Shared by Joseph and Ruby’s daughter, 2026.
Joe and Ruby were married in Kingman, Arizona, on July 5, 1938, six months after his last letter from the Hotel Taft. The date comes from their marriage license.
Their first child, a little girl, was stillborn. Joe was beside himself with grief. Ruby’s mother, Nettie Wilson, wrote to her own mother: “I just returned from the little granddaughter’s funeral. Joe was so heartbroken — it was like the baby was a child he had known for a while.”
Merced Cemetery District’s records list a “Baby Sharmer” in the Masonic section, Lot 9, Babyland plot #146, which is very likely her. The record gives no parents’ names or date of birth, and its date of death reads September 27, 1929, almost certainly a slip for 1939: the California death index has a Sharmer death in Merced on 27 September 1939, and Joe and Ruby only married in 1938. (Merced Cemetery District, email to Joe Sharmer, 13 November 2026.) The family remembers that she has a small heart-shaped headstone there. Joe and Ruby’s daughter agrees: going by the July 1938 wedding, the baby was most probably born in September 1939.
