Ancestors

Bessie Mae Marshall

Bessie Mae Marshall was born in Michigan on 7 April 1905, the sixth of the eight children of George Elmer Marshall, a native of Wayne in Wayne County, and Lena Seig. Her brothers were Elmer Almerin (1894-1980), George Alfred (1895-1964), Albert Walter (1897-1954), Elgin Alonzo, called Lon (1899-1971), Lee Seig (1900-1946) and Thomas Edward (1907-1955); her sister Grace Ethel (1915-1942) married a Perkins. The family lived at 250 East Hobson Avenue in Flint.

She married Russell Lodric Little, a farmer's son from Hesperia six years her senior, in 1920, when she was fifteen. Their studio portrait of 26 December that year shows her standing at his shoulder in a dark satin dress. They had six children: Betty Ruth (1921), Ralph Lodric (1926), Carl Thomas (1927), Jack Lee (1929), Edna Mae (1932) and Robert Clayton (1935). The household stayed at the East Hobson Avenue house, where her father died in April 1935 and where she was still living nearly thirty years later.

Russell died in November 1960. Bessie died at Flint Osteopathic Hospital on Friday, 24 January 1964, aged fifty-eight. The Flint Journal printed her death notice the next day: she was a member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, services were to be at the church with Elder Theo I. Bush officiating, and burial in Gracelawn Cemetery beside her husband. Her survivors were three daughters, Betty Ruth Little at home, Mrs. Eugene Bacon and Mrs. Donald Hoover, both of Flint; four sons, Ralph L. of Muskegon, Carl T. of Flint, Jack L. of Anchorage, Alaska, and Robert C. of Cheyenne, Wyoming; nineteen grandchildren and a great-grandchild; and three brothers, George Marshall of Brighton, Elmer of Mount Morris and Lon of Grand Rapids. She lay at the Reigle Funeral Home, Sunset Chapel, on Clio Road, the same undertaker who had buried her father.

If Bessie Mae Marshall is in your family, start your own tree.

Researched October 2026. Cite: Heirology, "Bessie Mae Marshall (1905-1964)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/bessie-mae-marshall-1905-1964-002847.