Cole Bill Saunders
Cole William Saunders, known as Cole Bill, was born on 16 May 1925 at Dalhart, Texas, a ranching and railroad town in the northwest corner of the Panhandle. He spent his younger years in Colorado. His parents were John Saunders and Anna Chadwick.
His Social Security application gives a different birthplace, "Graffton, Illinois". Grafton is a river town in Jersey County, where the Illinois River meets the Mississippi. The 1950 census gives Texas, and his obituary in 1988 gives Dalhart.
On 5 August 1948 he married Mildred Ann Brown at Pawhuska, the county seat of Osage County, Oklahoma, before V. E. Theis, a justice of the peace. He was 23 and living at Barnsdall. She was 16, a daughter of Rufus and Stella Brown of Barnsdall, so her father signed his consent before the deputy court clerk, and Rufus and Stella stood as the witnesses. In April 1950 the census found them at Pawhuska: C. B. Saunders, 24, Mildred, 18, and their baby Margaret Ann, born in September 1949.
Their son Billy Earl was born at Barnsdall on 3 September 1951. Their other children were Betty Joyce, Dixie, Joyce, Tommy Gene and Jimmy Wayne, who was born at Barnsdall on 25 July 1958 and died in April 1989. The family moved often, and Billy went to many schools before finishing at Perry. About 1977 Cole and Mildred settled at Yale, in Payne County.
Cole Bill Saunders died on Sunday, 21 August 1988, at St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa, aged 63. His funeral was held at eleven in the morning on the Tuesday at the First Baptist Church of Yale. The Rev. Warren Lamons officiated, and the Yale-Hackler Funeral Home had charge. Mildred survived him, with their three sons and four daughters. The sons were Billy Earl of Morrison, and Jimmy Wayne and Tommy Gene, both of Beasley, Texas. The daughters were Margaret Anne Dowell of Newkirk, Betty Joyce of Yale, Dixie Herring of Cushing and Joyce Ramage of Montary, Louisiana. There were 31 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
He is buried at Ethel Reece Cemetery in Barnsdall. He and Mildred share a low granite stone headed SAUNDERS, with a horse's head carved at one end and a cowboy boot at the other, and BELOVED PARENTS along the base.
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Researched October 2026. Cite: Heirology, "Cole Bill Saunders (1925-1988)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/cole-bill-saunders-1925-1988-c88dad.