Adele (born Schmale) Ruby (1878-1954) was a full-blooded German who came to America at the age of fourteen in 1892. She arrived with her parents, August and Carolyn Schmale, her brothers, August, Will and Paul, and her sister Lena. The Schmale family arrived in New Orleans, traveled up the Mississippi River to Springfield, Missouri, where Adele met Carl Benjamin "Ben" Ruby.

Adele married Ben, and the couple had 6 children together: Anna, Fred, Carl, Paul, Bill, and Frank.

In 1910, the Ruby Family (the Patriarch Christian Ruby and Matriarch Julianna Ruby), traveled from Wisconsin to South Dakoka by train. They brought their daughter Rose, two sons Richard Frederick "Fred" and Carl Benjamin "Ben", and Ben's wife Adele with their six small children, the oldest was only seven years old. When the train arrived in Lemmon, South Dakota, it was a hundred-mile trip by horse and wagon to Perkins County where they planned to homestead.

The Ruby Family patriarchs didn't stay long enough to build a house and prove their claim. They moved to Washington State where their daughter May lived. Their daughter Rose filed her claim, but she didn't build either; rather, she married and moved to California with her husband.

The two brothers stayed on their homesteads and set to work building a one-room sod house for Ben and Adele and the six children--Fred, Anna, Carl, Paul, Frank, and Bill.

Ben was killed in a coal mine near the homestead, and a couple of years later Adele married Ben's brother Fred. The couple gave birth to six more children--Chris, Richard, Rose, Ruth, Emma, and May, all born in the sod house except May. Another baby, Adele, was stillborn and is laid to rest in the Ruby Family Cemetery next to Ben's grave.

*Biography Facts Courtesy of "Prairie Rattlers, Long Johns and Chokecherry Wine: Memoirs from the Silent Prairie" (ISBN: 1-4137-0053-5), authored by Emma L. (born Ruby) Willey, the eleventh of Adele (born Schmale) Ruby's twelve children.