Merriel Curtis Coon, formerly of Taylor Ridge, died February 17, 2024 in Towson, Maryland. She was born May 22, 1929 in Rock Island to Roy R. and Florence Wilson Curtis. She was the fourth generation of the Curtis family to live on the family farm in Bowling Township, where, as a child, she attended a one-room country school a mile away. She graduated from Reynolds Community High School and the State University of Iowa. She and Charles C. Coon, a fellow student at the university, were married in Reynolds on June 11, 1950. They lived in several states before returning to Illinois in 1979 when they lived in a farmhouse near Taylor Ridge, until moving to Mesa, Arizona in 2001. In 2007 she moved to Towson, Maryland. She received a Master's Degree from the University of Maryland in 1968, and taught speech therapy in elementary schools in Maryland, and later in Sherrard, Illinois. She was interested in genealogy, and after retirement, she researched early Rock Island County history and burial grounds of early settlers; wrote a book about the Dunlap Cemetery; and also wrote much about those buried in the Hazlitt, Sortore, Chapel Grove and Grace Church cemeteries. When she lived in Arizona, she was a founding member of the Apache Trail chapter of the Daughters of the Revolution. She was also a former member of the Colonial Dames. She retained her membership in the Reynolds Methodist Church until her death, where she was baptized and married. Surviving are: her children, Linda S. Coon (Caren Zielke) of Union Pier, MI; Curtis C. Coon (Kimberly) of Marco Island, FL, and Kristin J. Yates (Charles) of Hartford, CT; four grandchildren; five great-grandchildren, and a brother, Robert W. Curtis, of Reynolds. She was preceded in death by her husband, Charles "Chuck" Coon in 2002, and by a son, George Robert, in 1977.

Services will be held at 11 a.m. on Saturday, February 24 at Reynolds United Methodist Church, with burial at in the Reynolds Cemetery at Reynolds, Illinois. Wheelan-Pressly Funeral Home and Crematory, Reynolds is assisting the family.