By Paige Norman
Karen Snepp’s family hails from Indiana, where Karen spent her early childhood years before moving to Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Following her college years at Purdue and Northwestern, she started her career in marketing research with the Carnation company in Los Angeles, California.
After her brother, Dave, settled in Washington state to work for Boeing, she visited several times and fell in love with the nature and beauty, moving here in 1999; making her home on Education Hill.
Her brother’s death in 1988 changed the course of the family’s life as Karen turned to The Compassionate Friends, a group dedicated to providing “comfort, hope and support to every family experiencing the death of a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, or a grandchild.” Her association with The Compassionate Friends progressed from member board member, before taking a board position at the TCF Foundation. She remains as a Trustee on the Foundation to this date.
Deciding she wanted to spend quality time with her parents, Karl M. and Suzanne “Sue” (Lowe) Snepp, she retired early to travel extensively with them before their deaths. During their last years together, she worked with them to sort through the family’s historical collections including photos, documents, and other artifacts; her aim now is finding homes for the family collection and distributing grants from her parents’ estates. Continuing to ensure her family’s history has a home, she remains in contact with many historical and genealogical societies, especially in the Indiana area. Some of the collections she has donated can be found at Indiana Memory.
She has volunteered in the past at Redmond Historical Society, working with Collections Committee members Libbi Wright and Halee Turner, Collections Manager Jlean McDonald, and Administration Manager Laura Lee Bennett.
Awarded her Lifetime Membership certificate in March, 2022, she notes she joined as a Lifetime Member because “she has always loved history and is very pleased with the Redmond Historical Society and its way of telling local history stories.”
Redmond Historical Society is pleased to have Karen Snepp as a Lifetime Member; we celebrate her dedication to keeping history alive.
