Franklin Peter Rayfield & Myrtle Lee Seal

Their Story

Franklin Peter Rayfield was born on April 13, 1884, in Gads Hill — a small settlement in Wayne County, Missouri that had already earned a permanent place in American outlaw lore. Exactly ten years before his birth, Jesse James and the Younger gang pulled off the first train robbery in Missouri history at the Gads Hill siding. By the time Franklin was growing up, the holdup was local legend, the kind of story everyone in the area knew. He was the son of John Carter Rayfield Jr. and Nancy Ann Farris, and grew up farming the Reynolds County ground his grandfather had homesteaded a generation earlier.

In June 1905, Franklin married Myrtle Lee Seal in Butler County. Myrtle had been born on July 29, 1888, in Iron County — the daughter of Benjamin Seal and Mary Jane Lewis. Together they had five children: Jesse Clyde, Bessie (known to family as Betty), Vernon Jack, Elmo, and Imogene Inez. Census records trace the family moving through Wayne, Reynolds, and Iron Counties — always within the same stretch of Ozark hill country, always farming wherever they landed. Franklin worked the land the same way his father and grandfather had, and the 1900 census had already shown him at sixteen alongside his own father, working as a farm hand in the family household.

In January 1938, Franklin was admitted to a St. Louis hospital. The diagnosis was tuberculosis. He survived the acute illness but never fully recovered — his lungs were permanently damaged. Three years later, on January 16, 1941, he died in Ironton, Iron County, at fifty-six years old. The official cause was prostate trouble and left bronchial pneumonia, but the pneumonia took hold in lungs the tuberculosis had already hollowed out. He and Myrtle had been married thirty-five years.

Myrtle was fifty-two when Franklin died. She outlived him by twenty-seven more years — a quarter century of widowhood, longer than some people's whole lives — and died on July 1, 1968, at seventy-nine. She is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Des Arc, Iron County, Missouri.

Franklin Peter Rayfield — Vital Facts

Myrtle Lee Seal — Vital Facts

Children

Five children across roughly thirteen years, born in at least three different Missouri locations — a family on the move through Wayne, Reynolds, and Iron Counties. (Harmon and Glenn E., who appear in some census/family records, are not children of Franklin and Myrtle.)

Census Timeline

All Source Records

Research Notes — Myrtle's Seal Family

Connections to Other Profiles

• Son: Vernon Jack Rayfield (1909–?) — married Opal Robinson
• Daughter-in-law: Opal Robinson Rayfield (1911–2002) — granddaughter of Absalom Robinson
• Grandfather: John Carter Rayfield Sr (1816–1903)
• Featured in: The Rayfields — A Family History, Chapter 4