Iron River woman Diane Joy Vasquez remembered for lifelong family ties

Diane Joy Vasquez, 71, died Thursday, May 7, 2026, leaving behind a life rooted in Iron River and shaped by the close family network that surrounded her from childhood. Born Sept. 12, 1954, to Kenneth and June Kosky, she was raised on a dairy farm as the youngest of four siblings, with Kenneth, Darryl and Lynette among the older children in the household.

That farm upbringing was more than a detail of where she lived. Vasquez grew up across the road from her cousins Sally and Sue, and the two were like sisters to her. In a county where family names often stretch across generations, that kind of neighborhood connection helped define who she was long before she became a wife, mother and professional.

Vasquez graduated from West Iron County High School in 1972 and went on to Northern Michigan University, where she earned an associate’s degree in business in 1974. It was at NMU, while standing in line to buy books, that she met Dante Vasquez. After graduation, the couple had a daughter, Sarah, and later a son, Dante Kenneth, who was born at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina.

Dante Vasquez’s Marine Corps career took the family to Quantico, Virginia, Camp LeJeune and Pensacola, Florida. Vasquez spent much of her adult life in Ann Arbor, where she built a career at the University of Michigan and eventually became human resources director of operations. Her life linked the Upper Peninsula, the military and southeastern Michigan, but the thread running through all of it remained the same: family, work and a strong sense of place.

A graveside service was held Saturday, May 23, 2026, at 11 a.m. at Rosehill Cemetery in Beechwood, in Iron River Township. Rosehill, established in 1912, is part of the local landscape that has long held Iron County families across generations.

Her story lands with particular force in Iron County, where the U.S. Census Bureau counted 11,631 residents in 2020 and where 32.7% of the population was 65 or older. Iron River, incorporated first as a village in 1885 and later as a city in 1926, had 3,007 residents in the 2020 census. In a place of that size, and in a county with a median age of 53.1, the loss of a lifelong resident like Vasquez is felt not as an abstract notice, but as part of the ongoing record of the community itself.