Geneva Lee McRoberts was a teacher in Columbus Junction and rural Iowa for twenty-five years from 1910 to 1955. The McRoberts-Cecil family resided in Muscatine, Iowa for most of her daughter Shirley’s life. Shirley attended Iowa City High School and graduated in 1938, when she met and married Air Corps serviceman Paul Krieg Huff. They had their daughter, Penelope, in 1942 and divorced shortly after. They moved often from base to base and Penelope was left with her grandmother Geneva in Iowa. In 1945, Shirley remarried US Navy Quartermaster Lloyd Charles Cecil and had two more daughters, Pamela and Patricia. Penelope attended the University of Iowa in the late 1950s. In 1962, she met and married Phillip Howard LeMasurier. They eloped in New York. Consequently, Penelope and her mother Shirley had a falling out, documented in the correspondence between the two from 1962 to 1966.

Shirley’s daughter Pamela Lynne Cecil attended Muscatine High School from 1959 to 1963 where she was active in the choir and musical theater. She pursued a career in theater and spent time in Chicago and New York City where she performed in A Chorus Line, Forty Second Street, and La Cage Aux Folles. She married Dr. Louis C Galli, who donated the family papers after Pamela died in 2008.