Ancestors

Orval M. Belville

Orval M. Belville was born on 25 August 1901 at Hebron, in Thayer County, Nebraska. His parents were Herman Walter Belville and Edith Sarratt, who had married in January 1898. He had one older sister, Delpha, born in 1899.

He was two months old when his father died. On the stormy evening of Friday, 25 October 1901, Herman went out to the barn to do his chores and did not come back. About ten o'clock his wife woke, roused a relative who was staying in the house, and went to look for him. They found him lying about halfway between the house and the barn, killed by a bolt of lightning.

On 16 July 1904 his mother married Herman Baumgart at McCook, Nebraska. In 1910 the family lived in Garfield precinct, Lancaster County, Nebraska, near Lincoln: Herman and Edith, Delpha, Orval, and a half brother, Kenneth Baumgart. The census taker wrote the two older children under their stepfather's name, and wrote Orval as Arvil.

On 21 May 1918, during the First World War, Orval enlisted in the United States Army. He was sixteen. As Private Orval Belville, serial number 510371, he was sent to Recruit Camp Company No. 20, and on 29 June 1918 he was assigned to Motor Truck Company No. 417 of Motor Supply Train No. 411, a unit that hauled supplies by truck. He appears on its muster rolls through the summer of 1919. The Veterans Administration later carried his birth date as 25 August 1899, two years before the date he gave everywhere else, probably the age he had given the recruiter to be taken at sixteen.

In January 1920 he was eighteen and already married, living at Independence, Jackson County, Missouri, in the household of his sister Delpha and her husband, Roy Hilliard. His wife was Estella Marie Abbey, called Stella, who had married him at sixteen. Their daughter Lorraine was born in Missouri in 1921, and their son Robert at Independence on 4 March 1923.

His mother died at her home in Lincoln on 25 February 1923. Her death notice in the Lincoln paper named her son as "Orvil of Independence."

By March 1925 Orval and Stella had moved to Richmond, California, on San Francisco Bay, where Stella's father also lived. In April 1930 they were renting a house in the city of Pittsburg, in Contra Costa County, for $35 a month. Orval was 28 and worked as a laborer at the steel works there; the census marked him as a veteran of the World War. Lorraine was eight and Robert seven.

By 1940 Orval owned a house worth $1,000 just outside the city of Pittsburg, and the family had been there since at least 1935. A third child, Kenneth, had been born in California about 1933. Lorraine, eighteen, was still at home. Later that year she married Arthur Raymond Hommond, a young man from Pennsylvania who had come west to work for his uncle, a contractor at Pittsburg.

When Orval registered for the draft on 14 February 1942 he was working for the Columbia Steel Company at Pittsburg. He was described as five feet ten, 160 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair, and he named Stella as the person who would always know his address.

Stella died on 17 August 1981. On 29 January 1982, at Reno, Nevada, Orval married Alice L. Abbey. He died on 30 April 1985 in Contra Costa County, aged 83. He is buried in Oak View Memorial Park at Antioch beside Stella, under one flat stone reading "BELVILLE" and "In Loving Memory." His daughter's husband, Arthur Hommond, lies in the same cemetery.

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Cite: Heirology, "Orval M. Belville (1901-1985)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/orval-m-belville-1901-1985-fca27f.