In Memoriam — The Jones Family of Bay Minette

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The Jones family monument at Bay Minette Cemetery — twin granite uprights for Laurens Whipple Jones Sr. and Sally Riddell Jones, with JONES across the base. — The Jones monument, Bay Minette Cemetery — “Father” and “Mother,” side by side.

This page remembers three of my people who rest in Bay Minette: my grandfather Lonnie, my grandmother Sally, and their daughter Charlotte. The wider story of where this family comes from — the Whipple line and the Revolution — lives on the family & the revolution page; the full tree is here.

Laurens “Lonnie” Whipple Jones Sr.

July 2, 1922 — January 31, 2002

My paternal grandfather. Certified public accountant, WWII airman, and pillar of Bay Minette.

Born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1922, Lonnie enlisted in the Army Air Forces on June 20, 1942, at Fort McClellan — months after Pearl Harbor. He served as aircrew on B-24 and B-25 bombers with the 28th Bombardment Group of the Eleventh Air Force in the Aleutian campaign, flying against the Japanese-held Kurils out of Alaska. He came home a First Lieutenant, and stayed on in the Air Force Reserve after the war.

In 1951 he moved his family from Montgomery to Bay Minette, where he spent decades as a CPA — first at Bacon-McMillan Veneer in Stockton, then with Baldwin County Bank. He gave the town his best years: treasurer at First United Methodist Church, a director on the North Baldwin Hospital board, co-founder of the youth foundation that built the community swimming pool, and, at Christmas, a quiet deliverer of presents to children who’d have gone without. Bay Minette named him Citizen of the Year in 1995. He died at home in 2002, at 79.

Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Matthew 25:21 — his monument

U.S. Army bronze marker: Laurens W. Jones Sr., 1st Lt US Army, World War II, 1922–2002. — 1st Lt, US Army · WWII

Beside the family monument stands his bronze veteran’s marker — Laurens W. Jones Sr., 1st Lt, US Army, World War II. His full life story, war record, and the family’s deeper lineage are gathered on the family & the revolution page.

Headstone of Sally Riddell Jones, 1927–2004, with the epitaph from Ruth 1:16. — Sally’s stone · Ruth 1:16

Sally Ann Riddell Jones

January 21, 1927 — December 13, 2004

My grandmother. Lonnie’s wife of fifty-five years.

Sally married Lonnie in 1947 and shared the whole of his Bay Minette life — the church, the civic work, the raising of a family. She came from the Riddell line, one of the Scots-Irish threads that run through the Jones tree. She outlived Lonnie by not quite three years, passing in December 2004, and was laid beside him beneath the twin stones that read simply Father and Mother.

Whither thou goest, I will go. Ruth 1:16 — her monument

Charlotte Virginia Jones Cabaniss Robertson

April 13, 1951 — May 9, 2025

Their daughter. Librarian, literacy champion, keeper of Baldwin County’s history.

Charlotte was raised by Sally and Lonnie in Bay Minette. She studied at Huntington College and then Auburn University, earning a degree in Secondary Education and Library Sciences, and went on to serve as Director of Library Services in Bay Minette — the role that defined her life’s work. She won grants to bring internet access to library patrons, founded the North Baldwin Literacy Council, and launched projects to digitize local newspaper archives and gather oral histories from high-school students.

There is a quiet grace in that last work: it is exactly the kind of preserved record that lets a family find its own again. In 1971 she married her high-school sweetheart, Tom Cabaniss, and raised three children — Lauren, Amanda, and Will. Later she married the author Brewster Robertson, whom she met through a writers’ series, and the two shared a life of travel and symposiums. She died at 74, at her daughter’s home in Bay Minette, and a celebration of her life was held at the Bay Minette Public Library she had served for so long.