Mount Vernon, Washington - Ruth Ethel (Smith) Adams was born in Seattle, January 16th, 1921, the third child of Roy Elmer Smith and Ethel Annie (Duckering) Smith. Except for a stint in Anaconda, MT in the first grade, she spent her childhood in Seattle, graduating from Roosevelt High School in January 1939. She met her future husband, Albert Hamilton Adams, at Roosevelt in her junior Chemistry class. They were married in late December, 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor. Her husband having been sent to business school at Harvard by the army, they spent the earliest months of their married life in Cambridge and then in Virginia and Illinois before he was sent overseas. Shortly after the war was over they bought a poultry farm near Snohomish, WA and lived there, except for a short time in Virginia during the Korean War, until they sold the farm and moved back to Seattle in the mid fifties for a more conventional, non-farm life. Four children were born of this marriage: Douglas, Martha (who died of kidney disease at the age of eight), Cynthia, and Carol. The marriage later ended in divorce.

Ruth began her professional life working for the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts in Boston, and except for short period at Grandma's Cookies (where she was perforce a Teamster), worked in the Church for her working life: at University Congregational in Seattle, St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle, and, later, for the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia (in Seattle) where she was eventually the personal secretary of two bishops, Ivol I. Curtis and Robert Cochrane, and was elected to the diocesan Standing Committee. After her retirement she lived for many years in the North End of Seattle and, finally, so as to be near her oldest daughter, in Mount Vernon, WA.

She is survived by her children, Douglas Adams (Linda), Cynthia Adams (Fenicia Burke), Carol Lloyd (Brian), two grandsons, Allen Adams and Michael Adams (Michelle Robbins), a sister-in-law, Margo Smith, numerous nieces and nephews, and even more numerous great-nieces and nephews.

Ruth died November 23rd, 2020 (at 99 years, 10 months, and one week) in Mount Vernon. A service will be held at a later date at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Seattle, a parish she has been associated with, except for brief periods when living in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Snohomish, since she was eight and where, in the mid sixties she was appointed its first woman senior warden.