The family of Ruby Backen

Ruby Catherine Castle Church Backen was the daughter of Robert and Eleanor Church.

Robert was the son of Billy Church.

Billy Church married and lived in Sulpher Springs. According to my Grandmother Ruby Backen there was an open spring in a field behind the house. It was a rather dangerous area and Billy Church didn't want his wife to go back there. One day while he was away from the house chopping wood she needed to get some water so she went down to the spring without him. While she was there she fell into the spring and hit her head on a brick and drown. Robert was two months old at the time and his sister Lulie was two. The children were passed back and forth between two Aunts for a while.

Robert lived with his Uncle Jim and Aunt Sarah Blackman after his mother's death. They were well respected and fairly well off. Jim was a Circut riding preacher and Robert said that his Aunt Sarah would dress him up in a little blue suit and hat and send him off to church services with his Uncle Jim.

Billy Church remarried a woman named Pricilla who had 5 children and Robert went back to live with his father and step mother. He was often left to care for the children alone and blamed when his stepmother returned and things where in disorder. He was punished often and soundly so he ran away from home when he was eight years old.

A relative named Wilson Mitchel found him sitting on a fencepost in the woods crying one day. He had a bundle of clothes tied to a stick and he was very distraught. Mitchel took him home and kept him until his Aunt Sarah and Uncle Jim could come for him. He lived with them from that point on. He considered them to be his real family.

Grandmother Ruby tried to name some of the Blackman children and these are the names she mentioned. Jim and Grace (who ran a sanitarium in Florida) and Blanche.

Robert Church had a rough start. She mentioned that she was able to visit several of the places where he had worked. He worked for a bakery in Arkansas, and was also a delivery boy, and a farmhand. She said that he was a good man and that due to his teaching he was a strong Christian. He believed in doing right by his fellow man. He was not succesful financially but he was rich spiritually. He married Eleanor Harbison who was the daughter of James Matthew Harbison. The two men became very close and Robert looked up to him as a father figure.