Rosa Irene Mullins
Rosa Irene Mullins was born on 5 September 1943 at Jenkins, Letcher County, Kentucky, the daughter of Hassel Mullins and Ruby Helen Johnson. Her mother was a Clintwood girl, born across the state line in Dickenson County, Virginia, in 1920. Rosa had an older brother, Lonnie Wayne, born in 1940, and a sister Charlotte.
She never knew her father. Hassel Mullins, a brakeman in the Jenkins mines, was killed on 24 June 1943 when the trip of coal cars he was riding wrecked, ten weeks before she was born. On 3 July 1944 her mother married Forester Vanover, a Jenkins man born in 1910, at Wise County, Virginia, and the children grew up in his household at Jenkins. The census taker of 12 April 1950 found them there: Forester and Helen Vanover with Lonnie W. Mullins, Charlotte A. Mullins, Rosa Irene Mullins, the baby of the second marriage, Eliza Forestine Vanover, born in May 1945, and Forester's son Joe, 14, from his first marriage. Forester was a coal miner. Her obituary says simply that she was born at Jenkins "where she was raised and lived".
She married Charles Otis Reed, a Jenkins man eight years older who had served in the Army in Korea, on 20 June 1959 at Clintwood, Virginia, her mother's home town, on a licence from the Dickenson County clerk. She was fifteen; the certificate makes her a year older. Their daughter Cheryl was born in Kentucky and their son Charles Wayne on 20 January 1960. In 1961 they left the coal field for Lorain, Ohio, where Charles went to work at the Ford plant; her brother Lonnie made the same move the same year. Lorain was her home for the rest of her life. Her son Christopher was born in 1966 at Bay Village and her daughter Lisa later.
Rosa was a homemaker. Her obituary describes her as "a loving mother and wife who enjoyed caring for her family and friends", and says she "treasured her role as a homemaker and most of all she loved being a mother and grandmother". Her health was poor for much of her life, and in 1992 she had a heart transplant. She kept going. She was active at West Ridge Baptist Church in Amherst, "cooking and ministring with the ladies of the church", as the notice puts it, and her strong faith is the thread of the whole obituary. Her son Charles Wayne died in August 1997 at thirty-seven.
Her sister Charlotte Baldwin had died in 1979. Her half-sister Eliza Elkins died at home in Letcher County on 26 April 2009, and Rosa followed less than a month later. She died on Thursday, 21 May 2009, at the New Life Hospice Residential Center in Lorain, after a long illness, aged 65. Her funeral was at West Ridge Baptist Church on 23 May, the Rev. Bill Fraley officiating, and she was buried at Resthaven Memory Gardens in Avon. She left Charles, her husband of fifty years, her son Christopher of Elyria, her daughters Cheryl and George Willard and Lisa and Emerson Myers of Lorain, nine grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and her brother Lonnie Wayne Mullins of Wakeman. Charles was buried beside her in December 2018.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Rosa Irene Mullins (1943-2009)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/rosa-irene-mullins-1943-2009-19d202.