Jeanette S. Westhoff

Visitation for Jeanette S. Westhoff, 51, of Palatine, will be from 3:00p.m. to 8:00p.m. Monday, March 18, 2019, at the Ahlgrim Family Funeral Home, 201 N. Northwest Highway, Palatine. Funeral Services will take place 10:00a.m. Tuesday, March 19, 2019, also at the funeral home. Burial will follow at Windridge Cemetery in Cary.

Jeanette was born October 13, 1967, in Chicago to Bernard and Jacqueline Spillman. She passed away peacefully at her home on March 14, 2019.

Jeanette grew up on Chicago’s South Side, a point of pride for her. She often spoke of her happy childhood in her home near 95th and Michigan. Jeanette was baptized and confirmed at St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church in Chicago. She also attended school there. She went to Whitney Young High School and graduated from Roosevelt University, followed by graduate work at DePaul University. For the past 17 years, Jeanette worked as an administrative assistant at John E. Reid & Associates in Chicago.

On September 9, 2000, she married the love of her life, Jeffrey Westhoff. Marriage brought her from Chicago to Palatine, where she quickly became a keen patron of the Palatine Public Library.

Reading was Jeanette’s passion. She loved to talk about books with everyone she met and would invariably give them reading recommendations. She had been a volunteer with Reading for the Blind and also worked with Asian students in an English as a Second Language program.

Jeanette also loved history and travel. She visited Japan and Hong Kong as a teenager. She would speak fondly of a trip she took to Oxford University in 1994 to participate in a two-week seminar on the Arthurian legend. Her last big excursion was a cruise along the Danube River with her family. One of the stops on that cruise was Regensburg, Germany, where her late father was stationed in the Army during the 1950s.

Jeanette will be remembered for her enthusiasm, her curiosity, her kindness and her love. Besides her husband, she is survived by her mother, of Palos Heights; a sister, Maurine (Brian) Dennis of Leesburg, Virginia; her mother-in-law, Peggy (the late Thomas) Westhoff of Erie, Pennsylvania; three sisters-in-law, Ellen (Curt) Murphey of Fairview, Pennsylvania, Amy (Eric) Sokol of Lower Burrell, Pennsylvania, and Katy (Glen) Sementelli of Houston, Texas; as well as many beloved aunts and uncles, cousins, and nieces and nephews.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to the American Cancer Society, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society or Reading Is Fundamental.