Bette Jane Sondgeroth

Austin - Elizabeth Jane Wagner Sondgeroth passed away on Tuesday, March 12, 2024. Known as Bette by everyone throughout her life, she was born on July 19, 1924 to George Raymond Wagner and Anna Marie Ulrich on a dairy and potato farm outside Arnott, Wisconsin. After her father died in a tragic farm accident, she and her mother moved to LaSalle, Illinois, where her mother's brother and two sisters lived. Bette graduated from LaSalle-Peru High School in 1942. After graduation she worked as an ATT operator. She was married to James Emmett Sondgeroth on January 17, 1947. She moved to Mendota, Illinois, with her husband to raise a family and was a loving mother to her four children. Because of her husband's health problems, the family moved south to Dallas, Texas in 1965. While in Dallas, she worked as a successful furniture saleswoman in a major department store retiring in 1986 to travel the USA with her husband. After her husband's death in 1994, she traveled the world with widowed friends. She loved gardening and worked as a volunteer at the Dallas Arboretum, and she was an avid bird watcher wherever she lived. She moved to Sun City in Georgetown, Texas, in 2006 to be closer to three of her children who lived in and around Austin, Texas. In 2014 she moved with one of her children to the Hill Country about 25 miles west of Austin. In recent years, she lived in the memory unit of an assisted living facility, The Watermark at Southpark Meadows, in Austin where she passed away.

She was preceded in death by her father, mother, brothers Harlyn and Donald Wagner, her sister Doris Wagner May, and her husband of 47 years. She is survived by her four children: 1-James Sondgeroth, his wife Amelia Canales and their two children, daughter Erica and son Francisco, his wife Jordan Autry and their sons Joseph, Jacob, and Dane; 2- Daniel Sondgeroth and his wife Mary Shaw; 3- Nancy Sullivan, her husband Alan and her children George Jeffery Hebel and Katy Hebel; 4- Thomas Sondgeroth and his wife Jill Tow and their son Kosmo.