Ruth Ellen Marshall
Ruth Ellen Marshall was born 9 April 1927 at East Prairie, Mississippi County, Missouri, the first child of Fayette Marshall, a Tennessee-born farmer of twenty-one, and Christine Townsend, who was fifteen. The 1930 census finds the three of them on a farm in Wolf Island Township, and by 1940 Ruth, thirteen, was the eldest of a growing brood.
Her obituary keeps two details of her girlhood: she sang in a trio known as the Melody Girls on the radio, and she worked as a Harvey Girl at the St. Louis Union Station, one of the uniformed waitresses of the Fred Harvey railroad restaurants. On 2 January 1948, at East Prairie, she married George G. Brown of the Charleston side of the county. When the census taker came through Canalou on 3 April 1950 she was twenty-two, with Gary aged one and Sherry newborn, George away from the page.
The family lived in St. Louis for many years while George worked for the A.O. Smith Company. About 1995 they returned to the family farm at Charleston, where she belonged to the First Baptist Church. Widowed in 2002, she spent her last eighteen years at Friendship Village in Sunset Hills, outside St. Louis, where she died at 1:20 in the morning on 17 March 2022, aged 94. She was buried beside George in the IOOF Cemetery at Charleston.
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Cite: Heirology, "Ruth Ellen Marshall (1927-2022)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/ruth-ellen-marshall-1927-2022-0d3df0.