Maud Casad was born on October 11, 1866 in Kansas City, Kansas, the third child of Thomas Casad and Sarah Wakefield Van Winkle. In 1874 the Casad family settled in the Mesilla Valley. Maud Casad married William Nicholas Mandell on February 26, 1890. They had seven children, six of which survived to adulthood: Bertha, Jessie, Lucile, Humboldt, John (died in infancy), Darwin and William. In 1903 Maud separated from William due to his alcoholism, raising her children by herself in Mesilla. After her children had grown she followed them to Canutillo, Texas, where she lived for the rest of her life. She became a Spiritualist and promoted hypnotism as a way to cure alcoholism and drug addiction through the Eliminators of Evil, a movement she founded and carried out by herself. She frequently wrote letters of advice to state and federal officials, and even ran for the U.S. House of Representatives as an independent candidate in 1922. She remained close to her family and was greatly admired by her children and grandchildren throughout her life. She died in 1961. Humboldt Casad Mandell, the oldest son of William and Maud Mandell, was born in Mesilla, New Mexico on June 16, 1897 and married Mary Evangeline Smith in 1930. Eva, as she was often called, was born in Henrietta, Texas on July 25, 1897. She grew up in Cloudcroft, New Mexico and moved to El Paso in 1917. She taught school before her marriage, and later on was involved in many service organizations such as the Girl Scouts and the El Paso High School PTA (of which she served as president). They grew a variety of crops on their farm near El Paso and eventually owned more than a thousand acres of farmland. Humboldt Mandell died on February 28, 1975 and Eva Mandell died on August 14, 1992. Humboldt C. Mandell, Jr. was born to Humboldt and Eva Mandell on March 17, 1934 in El Paso, Texas. A pilot from a young age, he received a BS in Aeronautical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, an MSE from Southern Methodist University, and a PhD from the University of Colorado in 1983. In 1962, after a brief service in the Air Force, he began working for NASA, where he helped develop the Space Shuttle program. Officially retired in 2003, he continues to work with aeronautical students and is a Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin Center for Space Research. Madeline Anne Mandell, the second child of Humboldt and Eva Mandell, was born in El Paso on October 20, 1935. She attended Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso), where she majored in English. During her college years she worked at a Girl Scout camp near Denver, Colorado and continued working for the Girl Scouts after graduation. With the encouragement of her employers she received a Masters degree from the University Of Denver Graduate School Of Social Work in 1964. Later she managed Girl Scout troops in disadvantaged neighborhoods of the San Francisco area for two years, and her experiences there turned her towards the management of child care as her career path. In 1971 she was hired as the head of the Dallas Day Nursery Association, which was later re-named the Childcare Group. She led the organization for 29 years, working to expand and improve the availability and quality of child care in Texas. In 1982 she was honored with the Women Helping Women award by the Womens Center of Dallas and that same year she received the Dallas/Fort Worths Working Woman of Achievement award from Working Woman magazine. Under her direction, the group has been noted for developing the method known as Relationship-Centered Child Care. Madeline Mandell has been an active philanthropist, helping to found and support organizations such as the Dallas Womens Foundation and the Dallas Classical Guitar Society. She currently lives near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
From the description of Casad-Mandell family papers 1850-2002 (New Mexico State University). WorldCat record id: 713695915
