GUILDERLAND — Kathryn Jean Zelezniak, known to friends and family as “Jean,” was a woman with “a beautiful smile,” said her husband, Michael Zelezniak. It was her smile that first drew him to her and that sustained him over 59 years of marriage.

“She was very kind and loving,” he said.

Mrs. Zelezniak “passed away peacefully with her family by her side” on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2016, her family wrote in a tribute. She was 78.

She was born on Jan. 14, 1938 in Delhi, the daughter of Kenneth and Doris Abbott. She was raised in New Salem, and graduated from Voorheesville’s high school.

It was while she and Michael Zelezniak were both attending Albany Business College that he noticed her smile and went over to talk with her. “From that day forward it was always Michael and Jean,” the family wrote. The couple married in 1957 and moved to Guilderland.

The two of them worked together for over 30 years, running their business, Northeastern Stud Welding Company. As chief executive officer, Mrs. Zelezniak ran the office, her husband said, while he ran the field; the company worked on bridges and buildings throughout the Northeast.

They ran the business from home until sometime in the early 1980s, said Mr. Zelezniak, when they rented an office at Star Plaza. “She didn’t want anybody to know, but we were above the liquor store,” he said.

Mrs. Zelezniak was “the best mother three children could have ever wanted to have,” her husband said. She made her children, Susan, Sharon, and Stephen, happy and treated their friends like her own children, he said. She supported her children’s interests, even when it required her to learn new skills. He remembered one time when he came home, walked through the house, and saw her out in the backyard, wearing a catcher’s mitt and squatting down, helping her son warm up so that he could play baseball that night.

Mrs. Zelezniak was very active in Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church, which she joined in 1961. She worked with the church on every occasion it held, said her husband, including garage sales, auctions, and dinners. She was on the building committee, the auction committee, “all the way up to being a deacon” for a time, said Mr. Zelezniak, noting that she relinquished the role of deacon when she could no longer get to the church.

She collected and also liked to buy and sell — including at shows around the country — autumn-leaf-patterned Hall China. “We didn’t use them to eat,” said her husband. “They were displayed.”

Mrs. Zelezniak loved cruises, and got her husband to love them, too. She signed the couple up, he said, for trips to Alaska, Hawaii, and Europe, through the Panama Canal, and along the West Coast of the United States. She would tell him where they were going, Mr. Zelezniak said, and he would say, “No problem!”

She was a 40-year member of the women’s social club the Home Bureau and belonged for many years to the Red Hat Society, a social group for women over 50.

Her hobbies included needlepoint, knitting, and sewing, her husband said. “She was very good at sewing dresses for the young girls,” he said.

Once, he recalled, she embroidered a saying for him that read, Dear husband, I will walk with you from the dawn of our lives to the dusk.

“And she did,” he said. “She made my life beautiful.”

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In addition to her husband, Michael, Kathryn Jean Zelezniak is survived by her children, Susan Zelezniak and her husband, Gary Eichenbaum; Sharon Zelezniak; and Stephen M. Zelezniak. She is also survived by five grandchildren, Devon Zelezniak, Nicholas Zelezniak, Matthew Zelezniak, Joshua Eichenbaum, and Sarah Eichenbaum; several nieces and nephews; and her sisters and brothers, Charlotte Lichtenberg, Virginia Coleman, and Richard Abbott.

Arrangements were by New Comer Funeral  Home. A funeral was held Dec. 29 at Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church, with burial in Prospect Hill Cemetery.

Memorial contributions may be made to Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church, 2291 Western Avenue, Guilderland, NY 12084.

— Elizabeth Floyd Mair