Sasnett, J. Randolph (Joseph Randolph), 1890-1978

J. Randolph Sasnett was born on June 30, 1890. In 1912, he married M. Leonora Harris. Between 1929 and 1939, Sasnett served as a Methodist minister at the University of Washington Seattle campus. Due to his enthusiasm for Alice Meynell’s poetry, Sasnett corresponded with Wilfrid Meynell for many years, and visited the Meynell family at their Greatham, Sussex estate in 1936. While in England, Sasnett also met with Lady Marie Dickens, the wife of the late Sir Henry Dickens (1849-1933), son of novelist Charles Dickens. Sasnett was a Dickens enthusiast and writer who hoped to write a series of articles on Dickens’s role in the marriage of Alice Meynell’s parents, T.J. Thompson and Christiana Weller. Sasnett was the author of a book entitled Living Memorials: Principles and Plans for Church Memorials (1949).

On July 4 1939, Sasnett, his wife, and their three daughters were en route to Mount Pleasant, Iowa, where the family was moving, when their car turned over, killing Leonora Sasnett. Sasnett remarried in 1943, to Martena Tenny. Sasnett died on May 11, 1978 in Santa Barbara, California.