Odell Ambeus Stilley
Odell Ambeus Stilley was born at 9:15 on the evening of 16 May 1917 in Bethania Township, Forsyth County, North Carolina, and Dr. Flynn of Rural Hall attended the birth. His father, William Lee Stilley, was a farmer of forty-three born in Stokes County; his mother, Julia Loggins, was forty and had been born in Kentucky. He was the twelfth child born to her and the eighth still living. The registrar wrote the family's name Stilly.
The family was in Stokes County when the 1920 census found them, with Odell two and a half and his brothers and sisters Charlie, fifteen, Martha, thirteen, Della, ten, and Spengern, eight. By 1930 they were farming in Vienna Township, Forsyth County, with Martha's husband Cecil Fearrington and their small daughter Thelma in the house, and by 1935 they had moved to the Clemmonsville side of the county, where the 1940 census found Odell, twenty-three and single, still at home with his parents, who were sixty-seven and sixty-five.
He registered for the draft at Clemmons in 1940 and enlisted in the Army at Camp Croft, South Carolina, on 6 December 1942. He came out a corporal, discharged at Fort Bragg on 3 March 1946. A photograph from those years shows him in a white peaked cap and a white uniform, standing in front of a car.
He married Wilma Charlotte Coleman, a Topeka girl nine years younger, and they had two children, Raymond Odell, born in 1947, and Carol Jean. He worked for the rest of his life in the furniture trade that filled the towns around Winston-Salem and Lexington, as a finishing-room inspector, and the family lived at 362 Hampton Road, Clemmons, on the Davidson County side of the village line. His mother's 1959 obituary lists him as Odell A. Stilley of Clemmons, Route 2, and in August 1966 he and Wilma signed as witnesses when Raymond married Wilma Sarah Hudson at Center Grove Baptist Church.
He died at home on Hampton Road at twenty past eleven on the night of 8 February 1992, aged seventy-four, of end-stage emphysema, which had been on him for more than five years. His wife gave the particulars for the certificate. Hayworth-Miller of Winston-Salem buried him in the graveyard of the Muddy Creek Church of Christ at Clemmons, now the First Christian Church of Clemmons, under a grey granite stone cut "Father" and a flat government marker reading "Odell A Stilley, Cpl US Army, World War II." His sister Martha Fearrington lies in the same ground.
Children
Sources
Wilma Charlotte Coleman Stilley (3 Sep 1926 - 6 Aug 2013), Oakdale Cemetery, Washington, Beaufort County, North Carolina, Find a Grave memorial 115159606
Proves: Names Odell Ambers Stilley, died February 1992, as the husband of Wilma Coleman Stilley, whose son is Raymond Stilley of Winston-Salem. No record seen names Odell directly as Raymond's father; that link rests on the marriage and the shared surname.
Corp Odell Ambeus Stilley (16 May 1917 - 8 Feb 1992), First Christian Church of Clemmons Graveyard, Clemmons, Forsyth County, North Carolina, Find a Grave memorial 58117871
Proves: Gives his birth on 16 May 1917 in North Carolina, his death on 8 February 1992 in Davidson County, his Army service in the Second World War, and his burial at Clemmons, near Winston-Salem.
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Researched October 2026. Cite: Heirology, "Odell Ambeus Stilley (1917-1992)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/odell-ambeus-stilley-1917-1992-b9577f.