New Pictures of Estelle!
So, out of the blue, 3 weeks ago, I get an email from some named Kent Babcock, someone I didn’t previously know. He, much like me, has been bitten by the Family Tree bug, and (also like me) had started scanning old family pictures and putting them into his Ancestry.com tree.
His mother, Ruth Kincaid, was originally from Etowah, Tennessee, went to nursing school at Erlanger, and went into the Army right out of nursing school. A number of her nursing school and Army pictures had names written on the back, and….you guessed it… one of them was Estelle Smith! He wanted to try and track down families of some of the nurses he had pictures of, and so he searched “Estelle Smith” on Ancestry.com (there are a LOT of Estelle Smiths out there…take it from me!). But he found my tree, with some pictures of Estelle, and knew he had found the right one!
Ruth Kincaid far Left, Estelle far Right 
Sunbathing at Ft McClellan
Estelle – Ruth Turner far right
His mother and Estelle were in the same Erlanger Nursing School class, and joined the Army and were stationed at Ft McClellan, AL! His mother met and married his father, who was also at Ft McClellan at the time. She left the military after WWII, while Estelle stayed in for a 23 year career. He noted that she was identified as “Smitty” in some of the pictures. If you’ve looked at Estelle’s bio on this website, you will have seen where a small note to “Smitty” was written and signed by “Turner,” who is undoubtedly Ruth Turner, also a 1941 classmate and looks to have been assigned with Estelle on the USAT Comfort… just another piece of the puzzle in Estelle’s story!
1956 Nursing Class Reunion 
1977 Nursing Class Reunion
