Ancestors

Cleo Geneva Tate

Cleo Geneva Tate was born in Georgia about 1903, a daughter of William S. Tate and his wife Mary Ophelia. Her gravestone gives 1903, and she was thirty six in the census of 1940. In 1910 she was six, living at Cumming in Forsyth County with her parents, her brother William and her sisters Mary Kate and Louise. By 1920 four more brothers had come, Henry, Wheeler, Herbert and Clyde.

In the early 1920s the family lived in the Antioch community on a Cumming rural route. The Antioch column of the county paper kept track of Cleo and her sister Kate: Sunday afternoons with the Davis and Williams girls, a Saturday night in June 1922 with their grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. W. P. Wheeler. On a Sunday in October 1923 the visitors at her father's house included Marty Cheek of Douglasville, with his brother Arthur and Arthur's wife.

She married Marty Cheek on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1923, at her parents' home at Cumming. The Douglasville paper called it "a marriage of interest to the people of Douglasville and the Lois Mill Village," since Marty worked at the Lois Mill, and said the couple would make their home in Douglasville. Six months later Cleo had an operation, and her parents were called down from Forsyth County to see her. They went home the next day "reporting that she was much better."

Her children kept her maiden name alive: her son Ray was named Ray Tate Cheek. Cleo raised at least nine children in Douglasville over twenty years. Carolyn and Norma came in the late 1920s, then Frances, Nell and Barbara in the 1930s, Harold in 1939, Betty in 1941, Ray in 1944 and Nancy about 1947. In 1940 she was at home on the east side of Douglasville, off Campbellton Street, with six children, the youngest of them Harold, a baby. In 1950, at forty six, she still had five at home.

In 1949 the family lived in the South Beulah community of Douglas County. That spring Cleo took her baby Nancy to Gainesville to see her parents, and in the summer she took the children in to Douglasville to visit her aunt, Mrs. W. A. Burns.

She died in 1964, aged about sixty, and was buried in the Douglasville City Cemetery under a double stone she shares with her husband, carved CLEO G. 1903-1964. Her son Hal's obituary in 2015 gives her full name, Cleo Geneva Tate Cheek, and her daughter Betty's in 2024 names her Cleo Tate Cheek.

If Cleo Geneva Tate is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Cleo Geneva Tate (1903-1964)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/cleo-geneva-tate-1903-1964-8211d0.