Ruth Ellingwood

“No middle name, just Ruth Ellingwood”: the first child of Cudge and Ruth, named for her mother. At fourteen she helped her mother drive the Chrysler across the country when the family moved to Spokane in November 1937, and she graduated from Lewis and Clark High School in 1941 (Cudge’s memoir; her obituary).

With no money to send her away, she spent her first year of college at Eastern Washington College of Education at Cheney, then went to business college and worked a year for Mr. Merryweather, for whom her mother had worked twenty years before. She was one of the original hostesses of the USO. In September 1943 she went to Washington State College at Pullman, where she lived at the Alpha Gamma Delta house, swam with the College Fish Fans and in their races, served on the YWCA Board of Control, and in 1944 worked at the hospital office at Fort George Wright. She graduated in 1946 with a B.A. in foreign languages, French and Spanish (memoir, scans 158 and 161; her obituary).

In her last year she met Don Dorman, back from a German prison camp, and married him on 3 September 1946 in the First Presbyterian Church in Spokane. They lived at Pullman while he finished his degree, then in 1948 settled at LaCrosse as wheat ranchers, and raised their five daughters there: Gail, Nancy, Glenda, Marcia and Joyce. “What great friends all the Dormans have become,” her father wrote. In the summer of 1950 she rode east with her parents and her baby Gail and surprised her sister Joyce at her back door at Hingham (scans 158 and 170).

She went back to school at Eastern Washington University for a B.A. in elementary education (1971), and taught third grade at LaCrosse Elementary School for seven years until she retired in 1985. She and Don were lifelong members of the LaCrosse Methodist Church, where she sang in the choir. She was a Girl Scout all her life, fifty years with the Inland Empire Girl Scouts and for many years the leader of the LaCrosse troop, a member of the Farm Club, and a keen gardener and bridge player. She researched the family’s history and was inducted into the Daughters of the American Revolution. She died at Pullman on 30 September 2020, aged 97, survived by her sister Joyce Lee, her five daughters, thirteen grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren (her obituary).

Open questions

• Her DAR application: which Revolutionary ancestor she proved descent from, and by what records. The DAR’s Genealogical Research System lists the patriots its members descend from.