Ancestors

Samuel Arthur Hewitt Jr.

Samuel Arthur Hewitt Jr. was born on 31 October 1927 at Joplin, in the lead and zinc mining country of southwest Missouri. His parents were Samuel Arthur Hewitt and Dolly May James. His father had served as a private in the Army in the First World War and came home with a Purple Heart. His older sisters were Alzaida and Beatrice, and his younger sister Geraldine was born in Wisconsin about 1930, so the family moved between Missouri and Wisconsin while he was small.

By 1950 he was married to Dorothy Jean Sheets, a Kansas City girl who had been adopted as a baby. On 10 April 1950 the census taker found them in his mother's house at number 2641 on East Sixth Street in Kansas City. Samuel was 22 and worked as a painter for a paint contractor. Dorothy was 20 and their daughter Carol Jean was one year old. His mother, Dollie, was the head of the house. She was 48 and separated from his father.

It was a full house. Besides Samuel's own family it held three of his brothers, Rudolph, Clinton John and Eugene Carl. His married sister Geraldine Hughes was there with her baby son David Lee, born that February. So was a two year old grandson of Dollie's, James D. Hewitt, born in Washington state. Dollie's sister Mary, her nephew Teddy, and a lodger named Elmer E. Landers made thirteen people at one address.

Samuel and Dorothy raised their family in Kansas City. Their children included Carol Jean (1948), Samuel Bradford, called Brad (1952), Thomas Richard (1958) and Patrick Eugene (1963). When Thomas died in 1994 his notice in the Kansas City Star named five brothers, S. Bradford, Robert, Michael, Patrick and Sam A., and five sisters, Carol Pauley of Omaha, Vicki Landers, Georgia McKnight and Carla Hewitt of Kansas City, and Christina Yingst of Lee's Summit. By then Samuel and Dorothy lived apart: the notice placed him in Kansas City and her in Richmond.

Samuel later had a son with Donna Kathryn Ellis, Samuel A. Hewitt III, born at Kansas City on 4 July 1975. Through Donna he also had a stepdaughter, Heather.

He outlived three of his children. Thomas died in 1994, Carol in Omaha in 2008, and Brad in Independence on 2 August 2011, after a year with cancer. Samuel died less than three months after Brad, on Friday 28 October 2011, at 83. His funeral was held at 2 p.m. on Monday 31 October 2011 at Speaks Suburban Chapel in Independence, on what would have been his eighty fourth birthday. He was cremated. His obituary said only that he left six daughters, three sons and "many, many grandchildren."

If Samuel Arthur Hewitt Jr. is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Samuel Arthur Hewitt Jr. (1927-2011)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/samuel-arthur-hewitt-jr-1927-2011-c36439.