Ancestors

William Lee Stilley

William Lee Stilley was born on 22 May 1873 in Stokes County, North Carolina, the son of Henry Stilley and Catherine Tuttle, who had married that year. He grew up on the Stokes and Forsyth County line north of Winston-Salem, farming country of tobacco and corn around Rural Hall and Tobaccoville.

On 4 November 1893, aged twenty, he married Julia Hall Loggins, a Kentucky-born girl of eighteen whose family had come back to Forsyth County when she was a child. They farmed, first in Stokes County and then in Bethania and Vienna Townships of Forsyth, and thirteen children were born to them between 1895 and 1920. Five died young, among them Thomas Henry at twenty in 1915 and Paul at sixteen in 1918. In 1917, when Odell was born, William was forty-three and the registrar wrote him down as a farmer with a common-school education. In 1920 the family was in Stokes County; in 1930 they were in Vienna Township with a married daughter and her husband under the same roof; and by 1935 they had moved south to the Clemmonsville side of the county, where the 1940 census found William, sixty-seven, still head of his own house with Julia and their son Odell.

In old age they lived at 5030 Baux Mountain Road, north of Winston-Salem, near the Macedonia Baptist Church that Julia's parents had helped fill. Julia died there in November 1959. William lived on another six years, a widower and retired farmer, and died at Winston-Salem on 11 February 1966, aged ninety-two. He was buried beside her at Macedonia on 13 February under a single granite stone cut STILLEY, with his dates on the left and hers on the right.

If William Lee Stilley is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "William Lee Stilley (1873-1966)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/william-lee-stilley-1873-1966-48cdd0.