Left school in the eighth grade wanting to be a farmer. Worked most of his life as a farm laborer. Married at about 30 years of age and had one daughter, Mary Elizabeth. His wife died when the child was about one. Mary Elizabeth was adopted and reared by her grandmother, Mary Susannah Lee. At her death in 1928, Mary Elizabeth, then a young teenager, was adopted and by Belle Ballard and her husband, Roy Worthington.
Howard Orville Ballard |