James Mayhan
James Mayhan was born about 1892 in what is now Oklahoma, then the Indian Territory. His father was born in Missouri and his mother in Arkansas. He married Mary Ellen Stubbs, a Missouri girl four or five years younger, and they made their home at Marble City, in the hills of Sequoyah County.
In January 1920 the census found James, 28, at Marble with Ellen, 24, and four children: Dessie, 6, Frankie, 5, Cleadus, 3, and Clarence, one year and two months. Clarence had been born on 1 November 1918. Ten years later the family was still at Marble City, with James, 38, and Ellen and eight children at home: Dessie, Frank, Cletis, William Clarence, Norman Kenneth, Martha, Lillian and Steven. Martha, who later went by Marsha, had been born there on 1 November 1928, ten years to the day after Clarence. Two more daughters, Coralee and Alice, came after.
By the spring of 1941 James and most of his children had gone west to Farmersville, in the farm country of Tulare County, California, and were working as laborers. Dessie, by then Mrs. Perry, was living at Marble City.
On 14 June 1941 a Southern Pacific train struck the car carrying James and his sons Cletis and Kenneth at a crossing just north of Farmersville. Kenneth, 20, died that day. James, 49, and Cletis, 24, were badly hurt. The next spring James sued the railroad.
His son Clarence came home to Oklahoma in the end and died at Vinita in 1992. Clarence's obituary named his parents as James Mayhan and Mary Ellen Stubbs Mayhan, and his sisters Lillian, Marsha and Alice and brother Stephen were then all living in northern California.
Sources
If James Mayhan is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "James Mayhan (b. 1892)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/james-mayhan-1892-248c19.