born Lillian Estella Saunders Sept. 18, 1901, in Laconia, N.H., and graduated as the Salutatorian of the Laconia High School Class of 1919. She attended Plymouth Teachers College and taught in the Four Corners single-room schoolhouse in Belmont for two years. She moved to Manchester in the early 1920s and worked for C. A. Hoitt Furniture Company while she attended evening classes at Bryant & Stratton Business College. She then accepted a position as bookkeeper at the Mack Motor Truck Company in Manchester in 1927, where she met her future husband, Gene Bucknam, and worked there until 1936. She and Gene were married in 1935 and had a son, Ron, in 1937. After moving to the Boston area for five years, she and her family moved to Concord, N.H., where she resumed work as a bookkeeper for the state of New Hampshire Department of Education in 1948. She retired from that position in 1973.

She then worked for the New Hampshire Arthritis Foundation for five years.  After the death of her husband in 1980 she moved to Laconia, where she was a volunteer at the Lakes Region General Hospital for more than 10 years and received the hospital’s Volunteer of the Year Award for 1985.  She was a member of the New Hampshire State Employees Association, Laconia Woman’s Club, AARP and the Friendship Club.  She came to Oak Harbor in 1994 and attended Family Bible Church.

She is survived by her son and daughter-in-law on Whidbey Island, as well as three grandchildren and five great grandchildren living on Whidbey Island, in Whitefish Bay, Wis., and in Nelson, New Zealand.  A memorial service will be held at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 27, at Family Bible Church, 2760 N. Heller Road, Oak Harbor.