Helen Carol Jones McNamara, a public school teacher and university librarian, was born in Richmond on January 11, 1933, and died on January 5, 2025. Her parents Marvin Fred Jones and Marguerite Butler Jones and her only sibling, younger sister Jean Mayo Jones Patterson, are all deceased. Carol was educated in the public schools of Richmond's north side in the 1940's. She graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1950, after which she majored in American history at Westhampton College of the University of Richmond. She graduated in 1954 with a bachelor's degree in history. For the next 15 years she taught primarily English in public high schools, first in Virginia, including Douglas S. Freeman H.S., later in Savannah, Georgia, and finally in St. Petersburg, Florida, where she participated in the only statewide teacher walkout in American history. The next year Carol earned a master's degree in library science from Florida State University in Tallahassee. Then began her 26-year career as a reference librarian at the University of Tennessee, the University of South Carolina, and finally Georgia State University. In Atlanta Carol met Jay McNamara. They were married September 11, 1992, in a rustic ocean overlook at Pawleys Island, South Carolina. Upon Jay's retirement from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2000, his wish to relocate permanently to Richmond brought to an end Carol's 40-year exile from the city of her birth.
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At Carol's request there will be no memorial service. Ashes will be scattered in the Gulf of Maine privately later this year.
