On June 23, 2014, I wrote a blog post about my great-aunt Ruth Mendenhall. You can read that post by Here, but for the short-version, all I really knew about her was that she was disowned around the age of 14 because of a pregnancy. There were rumors of her ending up in California, married to a doctor and she didn't want anything to do with the family.
It was hard to find anything on Ruth, but I finally found her in Dec 2016. Again, here is the original blog post that you can read Here, but for the shorter version, I found that she died on 08 Mar 2002 in Scottsdale, Arizona. She had been married to a man named Jack V. Breckenridge (1921-2011), a veteran. There appeared to be no children in the picture.
Recently, I decided to try and find more on Ruth. I decided to focus on her husband and his family. Jacks middle name is Victor and he had 3 siblings- Janet Louise (1918-2007), James Harold (1925-2011) and Richard A. (1928-2016). I did find living relatives for all of these siblings and messaged them on Facebook, hoping to find some answers- maybe some of them knew about Ruth, but this was on May 13 and nobody has responded (Can't say I blame them, they don't know me). I also found a picture of Jack--
Recently, Newspapers.com had a "free" weekend and I decided to research Ruth in the papers, see if anything came up. My thought was, maybe she didn't leave Ohio for California...let's search that. AND I found more!
I found a couple of newspaper articles about a Ruth, same age, same address as her parents. They were dated September, 1945-- she would have been 19 years old. She had broken her parole. When she was 19, she had been arrested for forgery and, since breaking her parole, she was being sent to jail for 1-20 years!
Here are the articles:
With the name, age, and address all matching, I just don't see how this COULDN'T be my great-aunt Ruth. This would make sense...for even though she wasn't 14 at the time, she was still a young woman who was sent to prison. After finding this information, I talked to my Aunt Nancy who confirmed it- she remembers her mother talking about when she was younger about Ruth being in prison. Apparently, my mother didn't know about this. :)
So...NOW, the next step is getting Ruth's prison records to see how much time she served...all out of pure curiosity! Wish me luck!
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