My grandmother Ruth Nave Reed Pennington White must have been lucky at cards, because she was unlucky in love.
November 25, 1913, she married Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed in St. Joseph County, Indiana, probably in South Bend, where Ruth lived with her mother. Frank Reed's family lived in Logansport, in Cass County, Indiana. They had three children: my uncle Donald Reed, my aunt Margaret Reed, and my mother, Martha Reed. Frank Reed worked for a railroad as a switchman. He was killed 22 October 1917 when he was hit by a railroad-yard donkey engine. He was 29 years old. Frank Reed and Ruth Nave were my grandparents, my mother's parents.
Sometime after 1920, Ruth Nave married William Walter Pennington. I don't have their marriage record yet, and haven't found it online. A cousin of mine lives in Logansport, Indiana, where my grandma and William Pennington lived, and has offered to search for that record in local records the next time he goes downtown. William Pennington died 4 September 1927 in Logansport. In an awful irony, he, too, was 29 years old when he died.
14 August 1942, Ruth Pennington and Harold Blaine White took out a marriage license. I have not yet found their marriage documents. Harold White was an unstable person, as far as I have been able to find. He cites himself as having several different jobs, from farming to railroad fireman to telephone cable splicer for the Bell System (AT&T). In census records and on his World War I and II draft registration forms, his employment is spotty and, on the censuses, his income minimal. Ruth, his wife, made up to three or four times as much as he did, and she had a fairly steady record when she was working. She was a telephone operator. His pattern of job-hopping (if he really held such jobs at all), the periods of unemployment reflected in censuses, and the minimal income he reported, may indicate his mental instability. He died in 1960, in a mental institution.
Ruth Nave Reed Pennington White died in 1951. The informant on her death certificate was her husband, Harold White. One thing he did may have indicated some caring for his wife: she is buried next to my grandfather, her first husband, Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed.
6 comments:
Maybe he buried her there because the plot was already paid for, not that he may have loved her in his unstable way.
Sad your grandmother's steady husbands died.
Wow, what a series of personal calamities befell your grandmother. I had a second great-grandfather who similarly lost two wives before marrying his third wife, who became my second great grandmother. I wonder why Ruth married the third time, when she was making more money than her husband.
Quite a life saga for your grandmother. It's only fitting that she be laid to rest alongside her first husband.
So sad she had such tragedy in her life. I hope she is resting in peace. :)
@Molly's Canopy - Money ain't everything (but sometimes it is way ahead of what's in second place, LOL). From what my Aunt Margaret, my mother's biological sister, told me, my grandma Ruth Nave had a very sad life. She may have been intolerably lonely, having lost two young husbands and been left with three children, until my grandpa Frank Reed's family took her two daughters away from her and had two of Franks's brothers and their wives adopt the girls. That had to have hurt. Harold White, the third husband, may have been good with the Blarney though not a good provider. He was mentally unstable, and some people with psychological problems can be manipulative and good with the b.s. It's a sad story, sure enough.
Money's not everything. ;) Also, maybe there was already a burial plot that was paid for next to her husband or maybe her children insisted on it, as they wanted their parents buried next to each other. :) Thanks for sharing. :)
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