Ancestors

Ruby Helen Johnson

Ruby Helen Johnson was born on 11 March 1920 at Clintwood, the county seat of Dickenson County, Virginia, in the mountains just over Pine Mountain from the Kentucky coal field. She went by Helen. Her parents were George Johnson, a coal miner, and his second wife Rosa Belle Stanley, called Rosy. Four older half-brothers and half-sisters were already in the house, the children of George's first wife, Belva Mullins, who had died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Helen was the first of Rosy's three children. Her sister Nona Marie was born at Jenkins, Kentucky, in September 1921 and her brother Virnel in March 1923. In October 1924, back in Clintwood district, her mother died of blood poisoning at twenty-seven. Helen was four. Her father did not remarry for twelve years, and in 1930 she was ten, living with him, her brother and sister and four half-siblings at West Whitesburg in Letcher County.

On 13 May 1939, at nineteen, she married Hassel Mullins at Jenkins, Letcher County, Kentucky, a Clintwood boy of her own age whose parents had both died young. Their son Lonnie Wayne was born at Jenkins on 1 June 1940 and their daughter Charlotte in Virginia about 1942. On 24 June 1943 Hassel, a brakeman in the Jenkins mines, was killed when the trip of coal cars he was riding wrecked. He was buried at Clintwood, and Rosa Irene was born on 5 September, ten weeks after. The next summer, on 3 July 1944, Helen, as Helen Mullins, married Forester Vanover at Wise County, Virginia, the next county over the line. Forester, born 15 September 1910, was a son of Henry Melvin "Sam" Vanover and Eliza Wright of Jenkins, and had a first family of his own; his earlier marriage to Della Davis, made in 1929, ended in a divorce entered at Bristol in August 1944.

The Vanovers lived at Jenkins, where Forester mined coal. Their daughter Eliza Forestine was born on 11 May 1945. In April 1950 the household at Jenkins held Forester, 40, and Helen, 30, Helen's three Mullins children, Lonnie, Charlotte and Rosa, the baby Eliza, and Forester's son Joe, 14, from his first marriage. Forester died on 3 March 1969, aged 58, and is buried in the Vanover Cemetery at Burdine.

Her children scattered and gathered. Lonnie and Rosa both left for Lorain, Ohio, in 1961, where Rosa's husband Charles Reed and Lonnie both worked at the Ford plant. Charlotte, who married a Baldwin, died in 1979. Eliza married Harvey Gene Elkins and stayed at Burdine, a member of the Burdine Freewill Baptist Church.

On 17 June 1971, at fifty-one, she married a third time, at Wise County. Her husband was Monroe Collier, sixty-two, born 25 May 1909, a son of Wibbie Collier and Belle Potter. The certificate gives her full birth date and names her parents, George Johnson and Rosie Stanley.

Helen went back to Clintwood. She died there on 28 January 1994, aged 73, and was buried beside Forester in the Vanover Cemetery at Burdine, Letcher County. Her daughters Eliza and Rosa died within a month of each other in the spring of 2009, and her son Lonnie in 2018.

If Ruby Helen Johnson is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Ruby Helen Johnson (1920-1994)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/ruby-helen-johnson-1920-1994-1f4707.