While looking through the gravestone photos taken in Maggard Cemetery in Letcher County this spring, I came upon the stone for the Fouts sisters.  This caught my eye since the photo on the gravestone is of two lovely young women – and then I noticed they died the same day, November 3, 1945.  I went to newspapers.com and found the following:

The Courier Journal, Louisville, Jefferson County, Kentucky

Monday, November 5, 1945

2 Women, Man Killed In Cumberland Crash

Whitesburg, Ky., Nov. 4 – Three persons were killed and three others injured last night in the head-on collision of an automobile and a truck on a fog-bound stretch of highway along the Cumberland River, near Cumberland, Kentucky.

The dead were Misses Pauline Fouts, 25, and Aledia Fouts, 22, daughters of the Rev. Riley Fouts and Mrs. Fouts, Partridge, Ky., and Clyde Ray Huff, 22, Norton, Virginia.

The death of young people always seems harder to accept.  They have their lives ahead of them.  The girls hadn’t found love, or had children.  The photo keeps Pauline and Adelia in that constant state of youth, vitality and vigor. 

Their father, William Riley Fouts, was born February 10, 1894, and died November 7, 1969, in Letcher County, son of Murray D. Fouts and Jency Fields.  Their mother, Bettie Lee Owens, was born March 10, 1903, Rockcastle County, Kentucky, and died October 17, 1967, in Harlan County, daughter of Michael Edward Owens and Mary E. Graham.  The couple married November 7, 1917, almost reaching their golden anniversary before Bettie’s death.  Riley and Bettie are buried beside their daughters.

Siblings were sister, Bettina, and brother, Shirley.

We speak their names and they are still alive.