This is the story of a woman who started teaching at seventeen, married in front of a Christmas tree with $20 to her name, raised three children through war and sacrifice, and built a church from nothing but faith.
Ella Kelly was born on December 7, 1914, on Klondike Road near Lithonia, Georgia—just eleven years after Henry Ford put cars on the assembly line and the Wright brothers took flight. She would live to see the world transform from horse-drawn wagons to the internet age, and through it all, she kept a simple philosophy she learned from her hero, George Washington Carver: "Help the man furthest down."
In her own words, recorded late in life, she tells the story of growing up during the Great Depression, of a mother who was "an angel" who fed neighbors from her garden, of a teacher's salary of $50 a month, and of a husband named Theron who "let me be me."
This memorial website preserves her oral history—53 minutes of memories, wisdom, and faith—alongside historical context about the world she lived in. It is both a family tribute and a document of a way of life now largely vanished: the rural South of tenant farms, one-room schoolhouses, and communities bound together by necessity and grace.
"I want you grandchildren to feel the time and space that I can no longer feel when I go. Carry on from where I am." Ella Owen, in her oral history
