November 17, 1941 –  February 1, 2011  WHITESBORO- Funeral Services for Eugene Homer Casad, 69, will be held 2:00 P.M. on Sunday, February 6, 2011 at Meador Funeral Home Chapel in Whitesboro with Bro. Jim Cragg officiating. Interment will follow at Oakwood Cemetery in Whitesboro. A visitation will be from 6 p.m. until 7p.m. Saturday, February 5, 2011 at the funeral home. Eugene Homer Casad was born in Escondido, California on November 17, 1941, and passed from this life at Texas Health Presbyterian WNJ Hospital in Sherman, on February 1, 2011, having struggled with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia for many years. Gene earned his PhD in linguistics from the University of California at San Diego in 1981. He spent his adult life analyzing and describing a minority language spoken by Cora people in western Mexico. He wrote and edited numerous books and articles on the Cora language and aspects of Cognitive Linguistic theory. His works have been published in several countries. With the help of native speakers of Cora, he translated the New Testament into two variants of the Cora language. He taught Cora speakers how to read and write their native tongue and has gathered a large amount of data to be made into a dictionary of the language. He also gathered folklore data, putting into writing the oral literature of the people. He traveled to many countries, giving lectures, teaching classes, and leading workshops. He was a member of Wycliffe Bible Translators, and SIL, a faith-based linguistic organization. The last few years of his life he lived in Whitesboro.
He is survived by his wife, Betty Casad of Whitesboro, a son, Rolf Casad of Conway, Arkansas, a daughter, Sandra Joy Casad-Villalba, nine grandchildren; two sisters, MaryAnn Campos of Raliegh, North Carolina and Martha Barker of Salem, Oregon; and a brother, Lee Casad of Escondido, California.