Orville Raymond Smith
Orville Raymond Smith was born on 1 December 1887 in Bourbon County, in the southeast corner of Kansas, the son of William Smith, an Ohio man born in 1822 who was sixty-five when the boy came. Within a few years the family had moved south across the line into the Indian Territory, where a brother, Dudley, was born in the Cherokee Nation in 1892, and then on into the new Oklahoma Territory, where McClelland was born in 1894. The census of June 1900 found them farming in Osage Township, Lincoln County, Oklahoma Territory: William, seventy-eight, his wife Alice, thirty-one, born in Kansas, and the three boys. Alice was nineteen when Orville was born; whether she was his mother or a second wife is not said.
Orville grew up in Lincoln County and married there. At Chandler, the county seat, about 1912, he married Nora E. Neeley, eighteen, a girl born in Iowa whose family had come to Payne County, over the line to the west, after years on the move through Arkansas and Kansas. Their daughter Helen Faye was born at Agra in January 1913 and their son Glen in 1915. In 1917 or 1918 Orville registered for the war draft in Lincoln County, a married farmer of thirty with two small children.
Then the family went west. The census of January 1920 found Orville, Nora, Helen and Glen in Dolores County, Colorado, a dry-farming district that was drawing Oklahoma families in those years. Nora died on 25 May 1924, aged thirty, and was buried at Pueblo, and Orville, a widower at thirty-six with children of eleven and nine, went back to Lincoln County. A third son, Maurice, born in Oklahoma about 1919, was also his.
In April 1930 he was living in Osage Township in the household of his daughter Helen and her new husband Lewis Risenhoover, entered as father-in-law, aged forty-two. When the Risenhoovers went to Colorado in the early 1930s he went too. By 1935 he was at Cahone in Dolores County in the house of his son Glenn, who had married an Oklahoma girl, Charlotte, and the 1940 census found the four of them there, with Maurice, twenty-one. On 27 April 1942, in the draft registration of older men, Orville, fifty-four, signed up at Cahone and named his daughter Helen Risenhover as the person who would always know his address. In 1950 he was still at Cahone, sixty-two, in a household of his own. He never remarried.
He died on 15 January 1974, aged eighty-six, with his last address at Cortez, and was buried at Cahone Cemetery, where his daughter and son-in-law would follow him. The stonecutter spelt his name ORIVILLE on the pink granite marker.
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Cite: Heirology, "Orville Raymond Smith (1887-1974)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/orville-raymond-smith-1887-1974-cefb28.