Betty Jo Gruell was born on September 22, 1928, in Connersville, Fayette County, Indiana — not in a hospital, but in the home of her own maternal grandmother, Nancy Belle Lindsey Helms.^1,2 She was the second child and only daughter of Theodore "Ted" Gruell (b. November 14, 1904) and Violet Thelma Helms Gruell (b. October 4, 1908).²

"Less than a year after her birth, the Great Depression began," her daughter Jennifer wrote in the 2018 eulogy embedded to the right.¹ The Gruell family had four children in those early years — Ted lost his factory job, took whatever odd jobs were available, and trapped rabbits to feed his family when there was nothing else. Betty, as Jennifer recounts it, "would tell me she hated rabbit. There simply did not exist a fancy French restaurant menu that would ever convince her that rabbit was a delicacy."¹

Betty had three brothers — all in this site's database, all confirmed by the eulogy:

Betty grew up in Connersville, attending 8th Street Elementary, then Connersville Junior High School, and graduating from Connersville High School in May 1947 in the top fifteen percent of her class — a member of the National Honor Society and president of the high-school chapter of the American Red Cross.^2,1 Her first paid job came that same year: Philco Manufacturing, 1947.²

The eulogy adds the texture the GEDCOM cannot. She was a self-described tomboy. She loved Saturday afternoon movie matinees and wanted desperately to sing like the actress Jeanette MacDonald — "but try as she might, those within earshot, usually her brothers, let Betty Jo know, 'She was no Jeanette MacDonald.'"¹

Betty was sixteen years and five months old when her father died. (The eulogy says fifteen; the dates say otherwise. Betty was born September 22, 1928; her father died March 11, 1945. The eulogist's math runs a year behind throughout.)

Ted Gruell, age 40, press-room foreman at Rex Manufacturing in Connersville for fifteen years, had attended a meeting of the company's management club at the Country Club on Saturday night, March 10, 1945. The next morning — "apparently in his usual health until shortly before his death," the local obituary reads — he died at the family home, 214 West Thirty-fifth Street, Connersville, at 9 a.m. on Sunday, March 11.^4,2

The Connersville obituary, headlined "Factory Foreman Rites Wednesday," records the survivors: Ted's wife Thelma; their three living children Theodore Jr (17), Betty Jo (16), and Bobby Lee (14); Ted's mother Mrs. Claude Dungan of Richmond — Elizabeth Connor Gruell, who had remarried after Ted's father William died; his sister Mrs. Lowell Church of Richmond; and his brothers Chase of Hamilton, Ohio and Russell of Connersville. He had also been preceded in death by his father, a brother, and his young son Billy — who had died at age three in January 1937, eight years before his own death. Rites Wednesday March 14, 1945 at 2 p.m. at the Myers funeral home.⁴

The obituary also records, for the first time on this site, the exact date of Ted and Thelma's marriage: January 8, 1927 in Connersville.⁴

The eulogy frames what came next: "Now the family that had struggled through the economic deprivation of the Great Depression would be forced to struggle to survive once again. While Betty Jo's mother, Grandma Thelma Gruell, found full-time work in a factory, Betty Jo had to step into a more mother-like role to help take care of both her brothers Junior and Bobbie. The family of six was now a family of four."¹

Five months after Ted's death, VJ Day brought spontaneous celebration to the streets of Connersville: cars honking, crowds, "the impromptu parade of cars that circled the four block area of downtown." Betty was out with two girlfriends. In one of those cars was a young man named Jack Hofmann, riding with friends who knew Betty's friends. The girls were invited to ride along. "Though Betty Jo and Jack hardly spoke that evening, both remembered that first meeting."¹

After months of Jack "showing up more and more at the places that Grandma Betty frequented" — at one point reportedly driving country roads ahead of her returning Red Cross convention car so he could be visible at every cross-roads — Betty and Jack married in May 1948.¹ Their three children, all in this site's database as biological children of Jack Hofmann and Betty Gruell:

Violet Thelma Helms Gruell died on December 21, 1954, of cancer, when Jennifer Hofmann (Betty's first child) was five.² Betty was twenty-six. Ten years after losing her father at fifteen, she lost her mother. "Grandma Betty was only 25 years old when she lost her mother, just a short ten years after her father had passed away."¹

Betty worked at Philco Manufacturing (1947), then Woodruff's Supermarket (1967, the year Jack lost both his mother and his older brother), and beginning in 1990 at the Union County Election Board in Indiana — a role she would hold for at least fourteen years.^2,3

On Monday, September 20, 2004, Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita visited the Union County Courthouse and bestowed on Betty (then 75) and three other long-time poll workers Indiana's highest award given to a private citizen: the title of Honorary Secretary of State. The other recipients were Norma Hendrix (absent due to health), Annastasia Warrick (10 years of poll work), and Pat Gentry (40 years, also president of the Union County Council). The four had been recommended by Circuit Court Clerk Patricia Hensley "based on the quality and dependability of their service."³

The article in the local Union County paper, written by staff writer Bev Woodruff, quotes Betty by name. She told the reporter that her first year as a poll worker she worked at Kitchel — one of the smaller Union County township polling places — and "birds were flying overhead and the roof needed work." She also said "in a small community people expect you to know who they are when they come in to vote," and added that she did know most of the voters.³

Betty Jo Gruell Hofmann died on July 25, 2018, in Ohio, at age 89.² In the last year of her life, the eulogy records, "the disease that was ravaging her brain turned her focus away from us and away from the present and the future. Every day, and more and more, we faded from her memory. Memories of us were replaced by memories of her own mother and father. In her mind, she started to relive the sorrow and enact the grief of the young woman who lost both of her parents too soon in life. Here she was, nearly ninety years old, but instead, retreating to her childhood, going back to her beginning."¹ She was buried September 15, 2018.²