Jennie Julian

Jennie Ellison Dickinson Julian was born March 24, 1913, in Glasgow, Barren County, Kentucky, and died May 1, 2012, in Franklin County, Kentucky. Jennie was the daughter of Ada Gee and Alexander Dickinson of Glasgow. 

Jennie was a child during World War I, and she remembered when the soldiers came home from the war and marched in a parade on the square in Glasgow. 

In the early 1920s, Jennie remembered seeing her mother get to vote for the first time. Jennie subsequently knew that voting was a hard-won right, and she never missed a chance to vote at her local polling place in Bridgeport. 

Jennie loved school, and when she graduated from Glasgow High School in 1930, she went to college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. After one year at the university, Jennie came back to Glasgow to help her family make it through the Great Depression. 

Jennie trained as a legal secretary and worked first for her cousin Brents Dickinson, and then for the federal government at the Barren County Relief Office. 

In 1936, Jennie moved to Frankfort and worked as a secretary for the Department of Revenue and the Court of Appeals. 

In 1941, Jennie met and married Alec Julian, moved to his farm in Franklin County, and lived there the rest of her life. 

Jennie was a strong and faithful member of the Church of the Ascension, Episcopal, in Frankfort, and she did varied church work, including teaching Sunday School for 25 years, serving on the Vestry at Ascension, cooking homemade food for countless church dinners, serving on the Executive Council of the Episcopal Diocese of Lexington, and attending layperson training schools at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. 

Jennie was a strong believer in formal education, and in 1964 she went back to college at the University of Kentucky. She majored in English and received her B.A. degree in 1971, at which time she was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa scholastic fraternity. 

Because Jennie had lived through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the New Deal and the Great Society, she was also a strong believer in liberal and progressive concepts that the government exists to help the citizens, and that the citizens have an obligation to help their community. 

Because of these beliefs, Jennie volunteered to work with several community boards, including the Frankfort/Franklin County Planning and Zoning Commission, the Board of the Paul Sawyier Public Library, the Frankfort Great Books Foundation group, and the Board of Directors of the King’s Daughters’ Hospital. 

Jennie was also a staunch conservationist, and for the last three decades of her life she worked wholeheartedly with her family and friends to save her farm and to encourage other people to save their land. 

Jennie is survived by her daughter, Jane Julian, of Frankfort; her son, Bill Julian and daughter-in-law Sydna Julian,; her grandson, Sean Julian, his wife Karen Quillen and their children; and her granddaughter, Lori Jazaeri, her husband, Amir Jazaeri, and their children, all of Charlottesville, Virginia. 

Jennie was preceded in death by her husband, Charles Alexander Julian, and her brother, Jack Thomas Dickinson. 

Visitation will be at Rogers Funeral Home, 507 West Second Street, Frankfort, Kentucky, on Thursday, May 3, from 4-8 p.m. Interment will be in the Frankfort Cemetery, 215 East Main Street, Frankfort, Kentucky, on Friday, May 4, at 11 a.m. 

The family wishes that expressions of sympathy be sent to Hospice of the Bluegrass, 663 Teton Trail, Frankfort, KY 40601; the Church of the Ascension, 311 Washington Street, Frankfort, Kentucky 40601; Planned Parenthood of Kentucky, 1025 South Second Street, Louisville, KY 40203, or to the charity of choice.