Raymond Odell Stilley
Raymond Odell Stilley was born on 17 February 1947 in Forsyth County, North Carolina, the son of Odell Ambeus Stilley, a furniture finishing-room inspector, and Wilma Charlotte Coleman, who had come from Topeka, Kansas. He was called Buck. He grew up on Route 2 at Clemmons, south-west of Winston-Salem, where his father's family had farmed since before the First World War, and he had one sister, Carol Jean.
On 7 August 1966, aged nineteen, he married Wilma Sarah Hudson, sixteen, of Route 1, Clemmons, at Center Grove Baptist Church. Frederick K. Creasey performed the ceremony and both of Raymond's parents signed as witnesses. He served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. Their daughter Melissa was born at Winston-Salem in 1973.
He died on Sunday 2 September 2018 at the Kate B. Reynolds Hospice House in Winston-Salem, aged seventy-one, after a long illness, with his family around him. His obituary named his wife of fifty-two years, his daughter and son-in-law Melissa and Ernie Avery, his grandsons Michael and Bryson Hooper, and Bryson's girlfriend Andrea Cooper, whom the family called an honorary granddaughter. It also named, one by one, the nine dogs who were like children to him. The family asked for gifts to Brother Wolf Animal Rescue of Asheville instead of flowers, and the services were private.
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Researched October 2026. Cite: Heirology, "Raymond Odell Stilley (1947-2018)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/raymond-odell-stilley-1947-2018-18efe8.